Talk, talk and more talk

Much has happened since the last post, for Sautern as a whole and for certain individuals too. For starters, our favourite geek has succeeded in getting the much coveted ASEAN scholarship. His achievement is all the more impressive considering he was the only successful applicant among his party of 3 that was selected to attend the interviews. If you are still not satisfied that this is an impressive feat, do note that the 3 of them were the only ones considered 1337 enough among the top scorers of Chung Ling. So do please give Chong Yang a slap on the back or two, just don't overdo it and flatten him, or we will flatten you.

Moving on to the company. We have been involved in some top secret machinations involving repeated calls on the telephone and having Jupes masquerade as a pseudo-telemarketer. Thankfully though, the success rates we got for this does not happen to real life telemarketers, else more telemarketing companies sprout out. Most of you readers will probably be lost at this point, and I don't blame you. Maybe a slight recap is in order.

To counter the consequences of the impending loss of our Chief Programmer as noted above, we have had to make some unconventional choices. We decided to cast our sights to the vast untapped human resource of, drumroll please, college students. Getting the ball rolling has entailed the abovementioned phone calls. That task naturally fell to Jupes, who could probably talk about controversial issues in front of an unfriendly crowd and not get killed, oh wait, he did do that. If worse comes to worse he can still count on his superlative ability to steer the conversation off topic should things get dicey.

Turns out the few white hairs we sprouted were for naught though, as things went surprisingly well. At least we had no one slam the phone on us. Of course the bonus of getting a few appointments to discuss our proposal was appreciated too. The first meeting will be on a Friday afternoon and the next one will be right next morning. At least we still had 2 days to prepare.

2 days however passed really fast, and before we knew it Tommy, me and Jupes were putting on some last minute preparations at Tommy's place. The trip to the college, Disted by the way, took all of 5 minutes, and the interview took... barely longer, 7 minutes in fact. Yes, I timed it. Don't get the impression that we tanked though, as it was quite positive and a good start. We spent the time explaining and clarifying our idea and the lecturer said that she will discuss with her superiors.

The timing for the next meeting was a bit tight though, but what can you do, blame it on Saturday morning sleepiness. Thanks to some astute driving by Tommy we weren't that late, maybe 1 minute at most ( yea, I checked). Anyway, that's where the fun starts. The college (KDU this time) building was waaaay larger and we were required to go up a few floors and turn into a few corridors and... that's the part where we get lost.

At this point we had 2 options, either go wandering around like idiots or head into one of those creepy rooms they have as resource centre/lecture hall/whatever. Having not seen too many horror movies, we chose the creepy room option. We chose to enter a room marked resource centre to try to get some directions. Lucky for us, the person manning it wasn't a deranged axe murderer and so we were soon on our way.

Once we got our bearings straight and finally arrived at the correct room, we were greeted by 2 lecturers and ushered into a nearby classroom. The discussion took longer than the previous one, and we really went through our proposal thoroughly. Our day didn't end with the discussion though. As luck would have it, the classroom was also occupied by a class of IT students cramming for their upcoming exams. The lecturers allowed us to get straight down to business and pitch our idea to them.

Finally, we were actually seeing some concrete progress. After composing ourselves for a few minutes, we just went ahead and just talked, and talked, and talked. Trust me, we really did have to talk a lot, about our proposal, Sautern, heck Tommy even threw in some Dota for good measure. The class wasn't big, maybe about a dozen or so students, but encouragingly they were responsive and hopefully receptive. Throughout the hour or so spent talking with them (not timed this time, but it's a close estimate), we managed to get most of them to leave their contacts. All in all, quite a fruitful morning's work.