A Thai Business Trip

CONTENT

LOWEST LEVEL

A THAI BUSINESS TRIP

I landed at Don Muang airport, Bangkok at around 11:00am Thai time, having taken off from Singapore some two hours earlier at 8:00am. The sun was shining and golfers waited for our aircraft to pass, before they walked across the tarmac taxiway to play the next hole. The golf course, occupies the grassy reservation between the two parallel runways.

As we approached the international terminal building, I casually wondered if anyone had tested the effects of throwing a golf ball into an idling jet engine. At very best I imagined it would not produce a very good result. Birds are known to be bad for jet engines and they are softer than golf balls.

The immigration queue was only five people deep, so it was not long before I had exited customs and was surrounded by people trying to persuade me to use their over priced taxi and limousine services.

They are quite aggressive, because they know that if they don’t hook you before you reach the nearby exit doors, you will see the long line of much cheaper metered taxis waiting for you outside.

Although this was my first business visit, it was my second trip to Thailand, so I was not fooled by the limo touts and was soon sitting on the back seat of a yellow and green Toyota taxi, which it appeared had seen better days. The seats seemed to be covered in a fine film of something sticky, reminiscent of grease and the air-conditioning had expired. The initial couple of miles of near empty road, fooled me into thinking I would soon be at my hotel. It was not long before reality caught up with me and I found myself sweating in more typical Bangkok traffic conditions.

If I had been congratulating myself on already having saved my employer 200 baht in taxi fares, it was self-praise that was short lived. I checked my draft itinerary and made the phone calls to confirm my meetings, which had already been agreed to in principle.

I checked into my hotel and immediately booked a hotel car for the afternoon to be ready to depart at 1:30pm. That just gave me just enough time to unpack my suitcase, take a shower and put on some clean clothes. I had brought my travel iron with me, so was able to remove the minor creases, which my fresh shirt had acquired during it’s journey in my suitcase.

In Asia a travel iron is essential. Many hotels have a very efficient housekeeping service, who will turn a shirt around in a few minutes. In others, someone collects your shirt, nods in agreement when you stress that you need it back urgently, and then they disappear for several hours. Calls to housekeeping and the front desk, result in you receiving regular feedback into the status of the investigation, regarding the whereabouts of your missing shirt. However they seldom produce the shirt itself, in any reasonable timescale.

The hotel had laid on a nice white Mercedes limousine, and happily the air-conditioning was working perfectly. I told my driver to take me to Pacific Place, 140 Sukhumvit Road.

It turned out the driver couldn’t understand what I was saying, but when I showed him a letter-head with the address on it, he nodded and we were on our way. My meeting was scheduled to start at 2:00pm and I arrived with several minutes to spare.

I informed the driver that I expected to be back in about an hour and asked him to wait for me.

This first meeting was with a distributor, so was fairly relaxed. I wasn’t trying to sell him anything and he wasn’t likely to complain about our products. Our discussions took us through his marketing plan, targets and sales pipeline. Everything seemed to be satisfactory and I left at just after 3:00pm.

My next meeting, which was to be with an oil company who were a customer, was not due until 3:30pm and I was in no particular hurry. I’d noticed that although this was the first time I had met with them, their offices were nearby. In fact that was why I had decided to cross these two tasks off my list on the first afternoon.

My driver was waiting for me as instructed. I showed him another letter-head, he nodded and we set off.

After we had been driving for 15 minutes, I was rather surprised that we had not arrived at our destination. I checked the letter-head again. Just as I had thought, while the first meeting was at 140 Sukhumvit Road, the second one was at 124 Sukhumvit Road, surely 15 minutes was ample time to get from one to the other.

I noticed that interestingly the Thais didn’t seem to break up addresses into As, Bs and Cs as is sometimes done in the West, but apparently into halves and I wondered if they also had quarters. I hadn’t noticed this before because of the small font, but the address was more precisely 124½ Sukhumvit Road.

Since I really hate to be late for meetings, and even though I knew that in many parts of South East Asia, being late was the norm rather than the exception, I decided to call my customer to inform them and apologise. I spoke to a secretary and conservatively estimated that I would be no more than another 15 minutes before arriving.

When that 15 minutes had passed and we seemed to have already driven past several hundred buildings, rather than the dozen or so I had expected, I decided it was time to seek expert opinion.

In my best pigeon English, I asked the driver when he expected to arrive. I was a bit taken aback when he replied ‘We go long way, maybe five o’clock’.

Further questioning and inspection revealed that the letter-head, didn’t just say ‘124½ Sukhumvit Road’, but actually said ‘Km. 124½ Sukhumvit Road’. Coming from a country that measures distances in miles, I had simply failed to realise the significance of the preceding ‘Km.’.

I made another phone call. The gentleman I was meeting a Mr. Chaiwat, seemed to be totally unphased that I expected to arrive two hours late. In the end I was actually two and a half hours late.

Despite that, we had a productive and friendly meeting, followed by some sea-food and Singha beers in an open air restaurant at a nearby coastal fishing village.

It was well past midnight, when I eventually fell into bed. Before passing into dream land, I just had enough time to reflect on the graciousness of the Thai people.

You are always left wondering what is going on behind that smiling face, because when you read the papers or watch the news, you realize they are as capable of revenge, violence and murder as anyone else. But to a Thai any open display of temper or anger is contemptible.

Admittedly being late for a meeting, even very late, doesn’t warrant much in the way of retribution.

Having said that, there have been a number of occasions since this story took place, when I have wished that my compatriots had been as gracious as Mr. Chaiwat was to me, when a visiting Asian has miss judged the traffic situation.