The Labuan International Offshore Financial Centre's coffee-table book to commemorate their tenth anniversary (1999-2000) was an effort that brought me together with two people I know. Labuan IOFC is now known as Labuan International Business and Financial Centre.
I've known Yasmin Gan Abdullah when I was working many moons ago at Komplek Kewangan Malaysia Berhad. I was the training executive there and she was working with the Malaysian Institute of Personnel Management as its marketing executive. We became friends and kept in touch as we moved from one organisation to another. I then embarked on my freelance writing life, by which time she was managing her brother's design company, CTG Creative Point.
CTG was awarded the project to produce Labuan IOFC's coffee-table book and Yasmin pulled me in as the book's writer. Because the publisher wanted some new photos for the book, I brought in my photographer/writer friend, Peter Anderson, whom I knew through the Malaysia New Zealand Chamber of Commerce. See what I mean in my earlier post about cultivating contacts.
Working on the book involved travelling to Labuan. Peter and I flew there together for a three-day visit and were put up at the Waterfront Hotel. It's an old hotel and the room I stayed in was really quite large and rather dim. At night, it was difficult to sleep because of a constant knocking sound. On the morning that we were to return, I met Peter at the check-out counter. He looked bleary-eyed and when I asked him why, he said that he hadn't had a good night's sleep because of this knocking sound that went on through the night. I told him that I had the same problem. So we asked the guy at the counter the reason for the sound and he replied that it was because of some renovation work in the kitchen.
Peter and I said, "Oh, okay", and it wasn't till we were flying off that it occurred to us the absurdity of the kitchen being renovated so late at night. Needless to say, we didn't stay at that hotel on later trips to Labuan.
No comments:
Post a Comment