February 27, 2002: Another slow news day. Only a few of us in the office, I was going to say "only a handful", but that would pretty much be the office in its entirety. It's growing tho', and space is becoming a scarce commodity.
Left the office around 6pm: 5:30 is more usual but Aryuwath was having some trouble with his email, I may have caused this (or may not — unclear to me) but in any case I want to help make it right. At the same time, he's got work to do having been driving around a US guy looking at Real Estate for potential office locations. I guess the visits were successful, but they still need a "go-ahead" from HQ.
The way I get home most evenings, is to begin walking north (that would be parallel to the right edge of that map, and up), and catch a bus that is willing to go "all" the way across town (it's a couple of miles) for a fair price. Trouble is, their idea of fair (see "rich farang") and mine, may be "a couple of miles" apart.
I've found that it pays to find a bus/taxi (it's somewhere in between) that's empty. The drivers cruising around burning baht, but he's not making any money unless he's bringing someone somewhere. If the bus is full, people are all going wherever — it'll be an uphill struggle. A new twist: it turns out there are little red songteows as well as the regular sized. The drivers of the littler ones seem generally more cooperative than the full-sizers. Maybe it's the relative cost/km of their fuel.
If you read about the a capella concert I attended on the weekend, I mentioned that I'd met a teacher there. Well, what do you suppose the odds are, of that person, and no other person (i.e. it was just the two of us) — getting on my bus? I mean, this isn't exactly a one horse town! She got on, gave a slightly bewildered (or maybe just bemused) look and said "Scott, right?". We talked some more about working in Thailand, in particular as a Teacher. Among other things she said that schools are very strict (too strict, to her taste) about every aspect of the Student — attendance, proper uniform, length of hair. She said that you can pretty much estimate what year a student is, by the permissible length of his (or her) hair. Seniors are given a little more slack.
I told this story to Kathy, and she reminded me that we'd encountered friends of her family just so in Bangkok. A few minutes either way, a few steps in a different direction, and we'd have missed each encounter completely. And it's not just these two freak encounters: I've meet ex-colleagues in far reaching airports of the world, encountered relatives in my favorite San Francisco when neither I nor they knew one another were anywhere near.
I don't believe in fate, I'm not superstitious, not religious. But some times this stuff just spooks me out.
