A Little Fun with Snapchat (7-12)

This news is a bit old now, but I was lucky enough to be asked to run a story on the only official IBM Snapchat account. This would be the first time that anyone on the CSC has had access, so I was hoping to make it a great first impression for the program. But after my morning run on the boardwalk, when I tried logging in to the IBM account it said verifying device.. verifying device.. verifying device… and just wouldn’t log in. A little bing-ing (since Google requires a VPN here), and I found that it looked like this was a problem that my device wasn’t approved to access the account. So I sent an urgent email off to the Social Media Managers asking to approve me, and held my breath.

Throughout breakfast and the drive over and I still couldn’t get it. When we arrived at Han Te, they were still busy putting together a presentation for us about their issues, so we had a little down time which ended up working out well. Eventually Maria let me try logging in on her phone, which worked without any issues. So I did the unthinkable (with a terrible internet connection and the Google Play store blocked) and uninstalled the app. About an hour later when it reinstalled, I finally got it and started snapping away.

The rest of the morning flew by when we got into the details of the presentation. Han Te broke down their issues into 5 major categories and highlighted those that were the most important. Again wanting to be good hosts, we were taken to get some Western food at Pizza Hut. But a Pizza Hut in China is not like one that I’ve ever seen before. The pizza toppings definitely had some interesting ingredients, and they even served steaks! While we were waiting for our food Carosa pulled out a seaweed snack which was surprisingly good. It had a bit of sweetness to it that really balanced out the salty flavor.

We ordered a supreme and a seafood pizza which had some prawns and calamari on it as well. They both had the cheese stuffed crust which was delicious as well. After unsuccessfully trying to pay for lunch, we rode the bus back to the office. It would be tough without being with a local, but as it was, it was pretty fun and gave what I thought was some good material for the snaps.

We spent most of the afternoon sorting through all the problems, to make sure we had a good understanding of what we needed to work on the next three weeks. When we wrapped up for the day and got back to the hotel, I got a chance to check up with Korey and the kids back home for a bit, including video which was great! I definitely miss being there and being around them. Carlyn was super cute running around with the phone and waving. When Crosby took off with it, he wanted to see everything in my hotel room. Having the video chat and actually being able to use it has been a life saver.

I did have one other scare though back in Matthias’s room. I copied some files off of my phone, but when I put the case back on it was backwards.. and initiated a factory reset. By some miracle I managed to think quickly enough to rip the battery out of the phone before it started. Then after a few tries I figured out the right combination to get it to stop trying to reset it, but it was nearly a disaster. I can’t imagine even trying to get a subset of my applications reinstalled here. Luckily it was a non-issue.

Tonight was also our first weekly evening debrief with the rest of the teams. We each got to share a bit about how our teams were progressing and Brandon brought in food – pizza. So needless to say, I was pizza’d out by the end of the evening. Matthias had brought a couple beers for the two of us to go with it, but didn’t have an opener, but finally I was able to get it with some ingenuity and an opening in the brace of one of the tables.

When we wrapped up the meeting, Suanne, Payel, Maria, and I all went out for a nice walk near the beach. The place definitely comes alive at night! More on that later…