My two co-workers and I had lunch yesterday with our former head of APAC, the person who recruited me here 10 years ago. When she was asking about how is it with the new owner/parent company, all of our reactions were like this 😑.

Then we brought her to the new office and she spoke with some of the people who had worked with her and flew to HK for this week. The chats with them lasted for 1.5 hrs. After that, she was like, “none of the people I spoke with was happy.”

“What happened?! We were so happy in Bangkok,” she lamented, pertaining to the bureau chief meeting we had in 2019.

Shit happens all the time post-merger and acquisition.

Ironic.

She was happy where she is right now. After her short stint at a global PR firm (PR is not for everybody, she said), she decided to take up master in finance studies full-time. She said learning again is so exciting. Having more time for hobbies “is beautiful” and she is now pursuing baking and bird-watching. Now that the pool is open in their building, she now has the time to swim with her kids.

“I’ve got my life back,” she gushed.

I felt a twinge of envy. It’s nice to have somebody else in the family as the breadwinner. It’s nice to be able to get out of the rat race. I want to have a life outside this mess of a job.

She said she heard that the our owner is under investigation by xxx government because it was already highly leveraged when it was doing its shopping spree—and we were one of those buys. It kept on borrowing still, then slashed and burned and left the acquisitions down to the barebones. We were hardly recognizable from the companies we once were.

Now it is shopping again and kept borrowing…which may have prompted shareholders or creditors (or whoever) to alert regulators.

Stories like that seldom end well. How to deleverage? You do fire sales and the people who are directly under this chaos get the shorter end of the stick in these circumstances.

My bosses are all under pressure from above, which redounded to me. This is all too much.

I want my life back, too.

I tried fixing it but…I was able to tone down the blueness of the clouds since I had in my kit a tube of Holbein gouache but the foreground couldn’t be made less bright because I only had watercolors with me. Watercolors could not subdue gouache so I would have to wait until I come home.

I don’t want to work today but I have a pending story still in editing hell. I need to have this published today.