Posted 10:04 PM by Andy
Spring is teasing me with a few appearances, just enough to instill hope in its arrival.

Work and Play. After Chinese New Year when practically the whole firm was away on holiday, I had another week when my managers were gone. I chatted with anyone I could find around the office to whittle away the time. On Valentine's Day I ventured out to Bund Number 5. It's a lounge-bar catering mostly to foreigners near the waterfront. There was a speed-dating event that night but it turned into a free-for-all mixer. I hung out with a guy I met at the door and his friends most of the time when I wasn't mingling. Last week I hosted three auditors from Ernst & Young. Two of them were native South African guys (one Indian and one white), and one Chinese girl, all from the SF office. I took them to a street fair for Lantern Festival Day around Yu-Yuan one night. The streets in this tourist area were packed with people milling around but we couldn't find any dumplings to sample. The next night I took them to Pegagus, which features a hip-hop dance night on Thursdays. With the low cover charge and big dance floor, this venue is quite popular with the young and restless crowd. On Friday night I took them to Park 97. I slept half a day on Saturday to recover from the previous days' adventures. From these exploits I now know drinking is boring to me. I prefer to dance much more. At both clubs fights broke out and cops arrived to quell the disorder. I was amused by Viresh's attempts to sweet-talk local girls with his South African accent, Neil's fire-breathing antics with alcohol, and Leang's provocative dance moves. I told Leang later she is a completely different person when she parties than the soft-spoken prim-and-proper professional during the day. Beneath the chain-smoking, shot-pounding, stage-dancing exterior is a sweet girl. I file her under my party buddy list mentally.

Intermediary. There are those people who are truly connectors who love to have vast quantities of friends and associates, seeming to weave a broad net over their disparate connections effortlessly. I definitely don't belong in that group but it seems recently this intermediary role has been foisted upon me quite often. During the audit I was the main contact person between the auditors and my managers. My managers didn't want to deal with them directly for various reasons. In one meeting I was literally translating what our mask shop representative was saying to the auditors and vice versa to clarify our internal procedures. In a dinner that Jim invited me to, the host who happened to be the HR chief asked me to help play piano during a regular Friday night meeting. Never mind the fact that I haven't touched the piano in over a decade and that I had quit it in a rage against my mom's will because I hated to practice. I hemmed and hawed to express the fact that I really do suck, and that this was not a display of modesty. I hope the request doesn't come up again. Earlier this week, Arain sent out an invitation and registration list for a group outing to a park next Saturday. The purpose is to foster relationships between the single girls in the HR department and the single guys in my department, design services. I was amused by it and opted to wait until later in the week to find out who is going. My plan was foiled because Arain called me that afternoon to ask me to go. The count that day stood at 19 girls from HR, finance, and the school, and 7 guys from design services signed up. Later I made the rounds to HR to confirm that the girls have been pushing for this for a while. I told Arain I will go to help them out, ha ha. This morning, Christa, a senior HR manager, called me. A clip of this conversation went like this:

"Andy, you probably can't guess what I'm calling about."
"No, I have no idea."
"Are you single?""
"Uh, yes."
"Let me tell you about this nice girl...."

It turns out Christa is trying to hook me up with our CEO's secretary. My muddled response was something along the lines of everything starts from friendship so I don't mind meeting her. After consulting with a few of my close comrades, I realized that was the wrong answer. First, she is 28. I have nothing against 28-year-olds or women of any age for that matter, but the fact that people are asking around for her fervently suggests she is looking for a serious relationship, which I'm not able to sustain at this point in my life. This is also a political landmine to walk through given her relationship to the CEO and her excellent reputation around the firm. Not that I would mess around with any girl, but you cannot botch any relationship with "good" girls because that will do irreparable damage to your own reputation. This is the mental calculus that I performed after hanging up the phone. Next time I talk to Christa I will have to be very diplomatic yet firm in rejecting her overtures on behalf of her protege. I feel strange being in the unusual position of the hunted.

Secretary Network. A random observation that I made related to the above is that I seem to know or have an affinity to the secretaries at my firm. I know Shannon from my department, Sherry from marketing and sales, my former intern and currently another marketing secretary Qi, Vivian from IT, and Maggie from technology development. I hung out with J, a former marketing secretary, in the fall during my initial foray into casual dating here. I have word from a source that another secretary from one of our fabs who has expressed interest in me is in the upcoming English class I'll be teaching. I find this quite bizarre but I do value the information available from this haphazardly constructed network.

Time to bounce. Next time: dabbling in yoga, new latin dance class, English class, and of course the singles group hangout.