It's been over 4 months... and Kentucky Fried Chicken

Hello again! Hard to believe it's been over 4 months since my last post. I can give all the lame excuses in the world for the lapse, but I think it comes down to not being appreciated! :)

I can't tell you how many people tell me when I am back in the US on business, 'Please tell Stephanie we miss her Blog posts' or my favorite, 'It's so great you and Stephanie are blogging, please tell her how much we enjoy hers'.

But seriously, for those of you that have asked where our blogs have gone (thanks for thinking of me mom), we are both going to try to get more serious about it... for better or worse.

So my lapse has mostly to do with work... The program I am in charge of here in PRC for Intel is not going well. My team is working incredibly hard, but the complexity of what we are trying to do, and the relatively short amount of time in which we are trying to do it, has finally caught up with us. It's really been complicated by the fact that we are relying on an outside company to deliver a central part of the platform, and the General Manager of the company told me today (through a translator) that if he had known how complicated this was going to be, how much work it was going to take, and the resources it was going to require, he never would have signed up to do the job in the first place. It seems the representative of the company that committed on his behalf never really gave him all the details! Oh Joy.

What keeps me going everyday is the fact that the people on my team (spread out over Malaysia, Taiwan, Shanghai and the US) are truly working hard - and my job, in part, is to try to remove roadblocks and keep them moving forward... I feel like my job is really to limit the amount of confusion, manage the messaging, insure communication is being done effectively and that decisions are made in a timely manner... If I weren't doing these things, these people would be far more frustrated than they already are. So as one of my colleagues (who happens to be a USC grad) constantly reminds me - we Fight On!

Anyhow - the funny story I'll end with on this brief post (and I think this one was actually brief) is this: I have been spending a significant amount of time at the factory for this vendor we are relying on. I have had to have many meetings with their General Manager, and broach some sensative cultural ground - how do I indirectly tell this guy that he's screwing me, and allow him to save face?

Well it's not uncommon when we are there over lunch for them to bring food into the meeting rooms from their on site food service. It's usually marginally OK Chinese food (I am spoiled by the food cooked by our ayi, which is excellent). There is one Chinese gal that works for the General Manager and as far as I can tell her job is to bring food and drinks into every meeting he is in. We only see her when were meeting with him, and the menu is always the same since I have not been with him over lunch - she's only deliver snacks: 1 bottle of water each, 1 can of coke each, and 1 small plate of Roma Tomatoes. Pretty funny. I am sure she does other things, but as far as I can tell, she's his personal snack delivery service.

So we are in a somewhat tense meeting this week - there are about 6 of us in the room and it's 10:00am in the morning. In comes 'snack delivery gal' with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was the funniest thing. My friend Bill, who was in the meeting with me, looks at me and can hardly contain his laughter - as could I. So the gal makes the rounds and it's a leg here and a thigh there. Corn on the cob for this guy and then a second round to see who wants rolls. And then during the meeting everyone is chowing down on KFC.

People have told us that over time, you will find yourself acting more and more Chinese. I have to say, on that day, I was.... Chewin' on a chicken leg at 10:00am, figuring out how to keep a train wreck of a program on the tracks... This is China.