Who Approved This Purchase?

My solo mission here at the homestead, waking up alone, heading to bed along has now come to an abrupt embankment.  My daughter came home last night.  She and her boyfriend were here for dinner and I made a big veggie feast for them complete with linguini and lentil meatballs.  I’m just off the phone and my stepson and his wife will join us here.  I’ll cook that beef I had last night that I spared the vegans of, the night before.

It wasn’t always clear it would play out this way.  My stepson has a roof top bar he insists we check out.  On the roof of the mall, above Wang Jing there is a bar, he suggests that has a dinosaur on display.  It is, apparently a large aquatic dinosaur that is quite worth seeing.  But I don’t have it in me tonight and fortunately he and his wife are willing to come join my daughter and I here.

Ten years or so, I worked at a company that had an embedded strategy and it meant I had to regularly go to Taiwan.  I miss Taiwan.  I miss South Korea too.  I don’t have much reason to go to either place much these days.  And on one of those trips to Hsinchu, down south west of Taipei, we’d visited one of the many fabless semiconductor companies there, Elan.  In the lobby of the Elan headquarters, if memory serves, there was ten years ago a remarkable brontosaurus fossil in the lobby.  There above the receptionist was the entire skeleton of an enormous Mesozoic beast. 

Memory may not serve.  I’ve just searched on line expecting to be brought back to the familiar lobby beast and either they’ve expunged all traces of the herbivore or I have the company name confused.  No matter, there was once a dinosaur in Hsinchu and it begged the question who approved this purchase?  If they were sensitive to cost control on things like espresso makers and pressurized air hand dryers, who signed off on the brontosaurus?  Who had signing authority for the complete fossil?   I suspect I’ll relate that story when I finally get a chance to head to this roof top bar with the watery giant, there on view for the drinkers.

Thursday, 07/25/19