2nd business trip

Just completed the 12 days business trip in San Diego. Actually it was not a business trip, it was about sending 2 illegal workers there for re-inspection a ton of meters. But of course from mouse point of view it was about a jackpot of company autumn journey to release their high work load created by from company. Or I should claim that it was just about a treatment from company to heal any of those stuff who has nega in his brain. Therefore I didn't feel guilty to grab as much as benefits from this trip.

Raymond and I arrived Los Angeles mid-night of 1st Nov. Lucky I had Raymond along, otherwise I was like a handicap without legs who had no way to go to hotel because I didn't have driving licence. This was the first time I was seriously considered to take a driving course in HK soon. We just stayed in Los Angeles a quick night without any sightseeing, then headed to San Diego the next day morning.

We drove 2 hours from Los Angeles to San Diego and reached Alere at 11am. After briefing with Mike Robinson and Dustin Tano, we noticed that we had more units than expected to go through the re-inspection process. And we realized that the warehouse was the place we would stick within these 10days.

After a quick lunch we started to work. What we had to do was opened the battery door from the meter to see if there was any metal part above the plastic compartment which may cause the short circuit, if not, then put it back to carton box. No doubt that everyone will think it was a super easy job but actually this kind of routine job nearly killed me. It was hard to imagine how boring it was to do the same action for 10 hours. We started chatting, listening music and playing cell phone, to do all what we always blame the operators NOT-TO-DO in the factory unfortunately it was what we had to do to awake our brain up. . I did sympathize with what operators did in our factory.

The difference between real mouse and cunning mouse was we always had a plan for our next move. We couldn't waste the chance just stuck in the warehouse for the whole trip. We decided to "work hard" on the weekday and "play hard" on the weekend. So on 2nd Nov to 4th Nov we almost worked until 1opm, even a longer working hour than in China. On Saturday, as discussed with customer they accompanied with us to go to the harbor with cruise ship terminal. The weather was perfect on that day so we walked along the harbor to enjoy the San Diego wind, San Diego air and to scan all of the San Diego girls who ever jumped into my sight. In the afternoon they brought us to a outlet and had a great dinner nearby called Elephant Bar.

Having a tour guide was not a bad option for us, but the generation gap between between customer and us was nearly killed us. So we decided to go to San Ysidro outlet on Sunday afternoon by ourselves. It was a really good outlet, huge and having several popular brands over there. The price was not as cheap as expected but stingy mouse still could pick some shirts and souvenirs for family and gf over there.

After the charming weekend 2 little mice had to go back to do the routine boring job on the second week. In the meanwhile, we celebrated Raymond's birthday on 8th Nov. This is the first time for him to celebrate his birthday overseas. I thought it was a unforgettable moment for him because end up there was 3 different groups of customer celebrated for him.

On 11th Nov, we had completed the mission to re-inspect 16k meters which was more than expected. So we said good-bye to customer in the afternoon and continued to "play hard" in Los Angeles. As I knew that Los Angeles was a big city but very disappointed that the downtown was looked like a sin city, a lot of area just put "LEASE" on the front. When we felt "that's it" in Los Angeles suddenly we found a totally different world in Universal Studio and Hollywood. Although there were not big and stunning but at least it made me feel different.

On 12th Nov night we were ready to get back to Hong Kong. Although it was a free, relax and exciting trip, I still feel that Hong Kong is the best place I would like to stay for my entire life.