Leaving

I have a different feeling when hearing colleagues leaving the company. Today is the last day of one colleague in London and one colleague in Hong Kong. Also had one of my staff left last Friday.

I remembered I heard this statement long time ago. Back in 1984 if I am correct.
"Leaving just means we will meet in another place in future."
This is true only if we really meet again. As people are busy or lazy, you seldom call an ex-colleague only for gathering unless you really miss this person or you have a request for him/her. But I do call up all my ex-mercantile friends even though most of us left the company over 8 years.

When was your last meet with your university or secondary or even primary schoolmates?

I am lucky that I still have contact with them. We really get old since we treasure the time with all our old friends, colleagues and schoolmates. That's why people join facebook not just for fun, but for real feel of reunion.

Sometimes people say you will enter a different world after you get married because you spend most of your time with your another half, that also means you spend less time social with other friends. I think this is not entirely true, but instead you meet more new faces because suddenly you need to know the friends from your another half, which is sufficient to keep you busy for a while. And the cycle of meeting, gathering starts right the way. And we have not take into account their families and relatives ... etc.

Ok, finish for today. And just done my dessert in Hilton Hotel Istanbul. Time to go back to my room for a sleep.
 

Heathrow Terminal 5

Travelling today to Istanbul, heard about the problem in Terminal 5 last few days. Initially I am a bit worry about that, and the situation is getting better after 5 days though still have about 40 flights cancelled. Radio reported over thousand baggages still need to be manually handled.

My take is that BA already did what he needed. If we look at the total number of flights and baggades handled by BA, this is peanuts. So the overall situation this morning was good and no chaos noted and generally the work flow was fine and I could see there were lots of helpers and information assistants around the departure lounge helping passengers and giving directions. So no problem noted so far. It took 5 minutes for me to check in and drop my bag, may be because I already checked-in online and only got one bag. Everything was smooth and better than expected.

I remembered we had similar problem in HK when the new airport opened in 1998? There were always chaos in the beginning so everyone needed to learn from experience, though it might be a bad one. Unexpected things always come, it is just a matter of how to prepare well in advance and it also depends on how the lead person on site handling the problem. Whether it is under control or not make a big difference in terms of the way he/she facilitates the chaotic situation.

The new Terminal 5 is a huge buidling, there are 3 buidlings, A to C and there is a transfer train between them. I had a feeling that they copied the HK design. A lot of setup are similar, might be these are the modern standard of new airport terminal. If they can put some more decorations in the terminal will help giving a better look and feel.

My flight did not depart on time, I would not deny this was not because of the terminal services, I actually heard from the pilot broadcast that some problem were just fixed so we could take off. And we were already 30 minutes late. Actually the plane were queuing in the runway, 3 to 4 planes before us and 3 planes after us. It was a busy traffic :-@

We finally departed Heathrow and we were one hour ten minutes late oh.
@_@
 

Funny Cat and Rat

On my way to the park near my home, I captured a video about a cat chasing a rat.

That was really funny since the cat was basically watching and chasing the rat.

The cat had no intention to kill the rat, just played with it.

Poor rat !

 

Busy Day

It was again a very busy day, or call it a very productive day.

Working from 7:45am till 9pm, attended 5 meetings, 1 short birthday party, reading hundred of emails and clean up 2 piles of documents and tidied up my desk. I even went to 2 banks to make an inter-bank money transfer during lunch.

Think I am working faster than I expected myself.

Time to slow down ......

Snowing

This is the 2nd day having snowing in the morning.

It is a strange feeling while looking outside the window. It's a windy day and the snow flakes are just falling down slowly ... because they are light.

It is not that cold, 3 degrees and the snow flakes melt right after landed on ground.

The youtube video is not that great, at least can see a bit.

Will go out anyway, need some shopping, running out of food :-P