It’s around eight in the morning on Wednesday June 3rd at the Grand Hyatt Taipei and my cell phone is ringing. I answer to find TP at the other end of the line in a voice tinged with pain. “I need something stronger than Tylenol, the pain has gotten to be too much,” he intones in that deep bass sounding voice of his that sound like Hans Solo’s sidekick Wookie from Star Wars. With his thick mane of blond gray hair and droopy mustache and matching height he also resembles the hairy hero in bearing and gait. He’s a guy my age but a full-time geek, unlike me who is at best a part-time geek.
TP and I are in Taipei attending the Computex 2009 Conference, “the” PC and consumer show in Asia—CES in size and importance, especially for the 2009 Christmas buying season (whatever gets sold during this week will appear in products this year). We’re here with a bunch of other folks from our California high tech company pitching audio enrichment software. TP is an audio mastering engineer who used to work for the Grateful Dead and other rock legends. How he came to be at the tech company we both worked for is another story on its own. And no, TP, is not into elicit drugs, nor alcohol—not even beer and wine, though he is addicted to Red Bull—I know because our PR firm AccessPR scored every last case the Taipei Costco had in stock along with several jumbo bags of Mars miniature candy bars and a half dozen jumbo jars of nuts. Red Bull was no longer being stocked because of the misguided suspicion that the beverage contained trace amounts of cocaine. It does have lots of caffeine, though.
I tell TP there has to be a pharmacy close by that we can get a prescription filled, “can you call your doc in California and have him fax a prescription to the business office of the Hyatt.” That’s where I am when his call comes to my cell phone bouncing stateside to AT&T Wireless and relayed back to Taipei to the local wireless carrier here—roaming charges Cha-Chinging away. It’s just past five in the evening on the West Coast but TP has his doc cell phone number. As a backup plan I check the front desk halfway across the sprawling lobby of the Grand Hyatt to ask if they have a doctor on duty to check TP out and write a prescription in Chinese. The clerk directs me to the nurse station, where I find that the only way TP is going to get any prescription painkillers is to go to the hospital and have a doctor examine him.
I check back with TP and sure enough he got hold of his doc, who will fax the prescription. I tell him it’s no good we have to go to the hospital. The kind of painkillers TP needs are controlled substances and you’ll get mandatory jail time if you’re caught with them in your possession without a doctor’s prescription. I tell him to suit up and meet me in the lobby as soon as he can. In the meantime, I find CS our PR account exec at AccessPR and ask if she’ll accompany Tom and me to the hospital. “No problem,” which is the response I always get when I make a request from AccessPR. I just ask for something to happen and it does. CS tells the cab driver where we need to go and we’re off.
TP came to his state of pain as a result of something that happen on Saturday May 30th. I met him inside the International Terminal at SFO. I was to be his mule as he brought with him two large Pelican cases filled with audio “stuff”—cables, keyboards, PCs,… Since the airlines have begun limiting the amount of checked baggage per person, I’m checking in one and he’s checking in the other. We’re joined by CS who will carry a third Pelican he’s brought along similarly crammed full of gear. These three Pelicans represent what didn’t make the shipment from San Francisco to Taipei two weeks earlier—something like 12 Pelicans flown by a freight forwarding provider and awaiting us in Taipei. There are two EVA Airways flights leaving SFO within an hour of one another this Saturday night. The one TP and I are on, BR0007 lifts off just after midnight and the one CS is on, BR0017 departs about an hour later.
During the process of unloading the two Pelican cases from his ride to the airport, TP “does something” to his back and he’s not throwing the cases around as nimbly as he usually does. CS and I know he’s having trouble and though it irks him not to be able to manhandle the bulky black boxes, he’s content to let the two of us do the heavy lifting. Once we arrive we check in at the Grand Hyatt Taipei and TP unloads every Pelican we’ve shipped over in his corner suite on the 15th floor. He gets busy putting together over a half dozen demos for our two demo suites at the Grand Hyatt five floors below.
We arrive at the hospital and the three of us exit the cab and I’m so focused on getting TP into the hospital I neglect to pay the cabbie, who is speaking frantically in Chinese to get my attention. CS realizes the problem at the same time I do and I beat her to the punch paying the cabbie, tipping him profusely for the mistake—five bucks U.S. including tip. We enter the hospital and CS learns quickly we need to go to the second floor and sign in at reception. Remarkably, upon arriving, the whole registration process takes place in English with TP providing all the information without needing CS to translate. We wait a half hour and TP is finally taken into an examining room where, we learn later, the doctor is fluent in English and proceeds to lecture TP on the evils of companies exploiting their workers and causing them work related injuries. To be sure, TP’s trouble was work related.
While TP is in the examining room with the doctor, CS and I wait, making small talk about the event, how TP came to be in the state he’s in… I’m surprised by the number of westerners in the waiting room: adults, kids, and older folk. At the reception desk with its four clerks serving the slow but steady stream of arrivals, I hear nearly as much English as Mandarin spoken.
TP appears forty-five minutes later. He’s smiling and relieved to be done with the visit. He’s got his supply of prescription Vicodin-equivalent painkiller and it’s cost him less than sixty bucks. No, this is not the co-pay, it’s the total cost. We take the cab ride back to the hotel and back to the grind.
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