A Brit recruiting in Malaysia & China; My journey so far; Part 2
….I arrived at the office at 7.45 am the next day full of beans looking forward to meeting my new colleagues. I was still feeling a bit dehydrated from the previous day so plenty of water was needed.
In the past like many people in the early days of IT recruitment in the 1990s there were some great times to be enjoyed. I joined late in life at the age of 38 as I needed to change careers from working as a Business Development Manager for Lee Jeans. Even though we were secure, the excitement had gone out of the fashion industry and I knew I had to change to something more lucrative. My daughters were still little and growing quickly. So IT recruitment it was and off I went to join an independent company in my home city. It provided me with a good life, enabled me to move to better area of Hampshire, purchase a holiday home in Spain and buy a decent car. I went out with my colleague’s most nights and quite often we overdid it and ended up in a club, some more desirable than others. I was a typical contract IT recruiter of that area. Close, close, close and party.
They say nothing is forever and 3 years later September the 11th happened and it definitely had an impact on the business with all my American clients deciding to freeze all hiring. Consequently my figures dropped dramatically and I decided to launch my own company from home. Within 2 years I was employing 8 staff and 4 years later opened another office in Dubai. I employed some good people and some thieves and vagabonds. Unfortunately the industry does sometimes attract these types of characters.
There were many highs and lows. The highs being one of the top 3 suppliers to the largest IT Services Companies in Europe, having over 60 contractors at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire, supplying Ericsson in Pakistan, UAE, Bahrain and Oman. The lows having to close my recruitment business in the recession of 2008 and taking the pictures down and traditional recruitment bell off the wall. Very sad times indeed but then I thought of children suffering in hospices and I realised it was a test of character and I had to rebound.
So here I was in my mid-40s, having 10 years international recruitment experience, managing staff, high level business development and without a job. What should I do? I had to earn reasonable money as I had dependents and big bills to pay. Luckily I managed to sell my Dubai business to a PLC and part of the deal was to help them set up their operations in the Far East. So off I went to Singapore then. Due to Boardroom changes and further acquisitions my Singapore dream was cruelly dealt a blow when my CEO requested me to attend a meeting in London when he delivered the knockout news that they had bought another company from Ireland and my shares were worthless. I stayed with them until I found another job and went back out to the Middle East for what followed 2 difficult stints in Saudi Arabia.
A year later I joined an outfit in Iraq. This was to have an everlasting effect on me.
It was 10pm on a Saturday night in February and there was a knock at my door at lodgings in Erbil, Northern Iraq. I looked out and noticed 2 people at the door both dressed in military uniform. I asked them what they wanted and they said “we have to come to view your papers “. I politely requested that they come back another day as it was late. They were insistent that they viewed them immediately and after checking their ID, I like an idiot unbolted the many locks and let them in. Little and Large only spoke Pigeon English so I called my boss and handed them the phone. He confirmed that their intentions were honest. Not only had they fooled the security guards outside but also my boss and yours truly. My gut feeling was not quite right with these 2 burkes and once they had finished checking that nobody else was present in the building, they bundled me into a back room with me kicking and punching trying to land as many hard hits as I could. This was quickly stifled as the larger one pulled a hand gun out of his pocket and proceeded to ram it into the side of my head. They then tied me up, blindfolded me put a tourniquet in my mouth to stop me yelling obscenities at them which was mostly making references to their Mothers and made me kneel against the wall where they tried to knock me out by pistol whipping me. Growing up in Southampton I had been involved in a few scuffles in my youth but nothing had prepared me for this situation. It was fair to say that I was now in a spot of bother ! Surprisingly I remained calm throughout the ordeal and tried to think positively. I knew I was well insured and if this cowardly Iraqi was going to pull the trigger then at least the mortgage back home would have been paid off. It is amazing what goes through someone’s mind when faced with imminent death. I was thinking that I had not said goodbye to my loved ones, not witnessed my football team lift another trophy since 1976, not seen my daughters get married not fully rebounded yet. Funnily enough I was angry with my old clients at the time, if Hewlett Packard had not reduced the contract margin from 25% to 6% or if Computacentre had not employed a Master Vendor then I would be at home walking my choccy Labrador “Crunchie” around the lush green fields of Hampshire. The reality was that I was staying in a dingy apartment in Iraq being held against my will at gun point. They both decided to leave me unguarded and commenced to ransack every room. It was now that I realised that they were just robbers and not Islamic terrorists which was a huge relief as I wasn’t looking forward to being kidnapped. As I heard them smash everything in site, I managed to nudge the blindfold up and noticed a window that was slightly ajar. Some Syrian guys had been smoking earlier in the day and lucky for me they had not shut the window properly. This was my opportunity for freedom. I used to play a lot of football and I treated it as a brave near post header, so I jumped head first taking the window frame and showers of glass with me and landed 6 feet below on a hard surface. There was a problem with the irrigation and the sewage system outside and it was pouring with rain at the time so I was literally covered in glass, blood, the smelly brown stuff and soaked to the skin. I was thinking “I am 50 years of age this shouldn’t be happening to me, I always considered myself an easy going guy who wants to help people”. But I was alive. Immediately raised the alarm and one of the neighbours who was a member of the Iraqi Parliament and he called the police and 20 minutes later the local plod turned up. I was taken back to the station cleaned up, given hot a cup of black sweet tea and given an apology on behalf of the Kurdish people. They never took finger prints or roped off the scene of crime just asked me to look at a number of photos of criminals. Despite them having CCTV it was difficult to make out who they were. To this day I am convinced the security guards were involved but they never caught the culprits. The next day I was playing football for our works team on the Mosul Road. None of us realised that within a few weeks we would be only 25 minutes away from newly formed devil group ISIS.
I then enjoyed a short contract working with a good company in Manchester then back down to The Smoke and loved working in London Bridge. Then came the fall in in the oil price and our team was disbanded and I took some time out of the industry.
Back to my first morning at work in Malaysia in 2017 and I was here bright and breezy, early doors. In all my years in recruitment, I like to be the first one in to the office. Switch on the lights, air con, check my emails whilst drinking a 3 in 1, plan the day before the staff arrive. But of course no keys yet, so my new colleague and now good friend Sakthi is also there early. He takes me for a coffee and gives me some background to the company and the people that I am going to be working with.
The CEO, Thiru arrives later and also takes me for a coffee and reminds me about the regional conference in the next 2 weeks where I have to present to the team. It is Chinese New Year and I have plenty of time to prepare.
To be continued.