Our New Digs

As you can see, I made it “home” okay.

I packed up my stuff for the third time in my trip because this is the last time I’ll be in the company’s old apartment. After work tonight, we’ll come back to our new residence at the “Manhattan” also overlooking Repulse Bay.

My issue of the day is that I’m running out of cash. There are several ATM’s around, but none of them accept my debit cards. Well to be truthful, I can’t recall the PIN number for my business card and apparently I’m lousy at guessing. So I try my good old personal card from Rollstone Savings Bank. Somewhere back in Fitchburg, alarms are peeling as the system cannot imagine a Rollstone customer needing cash in Hong Kong and my entreaties are soundly rejected. As a man, I figure I can brute force this transaction though and slide the card back in… this time angrily. This stupid ATM clearly doesn’t understand its mission at all! The queue behind me is beginning to back up, and I’m embarrassed to turn around empty handed, so I try the Simeb card again… this time with an old phone number. Dammit!

Back upstairs, I send a plea back to our finance department to either tell me my PIN or reset it to a new one. I’m sure they’ll take care of it in the morning and make up insulting names for me like “PINhead”, but in the end they’ll help me right?

I’m sitting there in my office considering selling my body fluids, when Stan walks by. There’s nothing more difficult to do than ask your Boss for money, but what if my Chinese fails me again and I end up a street waif?

Stan floats me some cash and then makes me pay for lunch.

The new apartment is smaller, but still very nice. Patty (the Housekeeper) has most of the stuff put away by the time we get home. The first thing I check out is to make sure her homemade brownies survived the trip.