Project in Hong Kong

Just last week, a colleague of mine had been relocated to Hong Kong for 3 months to lead an eterprise IT project. If required, his stay might extend into a 2/3 year stint.

Without going into details, it is a challenging project, and 2 other project leads before him had failed to resolve the critical issues. He is the 3rd project lead to be assigned to this expensive initiative, and failure would result in a dive of his career prospects in the company.

On a personal level, he would be missing his family badly as he is very close to his wife and kids. The authority figure in the family, he took much pride in supervising his kids in day to day activities.

So he left Singapore with quite a bit of apprehension and sadness at leaving his family behind. I was happy to receive an IM from him that he was settling down well in Hong Kong. A first time visitor, he was awed by its beauty and told me of his discoveries in Mongkok, Ladies' street, etc. His hunt for an apartment was turning out to be a difficult task as the apartments were small, and it was difficult getting one away from a dodgy street as there were so many of them.

His first buy in the Pearl of the Orient was actually a camera (as opposed to buying presents for his wife and kids!) and I suggested he could use it to take pictures of HK and send it to the rest of us and he agreed to take one of the HK fireworks and send that over when it was done. Am sure looking forward to that.