Remember this item that I had posted at the beginning of May?
Meeting my old ex-colleagues was already a treat in itself but reliving the nostalgia of the Good Old Days was really something else. But you know what? At the end of the day, when everything's been said and done and everyone goes back to where their homes are, nothing has really changed.
In the words of Paul Simon, when both he and Art Garfunkel sang a new verse in The Boxer before a half-million capacity crowd in New York's Central Park in 1981:
And the years are rollin’ by me.
They are rockin’ evenly.
I am older than I once was, and younger than I’ll be.
That’s not unusual.
It isn’t strange,
After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same.
After changes, we are more or less the same.
But I do not want to detract myself and you from the happy occasion, that fleetingly short, happy, three-hour occasion where once again, I felt like a thirtysomething enjoying the camaderie of the good old Ban Hin Lee Bank Recreation Club days. Here are some photos from the reunion, courtesy of the recreation club and of course, the photographer, Kevin Khaw.
Firstly, the sight of the stage when we walked into the Tanjung Country Club. (The name of the club is a misnomer. It's not a "Country Club"; it's beside the blardy sea. I don't know why it's not called the Tanjung Seaside Club but I leave it to the club's management to sort this out with its members and visitors. It's not my beef.)
If one doesn't know it, one would have thought that the Ban Hin Lee Bank was still in existence. It's not. It was swallowed up by Southern Bank way back in 2000. But the Recreation Club remained. It just stopped functioning, that all. No way was the recreation club going to accept the invading hordes from Southern Bank and allow them to use OUR funds, OUR money which was collected monthly from us in the, yes, Good Old Days!
But inevitably, it was time for the club to fold up. And what better way than to hold a reunion dinner. It was through word-of-mouth that I got to hear of this. It was a pity that we did not have more of our old ex-colleagues at the function. Perhaps they didn't know of the reunion or some didn't care.
That's me beside Nazri Musir. He's certainly more prosperous-looking than me. We've known one another since the 1980s when I went to Prai Branch for training and he was the Second Officer there. Like me, he's no longer with Ban Hin Lee Bank .. or Southern Bank ... or CIMB Bank.
That's Mazlan by my side and seated is Wan Zailan, two of my trusty officers when I was in charge of the bank's ATM Centre. And that's Zailan's husband, Abdul Wahab. Oh, we had great fun running the ATM Centre. We became "experts" at looking at the ATM codes and trying to decipher the message length of the ATM transactions backwards and forwards to resolve customer issues.
I mustn't forget two of my trusted ATM clerks who were at the dinner too. I couldn't find a photo of Norliza, our SUKMA girl but here's Lee Soo Hock. He has one of the smoothest voices in the banking business but it wasn't to sweet-talk the damsels or charming old ladies. No indeed! This lad actually landed a singing contract and he's always a star singer at any dinner function. Just ask him to sing that evergreen song pang yao and I tell you, everyone melts. Of course, it had to be the finale of our reunion dinner.
And this is just a wee part of our Information Technology Division. Except for Gaik See in the foreground, everyone else in the photo was in the Systems and Quality Control Department. Guarding Gaik See are Kay Liang and Yuen Chee, while together with me at the back are Rosnita, Lai Sim and Kevin. This is the ONLY photo in the whole bunch of photographs that included his mug. Such is the life of a photographer...
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