Hi,
So today I pick up the gauntlet, can I create a sensible blogpost while my driver takes me to the office on Thursday morning. You should know that Thursday, traffic is not that bad, relatively speaking.
Yesterday a former colleague of mine passed away, for privacy reasons I call him Alex. Alex was an older man, but as I learned yesterday, not that old yet. In his fifties. Alex was suffering from many things, he was diabetic and had had a kidney transplant. When you would be in a meeting with him he would have a box with several pills in them. Sometimes he would be walking around with bandages on his feet, bleeding. Without being disrespectful, many of House's patients have the same symptoms.
But Alex was above all a very nice man who invited me on my first day in the office here in Cairo for lunch. On that first day Alex asked me if I wanted to come for lunch on Thursday, I accepted. And Thursday noon sharp I was ready. Waiting for him I sat at my desk but he didn't show up. I continued working because maybe we would have lunch at 12:30, but no Alex until 2 o'clock. He hadn't forgotten about our lunch appointment, but he hadonly a work related question and wandered off again. So I walked over to him and asked him about lunch. Of course we would have lunch, no he
hadn't forgotten about it. He would stop by my desk when we would go for lunch.
As the day went on, 2 PM became 3 PM, which became 4 PM and at 4:30 Alex stopped by and told me to wrap up things as we were going for lunch.
Ahhh, his English wasn't that good, so he said 'lunch' but meant 'diner'. No problem, early diner was perfect as I hadn't had lunch. We drove through Cairo and went to this very nice restaurant and no, I
don't recall the name of the restaurant. After enjoying the appetizers and some basic conversation his daughter showed up and joined us. Contrary to her dad, her English was excellent with a familiar
American accent. I explained the whole 'lunch vs diner' mixup and she started to laugh. Turned out that Egyptians have lunch around supper time and diner late at night. Don't you just love cultural
differences.
One other story I want to share with you about Alex is about the fact that he had his own unique way of telling something. Or rather he had a very unique way of articulation.
One day we were in a meeting about optimizing our End of Day processing, which is a problem in any bank. Alex had thought of a solution and was explaining. Concentrated I was listening to him.
Although he thought he was speaking English, it was mainly Arabic with some English words interspersed. Once he was finished he looked up at me and my other colleagues started laughing. Alex wanted to know what I thought about his ideas and even they hadn't understood what he'd
said. But the thing was that Alex knew what he was talking about, so his story was comprehensive and very coherent. His sketching was very much to the point albeit not a Rembrant, more like Picasso. The whole thing with talking with Alex' was to listen to what he had to tell and
not what he was saying, which is a huge difference. So when I summarized to him what he had been explaining, the colleagues were stunned that I spoke Alexian. But what I want you to take fromm this is that Alex was always trying to improve his systems and was willing to share his thoughts on this.
All the strength to his family and those he loved and those that still love him.
No, I wasn't able to finish this post while in transit. When I started this post I didn't know what it was going to be about. Once I started typing, I realized that finishing the post when it was finished was
more important then let traffic decide when I was done.
Iwan
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