Sunday Afternoon

It's a dog day afternoon; forced to work in the office preparing for the web app demo to executives tomorrow. Actually, as in other cases - work is actually baby-sitting. The consultant is here finishing his program, one of my staff is on standby for deployment, and another one is on his way.

I had to treat them to some snacks of course. We went to LASA restaurant at Podium. They have a great deal on buffet merienda. Php90 gets you 15 different viands. Actually it's Php108 becasue of taxes, but it's still a winner deal. They have a very tasty pancit canton, spaghetti, arrozcaldo, maja, palitaw, tokwa, ube something (?), dinuguan, and some other local stuff. The really cool thing about it is it already includes drinks. Well, sort of - you only have buco juice and sago't gulaman to choose from, and a very ordinary halo halo. It's nothing to write home about, but still is a sweet deal considering your in podium.

I guess it is good enough that I find myself having slack time in front of my laptop finally. Haven't written any blogs for a while. Got a lot of stuff that's happened - might as well give it a shot right now...

I think around a month ago, an executive visiting from the US was here for a couple of days en route to Sydney. He's an IT guy so my boss and I were discussing the projects we've done here in Asia Pac and the chances of maybe doing the same thing for EMEA (their region). We were the last appointment for that day, as he literally had his bags with him and was prepared to shuttle directly to NAIA after our meeting. My boss offered to porter one of his huge bags and I naturally offered to do the same for his laptop bag, but he begged me off and said he could handle it. So anyway, my boss ended up walking him out and down and I said my goodbye from our floor lobby, and that was it.

And then around 30 minutes later - I got a call from my boss asking me if we had a spare laptop. I said yes, and then he asked me to configure it to be usable for the US guy. And then blah.. blah.. blah... it turns out his entire laptop bag got swiped right in front of our building. Now I'm not gonna say which exact building, but it is one of the most prominent ones in ortigas, and is located in one of the most prominent streets here -- and that just fucking blows your mond away.

Apparently they were all standing just outside the door waiting to hail cab, and then they had to pee so they left the bag there amongst all the other US guys who were also standing and chatting. In fact, some other company colleagues were also standing there since it's the designated smoking area for the building. The way I heard it is that a couple of people actually worked as accomplices to distract all the guys there -- making some commotion about a dropped US$100 bill and then a cute girl walked over to my friend and asked for directions to shangri-la mall.

Nothing really special about that except that my friend is a freaking nymphomaniac (kind of like quentin tarantino's role in the movie "from dusk till dawn") and so the thought of a hot girl walking over to talk to him would literally shake his bones from within.

Naturally -- it rendered him impervious to other outside stimuli and so his peripheral vision was gone. And while all this was running about, a gay guy swiped the entire bag and walked away. The fucking dollar bill even turned out to be fake... what a bummer!

And so there was a police report, and everybody was shocked and amazed, etc. Besides his laptop, the bag also contained the guy's blackberry, some personal stuff, his passport and airline tickets. I felt so embarassed that it happened in Manila, and right in front of our office building. We have barong wearing security just 10 feet away when it happened. And the bag was left just a few steps outside the door. It was swiped right there... not even in the street pavement.

Security video was replayed but the whole thing was conveniently tucked behind a pillar in front of the building -- almost too coincidental if you ask me. Even looked like they knew where the camera was located. But then again, it looked really coordinated and were definitely works of pros, so I'm sure they scoped the place for a couple of days first.

The day after, I got talk to him and he at least believed it could've happened anywhere. At least he's not thinking about not returning to Manila ever. Well, another bad day to charge to experience I guess. I have been travelling a lot myself and I just can't imagine how fucking awful that would've felt if it had happened to me in some other country....