Old friends

This morning I woke up really early (5 am) in Doha, Qatar and had a good chat with a chirpy 10-year old over breakfast. C was about to make a 2-hour trip to school - something she does daily - and yet was in amazingly high spirits. Just last night, or rather this morning, I was chatting with her dad, my good old friend J from SQ days and we reminisced about bosses of 25 years ago (they were then as old as we are now) who inspired us. I recounted a test my then SVP held out: drink with me all night and show up at work before me in the morning and that's the measure of your worth. 

Well, J and I caught (first time after more than a dozen years) after staying up late and we both got to our 7am starts on time: he to work, and me for my flight back to Singapore. He's still in the airline industry like many of our TSM (trainee station manager) start group who are in on way or another still in the travel / tourism industry. Our grounding as management in the best airlines in the world meant we were sought after, everywhere. J is with Qatar Airways, which I am now flying on, and by golly it's service, its planes (brand new Boeing 787 Dreamliner), its inflight entertainment, its duty free offering can all rival SQ's. 

We were lamenting how a wildly successful formula, lack of diversity, management who hasn't tasted failure has led to groupthink and myopically so. 

So, it remained for us old boys to stay up late and get up early. I was there in SQ for only 6 years, J for nearly twice that time, some of our group left earlier, some later but whenever we meet we can just pick up from where we left off and continue. We would drive fast in his car (an AMG 6.3 Merc), talk of the universe and religion, bitch about racial/affirmative action policies and the leadership (or lack thereof) in our homeland, drink good scotch and of course listen to music on his spectacularly well put together high end hifi system (Vienna speakers, here I come).

There's something about friendships made when young. Friends from schooldays, first job: when one was innocent. Connections made then have a certain purity about them. Not that colleagues now can't be friends but sometimes our responsibilities, especially the drive to deliver results and to get the best of our teams, can get in the way. I am blessed that, for the most part, I've been able to keep such company of colleagues who are firm friends in the two companies I subsequently joined.

I spoke about J's daughter earlier, and of my own kids in my last post, and I look at the friends they have now and I know they too have made good friends who will become old friends with whom they can connect and connect and connect, anytime anywhere.