I haven't been able to go online these past few days as our Homechoice has not been connected yet, but today, I discovered that I could go online by connecting to my phone via bluetooth to get a decent connection of 115 kb/s. But unfortunately I think it is a bit expensive too, so I would rather not be downloading large files. Anyway, in my regretful offline status of the past few days, I decided to jot down a few things everyday...

19 September 2006
I wrote my first business letter in Chinese today! Although it did take about 3 hours to write, I feel rather good about it :)
Now all it comes down to is whether the guy on the other side will actually take it seriously with all my (no doubt) silly mistakes and awkward phrasing.

20 September 2006
So it turns out that this guy knows nothing and my time writing this letter has been a waste. Oh well, at least I practiced my Chinese.
Today, we enlisted the support of the Chinese office, so now I can put down the cold calling for a bit and focus on something else. I would have liked to a bit more, simply because I was far from exhausting possible leads, but the Chinese would definitely be able to be more productive with their warm contacts.
So anyway, now I'm copying by manual keyboard lots of numbers from this document to recreate a P&L statement. It takes so long and is so boring that my tired eyes literally start tearing every few minutes. Yeah, thanks to the genius who restricted copying and pasting from the document, you've made my life hell.

22 September 2006
The outsourcing of my calling task has been a good idea after all, but it appears everything they learn has to come through me and they don't talk to anyone else on the team. Likewise, I must communicate with them the knowledge I have learnt which puts me in a good position, as it's almost like I'm managing a team, without having to do the boring job of doing the cold calls. And that also means I don't have to go to the office everyday at 6:00am in order to make my calls to China, which is +7 hours ahead.
And I've also managed to outsource the task of typing in all the numbers from the P&L statements to a pour soul in the Indian office. It's just brilliant!

23 September 2006
After a slightly stressful session of cleaning up the flat and moving the remaining things from our Pimlico flat to the new place and handing over the flat to the landlady, I finally can relax and get a rest. Now comes the long and gradual process of settling down in the new flat. For example, just now, I realised I didn't have any detergent to wash my clothes. Good thing there is Tesco's express a 5 min walk away!

Labels: work