Today I had lunch with some of my old coworkers from my time at West Coast Beauty Supply. Jesse Lee organized it all and we met at 11:30 at Uno Pizzeria in the Embarcardero Center in downtown San Francisco. Since I hate trying to park in SF I took the BART and got there about five minutes early, seemingly the first one there (though I was not, as I later found out, Li Lau got there first since she was driving in from Sacramento). But soon everyone showed up at almost the same time, except for Jesse who turned out to be late.

Sam Kyu, Steven Chan and Bea Cary from the West Coast Information Services Department with Bea bringing one son (Christopher) and her friend with her daughter, whose names I forgot; Edgar, Peter Huan, Li Lau, Sean Finnegan and his girl friend who also works at West Coast and her two daughters. We were seated at a several tables pushed together and started talking (naturally I did more listening than talking) then Jesse arrived and we ordered. Most everyone had pizzas, I tried to get the crab cakes but they were out so I had fish and chips which was pretty good (standard fish, battered french fries, fresh coleslaw and tartar sauce, although I probably can't tell).

Let's see how many things I can remember. Jesse of course works at Oracle now, in the Applications Division. Bea works for some company in Oakland that tests things (kind of like Consumer Reports). Whatever she does can be done at home and she has Sun Workstation that Patrick helped set up and she only has to go into the office once a week. Li Lau (for some reason I always think of her as Li Lau) has a job only 5-1/2 miles from her home. Her son, Kevin, is in his senior year at UC San Diego and is not going to graduate school (he's a Computer Science or Computer Engineering major, whatever they call it there). She's flying him in for the weekend for his birthday and when her husband complained she said that they're only going to see him 2-3 times a year multiplied by thirty years and that means they'll only see their son another 60 or so times, so every occassion counts. I never of thought of it that way.

Sam said that in five years he'll truly be stuck at West Coast as he'll be 60 so there'll be no chance to move to another company. Not that I think he really minds. We all assumed he'd be the one to stay at WCBS forever. Meantime he now has to drive to work now that there is no vanpool, but he only has to do it three times a week. His daughters are like 13 and 14 or younger and we all urged him to take them to Disneyland, which they've never been to. He's worried about taking a long vacation because at this point there's nobody at WCBS that can do his job (Steven said that they posted a job for a computer programmer but the salary was $40k which is nothing in the Bay Area and an indication of how cheap upper management is). I think we convinced him to take a vacation before Christmas, when his daughters are out of school. We'll see next time we have a group lunch, which we resolved to do in 2-3 months.

Steven is always the same. I didn't hear his end of the table, so I don't know hoe him and Edgar are doing. Peter's job is head of the General Ledger section of some company (he has seven people under him). Sean is now in the IS Dept learning Java so that he can take over the web site. He said the contractors that WCBS hired (it's that short term mentality, don't pay good money for quality staff, pay it on high-priced contractors who do something and then leave and you still have an untrained staff) created this web site for online shopping but it has all these errors when he checked it himself.

We gossipped a bit. actually a lot, actually they did since I haven't worked at WCBS in years so I'm not going to hear these things, not that I really heard any of these things when I was working there. I'm not going to repeat it here. But realize that the President and owners of WCBS have eligible kids working at WCBS and you can imagine the sort of interesting matchings that go on. Who dates whom and so forth. It was a fun time and I miss them. But we've scattered to the winds so having a group lunch is nice and I look forward to the next one.