04-012 Introducing Betty Soo

04-012
Introducing Betty Soo

Back in the late September of 2022, when Hongkong decided to lift the hotel quarantine for inbound travelers, many are still expecting China to stay on its zero-COVID policy for quite a while, well, until at least 2024. Many, including those pro-Beijing politicians and those working in the Hongkong government, challenged our CEO Joseph Lee on lifting the quarantine requirement as an act of working against the will of Beijing government.

General public were, however, overwhelmed as we can finally travel aboard again. Since then, people started posting their travelling photos on different social medias.

“Living with COVID” was advertised as a kind of mismanagement and weakness of the democratic western world by the Beijing government. China will never follow this as the Beijing government cares the life of the people. But after several protests in November, out of everyone’s expectation, China dropped its zero-COVID policy all out of a sudden. Now, China has even announced opening of its border on the coming Sunday (8-Jan-2023).

Many are suspecting this abrupt change on COVID policy would lead to a disaster. Many people will die. They are correct. It is happening now. But anyway, like it or not, we are at the fringe of a new era. And I want to have a little recall of what I was facing at the beginning of the pandemic.

COVID-19 has changed the world a lot.

I am working in an international firm, a German company. The business involves very high-end technologies. However, many of our internal intercompany processes are decentralized. We still rely very much on low end systems – email, excel or hand-written form etc.

Take an example, if a technician used a spare part, he needs to fill in a handwritten form, has his supervisor signed, scans the signed form and emails it to the warehouse team. Upon receiving the email, the warehouse worker would manually input the form into the company database. Mistakes happen always.

So, back in 2019, we have planned to migrate to SAP, a centralized data management system. With SAP, data only needs to be input once. Error can be minimized.

Many business trips were planned for this activity. Hours of meetings were scheduled. Meeting venue negotiated. Hotels and flights booked. Everything was planned to take place in early 2020. Hundreds of pre-meetings were already taken place in 2019. Everything was ready. Even everyone was ready. Then all in a sudden, it came the COVID-19.

You can imagine what happened next. Lockdowns. People started working from home. Flights and hotel were all cancelled. Face-to-face meetings became skype meetings, with children and wife consistently screaming at the background. Handset quality widened the language barrier. And time zone became significant.

We all had a hard time. We all found out how inefficient is to work at home. And we also found out how much we missed our office. There were benefits though. We saved quite a lot in commuting, lunch and pants.

My first half of 2020 was just like hell. But I struggled through it. SAP successfully went live on 1^st of July 2020. It has been running for more than 2 years by now. So far, so good. God blesses!

Company did save an awful lot though. To appreciate all our hard work, management spent some of the saved money and organized a private concert for us. But how?

My first ever live concert on Skype

In the summer of 2020, I had my first ever skype concert in my life. Instead of meeting everyone in a concert hall, we all wore our headsets, sat in front of our laptops, with the skype cameras turned on and… Well, you can scream at your seat but since you are muted by the administrator, the singer can’t hear a thing. Actually, there was still a way to express your excitement, if any. You can type something like “Yeah!”, “Awesome!”, “You are so good!”, etc. in the conversation field on the left-hand side of the skype window.

It was just so weird!

But, but, maybe because most of us are Asians, the management board invited Betty Soo as the guest singer. I didn’t know who she is. Never heard of her before. The concert was at our 3pm, her 3am. And she sang so well.

Introducing Betty Soo to all of you.

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