Speed Racer and Giant Robot Come In Handy

I am assigned to two different programs. The first is for ONO, the largest cable TV company in Spain. They are currently buying two products from us and want to buy two more. I am assigned to these two new products. The program manager is a guy I like and he likes me so he was very very happy I joined him to get this stuff done. I've done such a good job so far he wants me to take over the other two products, too. These two are problematic because a year or so ago a decision was made to let our Taiwan-based manufacturing group do these designs as well (design work and manufacturing work are two different things). They've dropped the ball on it big time and now they want me to straighten everything out.

So, that program has a customer in Spain and a development and manufacturing team in Taiwan. I have morning conference calls with Spain and evening conference calls with Taiwan.

The other program I am assigned to is for KDDI, a very large telecommunications company in Japan. This program is for a product that allows you to watch TV like a cable TV box and also transfer videos and music from the box to your phone (watching videos on your phone is a big thing in Japan, something we in the US are way behind on). This is a complicated program because there are many companies involved; we here in San Diego are specifying the requirements and doing hardware design, there is a Motorola division in Stockholm, Sweden and St Petersburg, Russia involved in some software and other software companies in Japan also involved. This program has visibility at the highest level in Motorola, too, so that adds to the pressure.

I expect to be fully occupied through January with a few trips to Sweden and Spain through the first or second quarter of '07.

I've been in all day meetings with the development team on Wednesday and now today and tomorrow with the customer and the development team. Last night I took the Swedes (software stack developers and a recent acquisition of ours) to Il Fornaio in Del Mar last night to get to know them and to let them know that they aren't working with a typical clueless American and we got along great. We talked about guitars at one point and photography and other stuff. A successful evening and I think I will bring in to the meeting tomorrow my Rickenbacker bass to show (off to) them.

Tonight I initially begged off on going out with everybody as I was tired and am trying to kick my chest cold once and for all (I promise I will be 100% next week) but later I was specifically requested that to go since the key upper managers were not available. I was the ONLY Mot San Diego guy there. Eventually someone with some financial fire power did appear and he picked up the tab. I was not looking forward to having to pay for 20 guys at Roy's (very nice Asian Fusion place in UTC).

I sat with some of the Japanese guys and the translator. At one point one of the guys says to me, "You must know about Japanese animation." I replied that I was aware of anime (the style of Japanese animation/cartoons with schoolgirl superheroes with big eyes and long legs) and other sorts of these types of things but I had never watched any of it. I started thinking about my childhood in LA and so I decided to try something. I said, "But, I remember as a kid two cartoons I liked. One was 'Kimba the White Lion' and the other was 'Speed Racer.'" We had been speaking in English so I asked the translator to help me out. Kimba didn't ring any bells and I knew that it wasn't called "Speed Racer" in Japan but I described the cartoon and the guy lit up and said, "Mach Go Go Go!" "Yes!!!" I replied remembering what the Jap name was since he'd said it. They were VERY impressed.

Then I said, "I remember one more..."
"OK..."

"Giant"
"Robot"

and all three of them went through the roof! "Giant Robotu!" So they start talking about Giant Robot. "The very last Giant Robot episode was verrrrrry sad." said one of them. "Oh, you MUST come to JAPAN!!!" the VP said.

So we bonded, me the SoCal native USian and these three Japanese guys from Tokyo because I, as a kid growing up in near-inner city LA had been privileged enough to be able to watch Speed Racer and Giant Robot as a kid 35 years ago. How many times has something I did innocuously or weirdly or whatever because I was a nerd or a bookworm or whatever I was back then as an awkward 10 year old kid come back to pay off in my life, even in a small way?

I drove home tonight wondering the what and why of these strange coincidences in my life and asking myself how many more times will I be able to claim a bond with a stranger because of them.