SuperGlue’s Random Thoughts

Visiting the blog site after a long time. Trying wordpress from my iPhone.

Sorry for being away for so long.. I have had a lot of things going on which required my full attention and I had to step away from a few off-work activities such as writing & maintaining this blog site  for a while. Little by little I am working my way back to blogging again. No matter what happens this site will not go away … it just may take longer to get new info posted.

This afternoon I was dropping Stephanie to her ballet lessons at JESS. While I was parking the car, at a distance I  noticed a some what familiar face just out side the JESS. It didn't take long for me to recognize that he was one of the  Presidents of the company and a very powerful top notch! So I told Stephanie who he was and her immediate response was "dad, why don't you say hi to him …" So, after getting off from the car and while passing by him, I did, as Stephanie said. I introduced my self  and Stephanie too and told him that I was dropping Stephanie for her ballet classes. He in turn said, that he was there to pick his son up from football. He had a pleasant smile and talked to me nicely. I thought, that was a  pleasant and nice casual meet. Call me crazy - but I was delighted :-)

After about 15+ years of working in the Emirates Catering offices at Emirates Operations Center, 3rd floor, we are now packing up to move to the new state of the art Emirates Group Headquarters (EGHQ) building on the Airport Road, Dubai. The last day at the old office will be tomorrow and we will be starting at the new open office environment on the 3rd floor of the new EGHQ from Sunday, April 27th, 2008. I know, like my self for many of us at Catering, it would be a big change, particularly because most of us in the Department started our career with Emirates at Emirates Operations Center offices and also more importantly, in our present offices, we are next door to our service partners - Emirates Flight Catering Company, naturally, which made our jobs much  practical in day to day catering operations. However, like everything in life, the change is invariable and looking at positively, moving the new offices would give us greater opportunities to be able to work much more closely with our other partner departments within the company, which would be nice :-)

Well… it was certainly better than yesterday! Don't know why, into the mid day, Bob passed by the office saying, ' forget about yesterday, leave everything behind and be happy & smile for today…" I have no idea, why he said all that as I guess he had no clue what was going in my mind about yesterday anyway!

I think, together with both Glen & Shanaka - my wonderful colleagues, we came up with a 'plan' in an effort to do something about suddenly cropped up meal trolley problem :-) Well., guys, I guess we will have to put 'the plan' into action fast ! OK, now the bit, I have to do my self…. I got an appointment slot with Kev for tomorrow to go see him to make a rather strange request…. again something to do with meal trolleys. Then I also sent a couple of emails to a couple of senior industry colleagues at Flight Kitchens we cater asking for their personal attention to look into any excess meal trolleys lying around in their respective Kitchens. Let's see how all these will go….

Just about less than an hour to take off of the Johansberg flight I had a call from Kev and he started saying, 'mission impossible..' he wanted me to fix 2 CHMLs for a couple of kids accompanying parents on the flight as they were not pre-booked due to tickets were purchased late to rush for an family emergency. Well, I had to get on with his request to 'make it happen' - made a couple of quick phone calls to the Chefs @ the Kitchen and Ops guys, including Darrell who was on the ramp and we managed to deliver 2 CHMLs to the aircraft without any delays and 'the Mission was succeeded'

I didn't write about this in my post yesterday; because I was really p….d off with my friend(s) @ IT. Those who know me and really know me, know how much love and passion I have for this IT stuff is (ofcourse among other things!) But when I don't see same kind of interest from them in getting on with the stuff we had discussed and planned, not keeping up to schedules, and stuff like that,I can't stand for that ; so I was not at all a happy person with IT y'day and had avoided any communication with 'em since last evening. However, I feel good that I picked the phone this afternoon and talked to them and explain how could we do things even better with much understanding and clarifying any doubts and that was brilliant :-)

The new Flight Kitchen dedicated just for Emirates is now in full operation here in Dubai and has been since last week. Its a monster kitchen and supposedly the world's largest Flight Kitchen built to capacity of 115,000 meals a day! The migration of Emirates operations from the old kitchen to the new kitchen was a mammoth task, although it was carried out in about 8 phase approach. Kudos to all those involved ! Like everything else, understandably , it would take at least a couple of months to get all operations smoothen up in the new kitchen and I guess, we may have to bear up with on and off minor hiccups and try & support them in any way we possibly can.

This afternoon we had our weekly meeting with EKFC in the Conference Room @ the new kitchen (EKFC1) and overall, the meeting went well. It seems, we have a shortage of meal trolleys to meet flight packing requirements and really cannot understand where the hell these meal trolleys are disappearing ? Some times in the recent past, we've been carrying out trolley counts both out and in and was stoppe, when everything seem going on well. I guess, absence of real time trolley count @ different locations around the world and/or lack or no visibility at all of building up of trolleys have made managing the meal trolleys even more challenging ! Bob mentioned the idea of 'SALIK' tags for trolleys; however, there appear some obstacles quoting 'high costs' to it. It is however, suprising that we are not making concentrated efforts pursue SALIK tags (RFID) methodology, when other areas such as Cargo has already introduced RFID tags to track ULDs and even Airport Services are cosnidering biometrics technology to further improve customer service!

I registered another couple of domain names since my last post. They're sherpherdlodge.com, srilankanmac.com and most recently, airlinetales.com. With that, I've now changed my this Blog's URL to www.airlinetales.com, which I thought, much easier to remember and also it fits in with most of my stories here.

In May this year, I set up "inflightcuisine" - the online forum for passionate airline catering professionals. It was a 'spur of the moment' thought! Well… just to give you all a brief background, I first registered the inflightcuisine.com domain name a few months back on Februrary 25th, 2007. The idea has always been to create a place for world-wide community of airline catering professionals on the net.

As of today, there are some 23 members have registered on line and I'm really hoping that it will grow. However, as for forum posting, there aren't many, except on my own posts!

The company newsletter Safar team published an article about my love for Apple. I had to bring my iMac to work to pose for a photograph. I also wore my Apple user group tee and the cap as one could see in the photo. That was fun!