No Fool Me, April 1st!

 No joke. April 1st. 

Life began at 40 for me, when, this day 24 years ago I started employment in the small (fucking tiny) Hong Kong office of the No2/3 medical ultrasound company in the world (for radiology and obstetrics at the time I think, maybe No 1.), a team I lovingly call The Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 1, aka Advanced Technology Laboratories (indistinguishable from magic). 

ATL was smallish company, as these things go, from rain-drenched Seattle and as smallish companies go, they liked to party. I was covering North Asia, South Asia with occasional trips to Thailand and Singapore to give product training. Awesome. Many friends made in Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Singapore, Korea (I could tell the difference between good and not-so-good kimchi), not so much in China at first as I was not a qualified doctor like all the minions there. 

Also, as smallish companies go, they went. 

Two years later the fun and games came to screeching slow-down when the Big Boss took his $44M payout and ATL were swallowed by The Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 2 - aka the dour dutch Philips. 

This moderately huge light bulb and sandwich toaster company from Eindhoven wanted to buy their way into a burgeoning health-care market (due to the ageing population - opportunity?  yeah baby!). To be fair they were/are world leaders in cardiac catherisation labs, and their general x-ray systems were generally a cut above the others. Something I appreciated 12 years later in Sienna. Our ATL Big Boss had convinced Philips that ATL were an echocardiac (heart) ultrasound specialist company that would sit well with their cardiac angiogram predominance. They soon found out we weren’t (due diligence guys!). 

So Philips, with too much money (that that they didn’t waste on salaries I must point out after I lost 40% of my ATL salary: housing allowance mainly), then went for Hewlett-Packard’s excellently structured Medical Ultrasound Division, which itself had just been spun off by CEO Carla Fiorina into a new company called Agilent. *They* were the cardiac ultrasound leaders at the time. Their product development and training team were so well organised and professional it was a joy to be with them in Andover. (One of the trainers later took on my role in HK.) 

They ruled cardiac U/S, until a tiny Danish company came up with an innovative wedge technology (cardiac muscle strain measurement) that GE bought and used to shut the door on everyone else some 6 months later. GE also bought from the financially troubled Korean company Medison (who had done all the initial awareness and promotional work), a German technology for obstetric 3D scanning, and that pushed ATL/Philips from the No1 spot in the anxiety and litigation swamped world of fetal imaging and assessment (that was in fact my specialty).

Even the amazing Agilent/Philips 3D cardiac system introduced a year or so after (in the middle of SARS lockdowns) could not compete. Someone should write book on the intrigue here. 

Then, 3 & 3/4 years after their takeover, Philips saw fit to allow me to investigate other career options, such as opening a bookstore in Stanley. Yep, they asked to lift my game one day and the next day, literally, sacked me. Moi? Can you imagine any company succeeding without my input as a Marketing Manager? WTF does a Marketing Manager do anyway? I never had time to find out.  

Thanks to a key nomination by an old friend (who may or may not have been my line manager in HK and the guy who brought me to HK in the first place) I moved to Singapore into the smaller, not quite family-run Japanese Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 3, called Aloka, whose excellent logo, borrowed from Gandhi, was “Science and Humanity”. I loved them for that already, until it was subsequently fucked over by some unmemorable Hallmark Business Logo blandishment. 

Thus began a revitalised life of fun, parties, etc, in South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Canada. Some brilliant party animals in this company, and many stories that can’t be told outside this blog to non-expats, or non-ex-expats for a plethora of reasons: moral, intellectual, physical, typographical, topographical, graphical, outrage to modestical, ethical, sexualical, libelical, marital suicidical, dubious, apocryphal, and plain spooky mystic weird.  

But as smallish companies go, they too went. 

The inevitable takeover was by a (surprise surprise as we were thinking it would be Philips) moderately huge behemoth - the Cosmodemonic Ultrasound Company 4, another Japanese company called, let me think, ah yes, Hitachi, who, ironically [cue Alanis Morrisette type pedantry], were selling Philips machines in Japan. 

And as largish companies don’t usually go, they kept paying my outrageous salary for many years, until my retirement age approached (see other posts here.) I should add that much of the partying continued but not necessarily at the level I enjoyed with those forever to remain unnamed colleagues of yore. 

And the rest, like all the past not suppressed by the winners, became the post-40 laughable history of

E@L