People, please forgive me for i have whined. Sigh… i know i tend to like dwell on certain things a lot… and it’s always me making a mountain out of a molehill and everything always works for the good for those who love Him.
Wanted to share a bit about some stuff that happened at work… On the last work day of 2006, my colleague got an instruction to bind coverage from our Philippine office at 2:30pm. While getting binding orders is always good news… it’s not so good if it’s the last work day of the year, and all the underwriters knocked off at lunchtime.
My colleague was kind… he called the entire world (no joke – he even called underwriters in London to try to bind coverage ‘cos they’re like 8 hours behind us so he could catch them before they finished their work day) to obtain coverage… but it was just impossible to find anyone. Finally, after like 3 hours, he managed to find the country manager for an insurer in Singapore and got the country manager to say yes to providing 50% of the capacity the client required. More calls followed and he got another underwriter to agree to follow the first, and provide the remaining 50% coverage.
Great job… or so we thought as we celebrated with lots of beer at the pub at the basement of my office building. Hey… doesn’t it feel good to know that you managed to pull off a USD100+ million deal on the last day of the year? Talk about ending the year with a bang right?
We were so wrong.
On the 1st work day of 2007, as my colleague sat down to sort out the administrative details of the deal, the 2nd underwriter decides that his syndicate couldn’t do the deal. We couldn’t pin him down either ‘cos there was no black and white agreement (everything was verbal as the underwriter was out of the office and my colleague had spoken to him on his mobile phone) and the underwriter’s exact words were, “we should be able to follow.”
Thus started the mad scramble to find another insurer to fill the gap. This would have been a serious E&O (errors & omissions) case for my department if a loss happened before we found another insurer. After some severe firefighting by my colleague, my boss, and me (ok… i did very little… probably doused the fire with a few pails of water only) during the past week, my colleague managed to get another insurer to come in and we’re good once again.
This whole incident was rather harrowing for my colleague and my boss… but it made me happy to know that my boss wasn’t the kind who would abandon my colleague & make him pay for his mistake. In fact, my boss didn’t even lose his temper. He handled the entire matter in a very objective manner. He said, “You know you made a mistake right? You should have done this this this… but it’s ok. Now we just need to do this this this… to rectify things.” I think that was really really good of him. Not sure about you… but i haven’t seen many bosses who will throw their weight behind their subordinates and work together to pull things through.
Was at Bala Clava (yeah, my favourite haunt of late) last night when the band played this song… just saw the music video on youtube and thought it was fantastic!! I love the part where they start vandalising the advertisement signboard… heh. Hope you like it too!
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