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Resurgence
Yesterday our new employee started work. He arrived five minutes early but as soon as he sat down at his desk his phone rang and he answered it - he could have set fire to Pinky and it would have annoyed me less. But the rest of the day went very well and he is a fast learner so in the afternoon he worked alone with only a couple of questions being asked of me. (The call was from his protective sister to check everything was OK).
On Friday we went to his school. I wanted to ask his tutors what would be a suitable project for him that would help his studies and I only had to seed the idea in Ploy's mind as a quick telephone call later we were on our way to his college. The college is closed but there are still students around doing some projects but it also meant the tutors were free to talk to us. I now have a much better idea of what they do and teach. He can remain at the college until he is 20 if he wishes in which case he will get a higher diploma. The latter years are 3 semesters long, and one of those semesters must be spent in industry. Our student is already committed to work with the Thailand electricity providers for his first semester and given the state of the electricity in Thailand he is unlikely to survive that. But we can choose another one or two (or more but we can't handle more) students next October when the industrial semester starts. If we like each other we can get them again in a year's time. We have options to sponsor their studies in which case we can contract them to work full time for us when they complete. This is very similar to day release in the UK which is how I studied, it just starts two years earlier here, but for us it produces just the type of engineer I like; practical but with some theoretical background. The college is just 15km from us and I got on with the tutors very well; they asked me to teach there part time and another asked me to help with his hobby electronics business.
However there is one small issue with our new employee. His name is Vipach but as with all Thais he has a nickname which is used instead, Dtot. Unfortunately I cannot seem to pronounce that properly so for my version I call him Dot, which means fart in Thai. So I have decided to call him Frank instead (or Flank).
And yesterday, as if our new employee is some sort of good luck charm, I was told to expect an order this week from one company whilst our old Hong Kong friend who caused us all these problems sent me a message to say he has his first customers and although he has spent a lot of time modifying my original designs, will honour our original agreement and will start sending me some license payments soon.
The evening meal was already planned, but after such a good day a small celebration seemed in order. We moved our meal to the coffee table so we could watch a DVD movie (The Last Emperor) although it has the disadvantage that it is at Pinky level. Ploy cooked larb moo for me, one of my favourites and one of the dishes she cooks better than any restaurant I know. Larb is a salad of minced meat or fish (pork in this case), with chopped spring onions, shallots, dried rice, chilli, garlic and mint leaves. It is served with raw vegetables of your choice, today cucumber and string beans. Ploy had noodles with makua yao, which are long aubergines, chopped and sauteed with oyster sauce, garlic, chilli and horlapa (Thai sweet basil). And we had some prawn crackers. And a bottle of nice Semillon/Chardonnay wine. And the movie was good. And the company was better.
