2020: In the eyes of the hungriest person in Teleport

Puteri Yasmin Suraya
Teleport Blog
Published in
5 min readDec 31, 2020

by Sabrina Khaw, Head of airasia food

I’m trying my best to start this without a clichéd intro. But really. There is no other way, but to take a moment and acknowledge.

2020. What. A. Frickin’. Year.

Let’s start from the beginning.

*cue Everybody Wants to Rule The World by Tears for Fears*

We’re excited. Bright-eyed and fired up. We can do anything, the world is our oyster. The year is going to be HUGE.

Well, I guess we weren’t completely wrong. It was still pretty huge, just not in the way we imagined.

To me, the year really only began in March — the end of, to be exact. With a palpable sense of uncertainty, we were jolted awake. There is a scene from Friends, the popular TV classic from the 90s, which perfectly depicts the mania during this time.

I don’t think this experience is foreign to anyone living and breathing in 2020, but here’s my experience of doing something wildly out of my comfort zone. Emphasis on “wildly”.

We embarked on our food delivery journey. That’s right, we started delivering food. It doesn’t sound so strange now, but at the time, if I had a moment to stop and think about it — man, what were we thinking?

For the pilot, I stationed myself at a restaurant selling grocery essentials (which was all the rage at the beginning of the first lockdown). We got about five or six drivers throughout the day and I’d assign them jobs using my trusty cell dropdowns (organised based on shifts and alphabetical order, of course) every time it got filled into a Google Sheet shared with a local food ordering platform we were partnering up with. In the absence of having our own delivery app, I would text the details of the order to the drivers and get them to update me immediately after completing the order, so I could track average travelling time.

We did 34 orders that day using Google Sheets, WhatsApp and a lot of nerves — marking the start of our dive into instant delivery. I’ll never forget it.

The next few times after that got even scarier. We started delivering actual food orders (not just groceries) for one restaurant, which led to another 25. Safe to say, I never looked at meal times, rain, weekends, or worse still, rain during meal times or weekends, the same again.

Within a month, we delivered food for restaurants all over Klang Valley. By then, we started using an app we created in-house for parcel delivery and repurposed it for food, which we still use today. I also got more help. I met a couple of pilots who very quickly became my lifelines and supported me in every way imaginable, day in and day out for little in return. I felt full support from the tech team and one person in particular, even on the ground with us to help deliver food herself when we needed it, even if it wasn’t her role to do so. At the height of the lockdown, while the rest of the world nursed their sourdough starters and planted what I would assume were basil leaves and chillies in their backyard, the four of us were out training drivers and delivering food all across the city (with gloves and masks intact, of course and not forgetting a skin-peeling shower at the end of the day to kill them corona-cooties). Saying how grateful I am for them doesn’t even begin to cut it.

One night, I placed an order for dinner. This was about two months in and being part of the delivery team had its perks, you get to keep track of your order literally in real-time, down to every detail. Lucky me — my order was picked up but of course, the driver’s car had to break down. I decided to head over, pick it up myself and see if the guy needed any help. When I arrived, his car starter had completely busted and his phone had died, so I decided to get him a car to get him home since it was almost impossible to get a mechanic at that hour. By that point, the driver pool had gotten so big that the driver had no idea who I was and probably thought I was an overly eager customer, really going out of my way to help him.

As we sat in my car waiting for his ride, naturally we got to talking and I asked him how he came to be a delivery driver. He said he had been a flight technician in training but because of the pandemic, well, he had to say goodbye to that dream. For now, he was making ends meet through food delivery and his goal was to at least work 12 hours a day to save just enough to get him a new car, so he can do even more deliveries.

Listening to this broke my heart. I didn’t mention this before, but just before heading out to pick up my dinner, I was extremely exhausted and demotivated thinking about how our food delivery service had been progressing, plus finding out I had to pick up my own dinner definitely didn’t help. Turns out, that night was exactly what I needed. Determined to continue the food delivery fight to provide more jobs to those who needed it most, I went home with a renewed sense of purpose and my dinner in hand. Thank you, Greg.

And because this is real life, things didn’t get any easier. In no particular order, here’s a quick summary of the next few months:

  • Many tears and sleepless nights
  • Many hungry (and then eventually angry) customers
  • Many disgruntled drivers
  • Many house plants (and husbands) wilting from neglect

You name it. The experience was nothing short of madness.

But I would totally do it all over again.

We have since started our own food ordering business, extending the service from merely logistics to a platform for restaurants to power their businesses during these truly tough times. Again, this is another battlefield, another zone of major discomfort, another challenge. We are just at the very beginning of a very exciting (and extremely terrifying) journey ahead in 2021.

I ended the year strong. With a strong bout of food poisoning that is. It was in-between trips to the toilet, I lay defeated on my couch reflecting on the year we called 2020, potentially, the worst and best year of our lives. I will end my story the way I started it — with one last clichéd point.

With another year full of uncertainty, there is one thing I’m sure of: there will be struggle, but nothing we will have to face alone. We survived 2020 because of the people around us. Gun to my head, I’m placing my bet on the same for 2021.

Here’s to another s***ty year. It’s gonna be great.

Happy holidays #TeamTeleport.

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