A Long Short Week

So this last week was pretty rough. We had the largest typhoon of the year on Sunday/Monday so that meant we had Monday off as a typhoon holiday and sent out a late shipment to Thailand (but with the weather they said it was ok). Then Wednesday evening our most important machine started having problems. Well the machine is from Germany so guess who at the company happens to speak English and be in charge of these sorts of issues and communications…me!

Thursday we had the local agent of the company that makes the machine come in and that’s when it started to go down. The main guy in Singapore who does service calls was busy and isn’t too good with software (the source of the problem) anyway. So that meant I had to go direct to Germany. Now we have a 1 million piece order going on Tuesday that absolutely needs this machine and I was instructed that I was authorized to have someone fly direct from Germany if it looked as if we couldn’t solve the problem. The problem here is that in Germany they get to the office at 2PM Taiwanese time so it wasn’t until late in the day that we could find anything from them.

The process went like: this email Germany the problem and what we did, wait and get nothing, Skype call to their service hotline, they email, we try the suggestions, take a bunch of pictures, email pictures and results to Germany (so they could simulate the problem on a machine there), and then start from the beginning.

About 5PM I called Germany to see if they could send someone…bad news. The next day was a public holiday and if we couldn’t solve the problem the earliest they could send someone would be Monday (WAY too late) and they needed to know the source of the problem before they could send someone. It was then I knew it was going to be a long one.

So we went through some more processes and eventually Germany gave me an email of things to do. This was the beginning of the end. I’ll spare you the details but I was on the phone for 3 hours troubleshooting the machine (which I never operate). I was the (as Bush may say) the communicator but I had help from the local agent and a coworker. In the end, we solved the problem and I left the office at 11:30PM (15:30 hours at the office, I also went back to the office at 8AM the next morning).

Now this saved the company a boat load of money since we didn’t have to pay for a German engineer to fly out on short notice, for his transport, work hours, and hotel. And just as important I gave us a fighting chance to make our Tuesday order on time. That is important since Thailand gave us a 4.5 million order for next month, which is the largest ever and we need to show that we can handle that volume.

The problem with this is that I had to put off a lot of other work such as sorting out the software and production schedules for sample cards that need to be urgently sent to Thailand and a lot of the invoice and spare part orders on my desk as well.

My boss has a way of overstating things (getting my hopes up to travel to Cambodia, Indonesia, and Laos) but hopefully he wasn’t kidding when he said he is going to try and get me a mainland China work permit (just think of the irony there if I get it, I could work in China but not in Taiwan there I live). But he said that I’ll likely be travelling to mainland China next weekend for a few days to check out our operation in Xiamen and I think he’s serious about this one.

The GM was pretty impressed by my work this week and recognized me in the morning meeting on Friday and then gave me the day off om Saturday (we have to work one Saturday each month and this was it). That gave me the chance to go to a breakfast lecture club this morning held by an old ND alum here. It was not too good of a breakfast (toast and “ham”) but I met another old ND guy (52’ grad) who was in town. The talk was about services for foreigners from the Interior Ministry. Seeing how I am here not-so-legally there really isn’t much they can do for me so it was a little boring. Although the guy who was speaking thought I was in high school so I got a kick out of that, maybe I really do still look 17.