By the time I arrive at Dencio’s in the Trinoma mall, Joy has already started drinking cocktails. She’s seated squarely in the centre of the long bench seat behind a table large enough to seat six, and the waiters are attentively at hand any time she requires another drink. Joy has recently graduated from Law and is staying…
Fred owns a two storey house in Bulacan, about 40km north of Manila. Meandering through the quiet local streets to his home, the bustling traffic of EDSA and Cubao are forgotten, and the pace of life slows down alot. Fred’s pace of life mirrors his surroundings. Getting up in the morning, he shuffles around his home, gets his…
I’m here! If home is where the heart is, I’m definitely home. I’ve arrived at Diosdada Macapagal International Airport, more easily known as Clark, just north of the city of Angeles (not pronounced the same as you’d say Los Angeles — instead try to say the ‘g’ more like you’d say ‘guess’) and caught the shuttle bus down to Cubao.…
Having spent less than 12 hours in Kuala Lumpur, and all of those being ‘after dark’, I really can’t tell you much about Malaysia, but as I was coasting in to Sentral on the AeroBus shuttle I had time to just watch and think. After checking into my hotel I then, as is my habit, took to the…
Major corporations struggle to deliver high quality services, and small businesses learn through repeated ‘trial and error’, and yet 5000 semi-literate lunchbox carriers in Mumbai can lose just one 1 in 6 million ‘tiffins’ that, as a united organism, they deliver from the client’s home, to their workplace, and back to home again. I’m on a flight from…
With only a few more hours in my office, and my bags almost packed for departure tomorrow to Philippines, I’m really looking forward to arriving in Manila on Thursday. During my trip I’ll be visiting some of my friends at various not-for-profit organisations, interviewing (through informal conversations) low-income slum dwellers, photographing some of the <$1/day Filipinos, and meeting…
In my regular ‘Nitty Gritty — Online’ column for Australian Business Solutions magazine, due to hit the shelves in a few days time, I address the question “Is there anything I can do to minimise the amount of SPAM that I’m getting each day?”. With only 500 words available to cover this whole, complex topic, I just briefly touched on…
A long time ago, I started writing about “Offshoring — the pros and cons from a social and commercial perspective”. I promised then to delve deeper in three subsequent posts, and this is the first of those long-overdue posts: Off-shoring is not only ethical, it’s a socially responsible and progressive step. That’s a claim that’s going to get me in…
A couple of years ago I wrote a draft article about off-shoring and the reasons why, ethically, it makes perfect sense and should not be condemned. However, it languished in the recesses of my hard disk until a couple of weeks ago, when a phone call I made to Telstra was directed to a call centre in Philippines…
According to the Herald Sun newspaper today, “a Monash university student has admitted in court scamming thousands of dollars worth of Internet access in what experts say is potentially a rocketing problem”. Considering I work with this type of technology (Internet, Wi-Fi, etc…) all the time and I’m not aware of the laws around this topic, I imagine…
