Through Persistent and Knowledge, the Earth was round! Or Sphere? :-)

Once upon a time, people believe the world was flat. Literally you would fall off the edge if you go to the horizon. It took some careful observation and a few hundred brave sea farers to prove the Earth was indeed not flat. The bloke who come out with this idea that earth was a sphere shape was ridiculed, laughed at and endure endless jittery, hardships and scars along the way.

When it was proven that the earth was indeed round as observed through the missing ship theory or only the massive mass of the ship was visible after a certain distance; the bloke was duly acknowledge and the doubters put into their place. From that day onwards, radical thinking; out of the box thoughts, unorthodox method was slowly accepted into society. Fortune favors the brave they say, and I fully agree with it...every single word of it!

Ok, morale of the story? You need to be confident about things in life, you need to be sure as hell in life and you'll need to analyse things with good sense, knowledge and logic. This bring me nicely to what just happened to me recently.

I've got a very demanding client recently, it was a passed down project from my superior last time. He had changed department and thus scoot free of the consequences and problems faced by ol'jon right now. This particular client is technically clueless and temperament. And every e-mails exchange, if he see something he don't like, he will cc to everyone he can think of. In 'Hokkien' a chinese dialect, cc means "cover cahcheng"; literally meaning covering one's backside.

The application was a tough nut to crack, the proposer(my boss) was; how do I put it, technically unsound as well, the client was 'unaware' of the difficulties and due to smooth sales strategy by my boss, accepted the proposal and proceed with PO and much fanfare.

3 months later, the project is now in Shanghai and facing lots and lots of difficulties. Here ol'Jon is trying to remotely simulate and settle the problems. It is a toughie, with lots of brain juices needed and some arm twisting with my affiliate office in China. ol'Jon's boss was not helping the situation by his reluctance to get involved in the trouble shooting. Every questions raised was replied with a standard answer; "I don't know!" or "I forget!". But deep down, like the explorer of the old days, I know I can do it. I just need to be 110% focus, settle the technical issues, more arm twisting with the canny Chinese Sales Engineer and a lot a lot of patience pills when dealing with this over the top, impulsive, unappreciative and EQ questionable client of mine!

And if I'm able to do that, then nobody can laugh at my persistent and passion anymore, coz I'm Jon and I don't just do the talk, I walk the talk! And in case you're still confuse, the earth is indeed round and it is not flat~