kill the sugar

The recent Annual Physical Exam results resulted in my immediate trek to the doctor's clinic last Saturday morning.

APE results in my urinalysis had showcased the presence of sugar -- a bad, bad thing according to the doc who I talked to about the APE results. According to him, for sugar to appear in one's urine, that means that person has a high level of sugar in the body. This of course is a no-brainer for what is to come if I don't lower my intake of sugar -- the dreaded D.

This morning, I went to MMC quite early to have a blood sample taken for sugar testing. That meant a fasting of at least 10-12 hours which started 8pm last night. Quite queasy and dehyrdated, I reported for my FBS this morning at 8:30am, some 30 minutes late according to the nurse on board but still ok to get a decent blood sugar result.

Results will come in on Wednesday and I will learn if I am a candidate for diabetes (I have a sweet tooth and have been a fan of confectionairy stuff since my first tooth).

Whatever the result, I need to drastically change my diet -- kill the sugar. That'll be my maxim, my motto, my mantra and alongside is an actual need to go on diet. Like what the beloved doc said last Saturday, reduce your weight and you'll reduce your sugar.

212 pounds now ... need to be somewhere between 140 to 160 pounds. Looks like I've got my work cut out for me.

ipo-ipo

Paranoid.

That one word currently describes the environment in my beloved office. Despite the dreaded word, the smooth operation and day-to-day debacle of office work continues. That's mainly because the paranoia I am talking about is limited to the company's directors, senior officers and the luckless departments like Finance and Communications (which I run by the way) so you can just imagine my delight (sarcasm intended here).

The paranoia rippling through the upper echelons and select niche of the office is due to three letters -- I, P and O -- which in biz-speak (and I'm not referring to showbiz here) means Initial Public Offering, the next phase in the Darwinian-like evolution that happens in the corporate jungle.

IPO, according to Wikipedia is:

"is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. IPOs are often issued by smaller, younger companies seeking capital to expand, but can also be done by large privately-owned companies looking to become publicly traded."

Read the entire Wikipedia entry HERE.

What this means for us is that we'll be a publicly-listed company and that investors can now ... errr, invest their money in the hopes that we continue to grow. The better performance we do, the higher the value of the company and the more returns all investors are guaranteed.

This also means that we'll become a public company owned no longer by a just a triumvirate of expatriates but by anybody rich enough to shell out dough as a form of investment. But this entails of course, lots of changes internally. We're no longer just accountable to T, C and K but to a Board of Directors whose main concern is to continue seeing the bottomline profit margins gaps go off the excel charts and to avoid seeing red.

As I see it, we're now publicly-listed in a major Asian market but we're also aiming for AIM, yes, join the big boys in London's Alternative Investment Markets (the counterpart of the US' NASDAQ where all tech companies list).

If that sounds like a lot of work, just imagine the pre-listing activities. Some blogs ago I mentioned doing work for auditors and those were for the IPO. The weeks that followed, while not so much, still had me working on IPO numbers. But this past week as the deadline for the London listing neared, more and more IPO-related work was passed on to us.

As is typical and usual and common in my beloved company, work for my department was just passed on a few days ago. Not complaining, just musing that if they had expected us to work on things, they've could've mentioned them to us like four weeks ago when we could've done things slowly. Now, we have to rush things with barely just a couple of weeks away from the listing date.

This week, my Brit boss and I poured over figures and data to support the potential growth of the industry until the next decade. We had to verify and redo calculations to make sure everything was accurate. I've also been tasked with making sure I chic and familiar with a 150-page document about the AIM listing. Just yesterday, I finished a procedures memo that talked about handling communications and info dissemination during this listing period.

This last bit was what got the paranoia level in the office rising. One of the tenets of the AIM scriptures was adamant that communication and information flow be controlled and monitored during this sensitive period. Great care must be taken that all info released for public consumption should not, in any way, affect or influence investor behavior. If the AIM authorities find any communication from the company to be breaching this tenet -- it meant doom for the listing, a disastrous demise for the company, and imprisonment for all involved in that communication.

With such a Damocles sword hanging over everyone's head in the office, no wonder paranoia broke out. Eat-the-Mark, the IT honcho, went absolutely praning and proceeded to forbid all marketing emails to our customers. Now, he's on the verge of martial lawing access to the servers and unless you had Level 5 security clearance, changing a period on the website required director-level approval. The normally-composed K was heard discussing with REbs in a voice an octane two times higher than his usual range. Though REbs headed the Ops, everything needed for the IPO needed to be signed by K since he was the only one left of the triumvirate. So, if things went wrong, K would be in the best position to wear stripes.

T and C are now more familiar with their stewardesses than their wives or girlfriends as they're jetsetting all across the globe to make sure pledges of support by investors still hold true. On the other hand, the HK office is as paranoid as the Philippine office is since they're to be affected as well.

Last Tuesday, in the usual weekly meeting I asked our Marketing Director if we should expect any IPO-related work to come. He answered that aside from updating the corporate website, he didn't expect anything to come in.

I got to the office the next day late in the afternoon due to a prior and unavoidable pediatric appointment and was surprisingly surprised to find that most of the team was working on something IPO-related. Soon after, I was, myself immersed in the business.

No complaints except for the possibility that mebbe we should've been given these assignments not on the 11th hour?

Personally, I feel an enormous weight of responsibility with this IPO thingy. As the one running the Communications Department, there's a lot of room for mistakes and with accountability to a BoD and not just T,C, and K, mistakes are sure to be costly. Changes will be sweeping the office starting next year and there's no doubt, my team will be very much involved in the new evangelization of the company and its employees.

On the brighter side, an IPO is supposed to mean fresh capitalization and influx of resources. If the company manages to use these resources well, it's going to be a windfall. And if it's a windfall, I guess it's only fair each and every employee receives his ample share of the pie, 'no?

Good luck!

A Work-Related Rant

I need a break from work.

Work has been so, so stressful and hectic and frantic and apocalyptic the past couple of weeks (which I have, in my self-speak dubbed as Helly Weeks) that I've found myself so fatigued when I get home. Not much quality time with the missus and the baby because I basically am drained by the time I set my foot inside the house and drop my bag.

In the midst of rushing things that need to be ready for a company event in Barcelona, I've been slave-driving my people to work their arses hard to finish deadlines on top of other deadlines. Work has been raining cats and dogs these past two weeks that several of us had to go on overtime on weekends.

The ongoing (and continuing) renovations inside our new-look, old-feel office has not been helpful: you get distracted during the days with the contractors loitering the premises, you get anxiety attacks thinking where you will be seated in the master cheating arrangement; and during the nights, you had to deal with noisy contractors who, on top of the banging and crashing they were doing, were shouting and laughing, not considerate of the plight of others who had to stay for the better part of the night to slave away.

The worse part of the past two weeks for me has been the UK auditors' requirements (which, unfortunately, still persists up to now). Everyone know I'm innumerate (a person who has difficulty dealing with his 1s, 2s and 3s) but when the need arises, I can cope (I'm not just born with the natural affinity with numbers but rather with words). And cope I did, as I was (with no choice whatsoever and no freaking chance to adamantly and violently refuse) assigned to crunch the numbers for several reports that the forthcoming auditors required. Get this -- extract specific figures and data for each of our brands (nine in all) on a DAILY BASIS SINCE 2004!!! WTF!!!

I would've welcomed any assistance but none was offered even by the requesting department. At any rate, later on I would experience that even getting help from the other departments was a risk since you can't trust the accuracy with which they gathered the data. Good thing, one of my staff possessed the ability to understand what was needed and helped me out during the critical times.

Even my wife was unhappy with the situation. As a former accounting supervisor, she opined that the work I was doing was accounting work and asked what the heck was I doing with it? I said I had no choice as this task fell on me after the department that was supposed to be doing this happily passed the task along to someone else and left with no choice, and no say in the matter, I was left with the only option I could do -- work on it. Quitting did come to mind but with the family to feed, bills to pay, and a guitar and new DVD Combo drive to buy, I had to be practical and realistic. Idealism and principles are good stuff but they pale when reality bites.

So, I worked on the auditors' reports which began a coupe of Wednesdays back; came in early Friday until late, late evening; worked a full day on Saturday, came in early Monday and went overnight well into Tuesday. I got a break last Wednesday but last Thursday, an additional report was needed urgently so I went on another overnighter and went home before 6:00AM on Friday (I did go to work Friday after a shut-eye of 4 hours, I think).

Thinking it was over, I joyously came to work last Monday (the thrill punctuated by the chance to enjoy my new company-owned and loaned to me laptop) but the joy was cut short yesterday with the news that another report was needed (fortunately, the bosses were more considerate this time -- instead of daily, they went for monthly and just for this year).

All of this was happening while I was juggling my other duties as manager, writer, art director, liaison officer, marketing coordinator, department spokesman, troubleshooter, opinion and decision maker and sayer, email expert, meeting master etc. etc. (multi-tasking is a must-have if you're keen on becoming an employee in the company I work for).

And I knew I was grumpy, grumbly and totally spaced out -- and I apologize to everyone (especially my team) who felt the brunt of the past two weeks of stress and fatigue. As if adding injury, because of the urgency of task, I was forced to eat my lunch for the better part of last week on my workstation! Ka-awa-awa.

And, jeez, for the better part of each day, I was staring at my monitor while my fingers danced the keyboard (the numpad mostly) because the idiotic Excel wasn't working properly and wasn't converting text from our not-so-friendly database into numbers (I needed to calculate much of the data).

Pressure? Like 50,000 leagues under the sea pressure. The pressure to finish coupled with urgency was ballistic! I was eternally pressured the past couple of weeks thinking that my job was on the line. Not a few people heard me remark that I'm feeling the pressure because I was scared that if I didn't finish, I didn't have to bother going to the office the next day. Better to die than get fired.

Martyr? Nah. Like what I said to the office cleaner when she exclaimed her amazement that I was working overnight:

Cleaner: Wow! Ser, Ang sipag naman talaga, mag-o-overnight. Ang sipag-sipag ni ser.

Poor, Dumbfounded Ram: Hindi po kasipagan ito ... wala lang ako choice.

In consolation ...

I've calculated the total extra hours I've worked this past couple of weeks and with the Saturday work and two overnight sessions, I was amazed to have accumulated about 28 extra hours! That's good enough to offset for 3.5 days which I hope can be allowed to use.

Aarghhh!!! No more numbers, please! No more Helly Weeks, please!

Multiplication Magic

Here's something useful for innumerates like myself which I found on Yahoo! Watch it:



I tried multiplying a 3-digit number by a 2-digit one using the technique taught by the video, but of course, increased the table into a 6-cell thingy and still got a correct result. Will try it with more digit-numbers later.