Today was our school field trip day. Weirdly, it was split into four separate locations for students to choose from, and teachers all get assigned to about 6 students at any given location.
Fair enough.
Guess which one I was assigned to?
- A bird sanctuary
- An experimental bio lab
- A luxury car... place including museum
- An HSBC bank
If you guessed bank - ding ding ding! Woooo!
I immediately got flashbacks of the Simpson's trip to The Box Factory, although now I've experienced the bank trip - which was a full day trip - I'd take the box factory any day.
The day started off with my usual 1-hour commute to work, where I immediately shuffled onto the bus and was shipped 1-hour back, to within a few hundred metres of my home, to the bank.
This was unavoidable since I was responsible for a handful of kids - I couldn't just meet them there at 10am or whatever.
After all the messing about we went into the building, up the elevators - I'm already struggling to fill this blog with events - and walked past what appeared to be a table in a cubicle, mere metres away from some kind of machine you can use to pay your bills. TO my surprise, the machine had two screens on it.
Next, we were all sent into a conference room where the front wall had no less than three TV screens, all displaying the same Powerpoint Presentation. They made sure all fifty students introduced themselves, one by one, passing the microphone to and fro, before starting the presentation.
As the presentation went on, it gave an invigorating history of the HSBC franchise, which, as it states, was founded by a Scottish man called Tom.
I was awestruck to discover that my suspicions about the 'H' standing for Hong Kong, and the 'S' standing for Shanghai, were indeed correct.
After the presentation reached its conclusion, it was time for...
The Wealth Management Workshop!
This was in fact a second Powerpoint Presentation which took us straight to Lunch time. This discussed 'The four P's'. I forget what they were. Price... Product... use your imagination. Taking the Piss might be one.
It was at this point I started to feel a rather severe headache coming along which, spoilers alert, grew at a constant rate of increasing agony until I got home.
But while that was going on I did get to enjoy an extended lunch break until 1:30.
For the first time ever, I was near my home for lunch on a work day, AND my wife was working from home! Actually she was just finishing at the gym, between work, so we met up for a brief lunch of healthy juice/smoothies.
I quickly went home to grab a handful of pain pills (pills that reduce pain, to be clear), and worked my way back to the bank, where we were re-shuffled back into the conference room.
This second half was on a whole other level of Excitement. Students had to get in groups and prepare presentations about the Four P's.
Naturally, this overwhelmed me to the point that I had to leave the room and sit on a chair, staring at another large screen which was cycling round about 3 minutes of HSBC promotional material.
Something like two hours passed. I'd occasionally rest my eyes, slouch a bit, try to imagine my head wasn't throbbing and threatening my demise, a whole variety of stuff.
But, time flies when you're having fun, and it was eventually time to go home. By which I mean back, 1 hour to the school campus, and then immediately 1 hour back home again from there.
How did the other field trips fare in comparison to my invigorating experience, you ask?
Well, they looked like profound disappointments, if you ask me:
