Hey, buddy, can ya spare me a dime?

When I arrived at Sony in 1997, I hit the deck with both feet running and was soon intimately integrated into the sprouting organization. Hiring was fast and furious as we went from a largely outsourced business model to bringing everything in house. It was a fun time to watch the organization grow. It was boom time in Silicon Valley, and everyone seemed to be enjoying their work, and their station in life......

I started out leading a small team of engineers from Japan who were on 2 year assignments in Silicon Valley. They were very dedicated and good software engineers. Within a short time I was managing a growing department with four sections, although my favorite section was software planning. In this role, I travelled to Japan frequently to dialogue with my counterparts in Tokyo. I usually brought one person with me, and usually this was an energetic and talented Ph.D. in computer science. We would hold detailed technical meetings with various groups in Sony's Shinagawa offices, and afterwards get on the subway system and go out to dinner. Note to self: things to do in Tokyo when you're not dead: see the sights and nightlife of Tokyo's various districts like Roppongi, Shinjuku, and Ginza; see the ancient temples at Asakusa; see the latest in gadgetry and technology at Akihabara.....

Sometimes it was formal business dinners, Japanese-style, and other times it was less formal and more casual. I remember this one time in the fall, when the Ph.D. and I arranged to take a bus tour of the city of Edo (Tokyo's ancient name) ending up with a dinner and watching a couple of hours of Kabuki theater. That was the best hundred bucks I ever spent (too bad I couldn't expense it!). I learned alot about Tokyo and its different districts, its rich cultural history, and I got to see many parts of the city I hadn't yet ventured into. It was an awesome cultural learning experience.

Another time, I had sent several of my software engineers to Tokyo to work on a joint collaborative project with our colleagues from Sony Europe and Sony Japan. I had come over for a few days of high-level meetings about the project, and wanted to let my staff know they were appreciated and their extended stay away from their families in California did not go unnoticed. So I invited them to go to dinner in the Ginza district, to one of those famed steakhouses..... Well, we were walking around, taking in the sites, window-shopping,and trying to choose the best place to go to. It was getting late, and many of the places were already getting crowded. So we ended up at this smallish, hole-in-the-wall kind of place and feasted on Kobe beef steaks with all the trimmings.... Just a few sakes and Kirin beers were imbibed that night.....

A couple of hours later, when it was time to pay the bill, I confidently whipped out my corporate credit card to settle accounts. Imagine my horror when the waiter indicated the restaurant didn't accept credit cards. Huh? No credit cards? How can that be? This was the turn of the century in an advanced city in a technologically astute country, how could a restaurant possibly not accept credit cards? My mind racing, I tried to think of alternatives short of trying to communicate between my broken non-existent Japanese language skills and the waiter's less-than-perfect English language skills. And of course the sake and the Kirin beer weren't helping matters, either. Luckily, one of my engineers had gone to the currency exchange that day, and still had alot of cash in yen to pay the bill......

Wow, close call. I honestly don't know what we would have done if he didn't have this cash hoarde. What were we going to do, walk the streets of the prim-and-proper Ginza district panhandling like gangsta wannabe's? Can you imagine several foreigners there with their hands out, plaintively braying to passers-by "Hey, buddy, can ya spare me a dime?" I don't even know how to say that in Japanese....... That night as I recounted the story to my long-suffering wife (see Me'n'the Missus posting) on the phone back in California, she couldn't believe it happened. She couldn't believe I was stupid enough not to double-verify that the restaurant accepted credit cards beforehand, nor could she believe how we escaped a painful panhandling experience in a foreign land. But the stars were smiling on us that night, and all was well with the world....