Photo shoot

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Makeup being done by a Bangkok hair and makeup studio.

The company is paying for all these so that we can have decent headshots for all the promotional materials that we will be having from hereon (i.e. conference brochures and backdrops). As I am part of the “ambassador” program (i.e. the face of the company especially in conferences), they are investing on the image of its ambassadors. So no more selfies for the headshots in our conference promo materials hahahaha!

My hair being fussed over.
The photographer told me to look angry. LOL.
My older sister told me I look like our mom. I believe this is the worst shot; the guy at the computer was flipping photos at warp speed and I didn’t see the other shots.

Right after the shoot, I rushed to the Sathon business district for a meeting. I was 10 mins late because my Grab was late and it took the car forever to reach my hotel. Pffffft. Good thing the guy was nice.

Leaving Sukhumvit. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I was so stressed out; it was bumper-to-bumper. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The office looked like the inside of a space ship. LOL. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I needed to finish an edit so I decided to have lunch in the same building.

This is the only nice thing about my lunch today. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It’s supposed to be an omurice-like dish but it fell short of my expectation given that this was not cheap. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Went immediately back to my hotel because I was so sleepy and I needed to wait for another time-sensitive story I must edit. I was already snoring before that story arrived in my inbox.

I was so pissed yesterday and I had to go out with colleagues to erase the bad taste that lingered.

I was supposed to interview a candidate for the Bangkok freelancer position but at the last minute my bosses told me I CANNOT HIRE A FREELANCER, even on a per-article basis, because I had no business case. Like Thailand is not an important market—that’s what they’re saying. I do not believe that and I have data to back me up. The only reason why they say there is no business case is because 1) subscribers already gave up on our Thailand coverage because we had crappy reporters in the past; 2) we haven’t had any reporter here for three years; 3) it doesn’t help that this market is very secretive and opaque and the military government compounded to it.

I didn’t have the temerity to cancel the appointment with the candidate. So I still met her but had to tell her that people in London do not understand that Singapore is not representative of the whole Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia is not Singapore. They think that you can cover everything in Singapore. That’s what my sources had been telling me the past two days—you cannot do business here in Thailand sitting in your office in Singapore. You have to be on the ground because everything in this market is hush-hush.

I like the candidate and told her that as much I want to keep her to myself, I must not waste a talent like her so I will be sharing her CV to my friends in competing news wires as they still have positions to fill in Southeast Asia.

I ranted to a fellow editor this afternoon about the narrow-mindedness of those sitting in London.

That’s how they view Asia. They think Asia is China + others. I wanted to scream at them and tell them that the world does not speak English.

Ok ok, I should let go of things I cannot control…

But at least I could give them a piece of my mind. If I get fired, so be it.