No. 55: Japanese Karaoke

Yesterday was a long day. Following my night with the East Gipps folk I was up at 530am so I could be back in Melbourne for a breakfast meeting. I then had  back to back meetings all day. Purely by chance, the latest Australian TAG meeting was also being held in Melbourne so at 5pm, having completed my GWD meetings, I headed to the Melbourne Docklands to join the Isle team and the few TAG members who had stayed on for drinks.

It had been a good TAG meeting, with some great presentations and excellent debate. We had three guests (Yang Villa, Reginald Bautista and Dora ‘The Explora’ Gamboa) visiting from Maynilad Water/MetroPac in Manila. They were attending to see how TAG works, prior to the launch of Isle’s newest TAG forum in the Philippines in Feb 15. This being my first meeting with Maynilad Water we decided to go out to dinner together. A local Japanese Karaoke restaurant was booked, the evening’s entertainment was planned…

What a great night. Perhaps it was the Sake, or perhaps it was the great food, but I think it was mostly due to the company. We talked about everything and nothing. Interview techniques, the history of Isle, the history of Maynilad. Dora corrected my miss-pronunciation. ‘It is MYnilad’ she said. Unable to resist, I responded with the cheeky: ‘YOURnilad!’. At which Yang, quick as a fox, said ‘No Piers… OURnilad’. Oh how we laughed.

Discussions rapidly moved on to my Global Water Development role (someone, and I honestly can’t recall who, compared the relationship between Investment Bankers and their investee companies to that of prostitutes and pimps; this is clearly wrong and unfair….although I can’t quite work out who should be most offended - the pimps and prostitutes or the bankers?!). Suffice to say that, somewhat to my surprise, a great opportunity for GWD arose out of our discussions. We were having such fun around the table that we never got to the Karaoke room. Probably a good thing.

As I fell into bed, slightly worried about how I was going to wake in time for my red-eye flight to Adelaide in the morning, I realised my sides ached from laughing so much. It had been a good evening. Philippine TAG is going to be so much fun.