Friday nights at OT...

When I was still in my previous job, some of my colleagues, including my best friend Tey, would usually stay back at the office on a Friday night.

One, Manila + Friday night is a recipe for horrible traffic. Two, there is more work to be done. Hehe!

The good thing is that our office was smack in the middle of the business district. That meant having easy access to the malls, drinking places, etc.

On certain nights where we didn't feel like heading to Greenbelt or we just wanted something very laidback, very casual, we would go to this place along De la Costa called OT.

It was a stone's throw away from the office and on many nights, it served as our version of the bar that Ally Mcbeal and her colleagues would hit.

There ws nothing fantab about OT. People were allowed to smoke. Food was your regular stuff. When you leave, you bring with you the combined smell of cigarette smoke, smoked food and so on. LOL!

But we love the place for two things - cheapo buckets of San Mig Lights and cheapo karaoke. Haha! We're talking about five peso per song here.

If I remember correctly, karaoke starts at 10PM. By then, there would be quite a few tables occupied with fellow yuppies who wanted to relax but nothing too formal and chichi (chichi talaga?!). Most of them were colleagues from other departments - Engineering, IT, Customer Service, and us Public Affairs.

Because we'd always see each other

A catalogue of the songs would be passed around and we would take note of the number code for the songs we wanted to sing. We'd give the piece of paper to the waiter who would then key in the numbers to the karaoke machine. Haha!

And for the next two hours, we would have our own karaoke night. No one cared how you sung the song. When you had the mic, you owned the place. LOL. No fights erupted. No broken bottles or noses. Just pure, unapologetic singing. Haha!

Good times, good times, indeed!

Smart bags three awards at the ACA 2012...

In a recent blog post, I wrote about how I was missing what I used to do back in the Philippines to pay my bills - Corporate Communications/Public Relations.

Thanks to a message from my former Smart colleague Monet, I found myself at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel last night covering the Asia Communication Awards 2012 for Smart.

Whooppee!

Smart was nominated in 6 categories, including CEO of the Year and Operator of the Year and my former colleagues at the Public Affairs Group needed someone to do event coverage.

How can I not say no? (Well, I would have if I was not able to find a DSLR to borrow.) Plus, it's sort of a raket as well. Yey! Hehe!

At the end of the night, the Philippines' leading telecommunications (writing that sounds very PR... LOL!) brought home three awards, including Operator of the Year!

That's a back-to-back win for Smart. I checked the ACA website and the company won the same award last year.

I'm glad that I can still remember most of the things needed for these events. Aside from taking photos, I was scribbling down notes on how the event was going.

It was also nice to hear a compliment Smart boss who attended the awards night for the company. He said something like, "Good thing you thought of asking the guy to stay behind for the photo. You really know these things."

Nice words to hear. :) Definitely "inspiring." *wink wink*

Congrats again to Smart! Double congrats for being the telecoms company who won the most number of awards! :)

Just like the good old Smart days...

Covering the Asia Communication Awards at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront for Smart.

Excited. Feels like the Smart PA days.

Wheee! I miss PR/CorpComm work.

Hope Smart wins tons of awards tonight.

We'll find out in a few.