Goodbye to the Yellow Man.

Time for a change.
We didn't know it for sure just yet, but this year's "Bring Your Child to Work" gathering of April 27 was the last one. We suspected it. Later that day I had lunch with my buddy Claudio discussing the eventual closure. The writing had been on the wall, for a long, long time. About a week later, on Tuesday May 9, the doors closed.

The April 2000 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L Friedman quotes a Far Eastern Economic Review(Sept. 2, 1999)article on the Manila call center taking 10-12,000 daily calls, each rep making less each day than a rep state-side can make in an hour. Yet, that overseas rep is still making about 35% above the going wage in Manila.

Reading The Lexus enabled me to handle it even more positively; you would think after a decade, this would be a difficult parting of ways. Management responded to the market, and eased us out with much forethought. We were hand-held through the transistion with a placement company which made it a lot easier to pound the pavement after these ten-plus years. More power to our global counterparts, be it in Manila, India, So. Africa, Mexico, Ireland, or wherver the market calls.

Today, Sunday June 18th, 2006 I read from the Associate Press an article by Ramola Talwar Badam entitled: New Indian curriculum: Speak up, be direct, assertive "They're teaching everybody to talk back and to be aggressive - that's not a piece of Indian culture...Indian workers are polite to a fault." Not me.

Tomorrow, Monday, is the first day of my new job. A global-banking company with close to 1/4 million employees and 110 million customers. Time for a change.