The Cheung Kong Center, where our office is located, is beautiful. Brand new, the building would make any skyscrapper in New York City jealous. Through the glass walls, there is a spetacular view of the skyline of skyscrappers in front of the beautiful mountains of Kowloon. In a clear day like today, you can even see Mainland China. The sitting arrangement is quite similar to the other regional offices (Houston and Calgary) I have visited, where the analysts - VPs sit on a trading floor style and the MDs sit in offices surrounding the floor. The office is fancy and beautifully designed. The equipment inside is pretty much the same as New York - 2 computer screens, the exact same Cisco IP Phone. It even has the same white boards for the MDs.
Many things, however, are much more difficult here in the Hong Kong office. For example, to purcahse items at the Pacific Coffee Shop on the floor, I must use a coupon booklet with monopoly looking money to purchase the food. They don't accept cash. It's good that these booklets are sold at a discount: $100 for $125 worth of fake money. However, it seems very unnecessary and gimmicky. Second, to get a building ID is a fairly difficult problem. In New York, we just went to the securities office, took a picture, and they printed you an ID. Here in Hong Kong, it seems to take weeks to get an ID ready. It's just a magnetic card that allows you access to the doors. My aparment building in NYC could produce it faster than Hong Kong.
The entire first day seems very disorganized in general. Nothing about the transfer seem to have gone through smoothly. It's actually very frustrating. My computer is still based in New York, making it extremely slow here in Hong Kong because of the server issues. There was issues transferring my account so I have yet to receive a Hong Kong blackberry or number. A whole host of other issues also are presented with the transfer. I wished there was better organization regarding the transfer. From the US til now, it's all been one of the most frustrating part - the utter beauracracy and lack of efficiencies regarding the transfer.
Glad to hear the building is modern and beautiful! It seems like that's the problem in a lot of Asia.. it's like on the outside, they've caught up to the US/Western places, but so much of the infrastructure is all messed up!
ReplyDeleteI started in my new group today too! Even though I only moved floors, don't worry I still had IT issues... none of my programs got installed and blah blah.. the usual.
Hope the rest of your weeks goes better!! =) excited for you!