Day 51

31.01.18

Rodger That

Caught up with one of my mum’s friends and old neighbour from Nanjing. His name is Rodge and he’s now the CTO of a subsidiary company of ZTE. There’s a lot going on with ZTE and US-China relations, which have damaged the company’s reputation and has massive implications on the Chinese economy if negotiations fall through. He said that all business has stopped indefinitely until agreements can be reached on the national level – it’s quite rare to see a company stop everything that they’re doing because of a dispute between two countries. Anyway, with a lot of spare time, Rodge and I had a lot to talk about and he provided me with some good advice – he said that I remind him of himself when he was about my age, moved his life from Nanjing to the big city Shenzhen and lived there for 6 years. He epitomises ‘doing what you like’ as he’s been doing something that he enjoys ever since his university degree – he has no concerns over his potential job loss as a CTO because he will always find a way to do what he likes. I have great respect for someone who has that type of mindset.

Visiting my old colleagues

After my meeting with Rodge, I walked a few minutes to the Sanpower Headquarters to see my old colleagues. As always, they welcomed me as one of their own, despite me only working there for a week. It was one of the team member’s last day today, who had planned to go back home or to Shanghai. She had moved to Nanjing just for this job but because of some reasons decided that the work didn’t suit her. I later found out that she had become the secretary (or bitch) of one of the executives who treated her very badly and was super high maintenance e.g. taking out the garbage and picking up her deliveries. Not the best job to be doing if you’ve just graduated from a well-known foreign university.

Quiz night

Every Thursday is Quiz night at Arcano, and yes, it is something I look forward to – despite having never attended such a thing in Melbourne. Tonight, Rory did the quiz and put a lot of VCE GAT questions in the maths section - which brought back bad memories. There was a music section on the golden oldies, 90s and 00s, so not really my forte – but it got everyone belting out the lyrics – especially for Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’ – the modern day Australian National Anthem as Rory said. Towards the end of the night, after a parma and a few VBs, we were playing darts and listening to some Australian classics – it was a good feeling being around people who know the songs.