Professionalism

i must say, i have never worked in such an entertaining environment before. today we had another blowout. there have been many but i have not written about them until now because to outsiders, i dont think it would be as good but this one, this one was priceless!

so a manager is off on a business trip this afternoon and suggested to a coworker that she get him a meeting so he could go see them in person. as of this morning, she still had not made any effort to contact the company. they went back and forth a few rounds and then it eventually exploded. it all kind of went like this:

manager: did you call XYZ Company and set up a meeting?
coworker: no because they were on holiday yesterday.
m: ok, well you could have emailed since they probably all have blackberries
cw: i dont know so i didnt do it.
m: i am trying to help you - why didnt you do what i asked you to do?
cw: OK! i will do it now!
m: i am just trying to get a meeting for you. they all have blackberries so there is no reason why you shouldnt have contacted them
cw: well i dont know. when you meet with them you and ask them yourself if they have blackberries
this went for a few more rounds and escalated until
m: lets go into the conference room and talk about this
at this point "cw" was now loud enough for the entire office to hear
cw: no, i do not want to
m: lets go, i do not want to talk about it out here
"cw" now stands up and demands
cw: i do not WANT TO!!!!!!!!!!
and sits down again
cw: do whatever you need, give me disciplinary whatever, disciplinary notice but i will not go in there
m: lets go now. you are directly disobeying a direct order and making this worse
cw: i dont want to go in there because we will get into a fight
m: i am not discussing this out here
cw: we are going to fight, we may as well just do it out here...
this dragged on for a bit until they finally went into the conference room to yell at each other in there.
and when a senior manager was asked to help intervene at one point, he said, "not interested".

hahahahaha - oh baby jesus, do i REALLY work here? it has to be a joke. i have NEVER worked in a place where yelling at your coworkers is completely tolerated. if i were the manager i would have grabbed that person by the scruff and tossed 'em out the door. but then again, maybe that is why i am not the manager ;)

maybe you had to be here.

Firsts...

i will miss another tofurkey day since i am in hong kong (obviously). the last tofurkey day i missed was back in 2002 when i was living in london. it was dreadful because i had JUST moved and i had no friends. however, this time around i have been here for 5 - thats right FIVE - months now and i actually have friends this time around. believe it or not...its true. an americana friend of mine and her aussie husband are hosting a lovely meal on thursday and i am very much so looking forward to it. i am bringing my brit mate who is very excited for his first thanksgiving and we are going to be amongst a bunch of aussies...go figure.

anyway, i had a lovely week with my friend in town. the only thing is with the current market conditions we were relegated to the marriott instead of the four seasons, sadly, and the marriott is less than nice...especially compared to the four seasons. however, it was another great week and we even hit up macau! we went to the exhibition match of mcenroe, borg, federrer and blake. it was lots of fun but the trip to macau is a bit of a headache. but we also went to the peak. we had dinner at pearl on the peak and is was DELISH.

here are two pics, one of my friend's boyfriend spilling beer on himself and me laughing at him at the tennis and the other i took from our TABLE at the restaurant (we had the best table in the place, by the way - it was corner with a magnificent view)...


































and then this saturday, i took a trip to disneyland with a mate. it was fun and really cute but very small and in comparison to disneyworld...it was kinda sad. nonetheless, i had a great time :)

all in all - a GREAT week of firsts.

Pictures worth a Thousand Words

these first two are of me, a friend and some famous kiwi ruggers from two weekends ago at the bledisloe cup. i have no clue who the dudes are but i do know they are HUGE. i have never been so close to a man that large before in my entire life. (now dont go down the x-rated path on me) but in all honesty, it is so overwhelming- the one on my right was just so big its almost a bit scary - intimidating at least. again, the weekend was LOTS of fun and seeing the haka live for the first time was beyond words incredible...

the these other two are from a ny colleague's visit to the hk office. as you can see it was full of the usual antics...


on saturday i went mountain biking for the first time ever (yes, my bum still hurts) and i went to the cricket 6s on sunday which i LOVED. its a shortened test match (none of that 5 day crapola) and is a lot like american baseball. it was lots of fun - big hits, beer, food and outdoor action! i could defo get into cricket...

outside of work has been a blast but work itself has sucked hairy swollen ball sacks. i think the tail end of work last week was by far the worst couple of days of my life. i am so stressed out and unhappy in work, my hair has been falling out in clumps....

What? WHAT? Did THAT Really Just Happen?

i brought soy milk into work and i put my initials on it so people would not think it was communal. i can share but i dont want everyone just thinking they can polish it off. so i go into the kitchen this morning, pour my cereal and the soy milk and immediately think it looks funny. i tucked in to find that it was all watery and gross. clearly someone used some, which is fine, but dont ruin the rest of it by adding in water. fuckers.

sometimes it is just too much for me to handle...