| My company sent me on a trip to China along with a freelance animation director named Bob Nesler. Our job was to see what we could do to fix some poor quality Scooby-Doo animation that had been done through a subcontractor. I was told that we had to stop in Tokyo before flying in to China because there are no direct flights from the US to China for political reasons. An interesting thing happened to Bob when he came back a few weeks early; his ticket reservations had been "lost", and his seat "cancelled" on his flight back to the US. He wound up getting a seat on a ChinaAir flight that flew direct from China to Los Angeles. My understanding is that the enormous plane was only sparsely populated with passengers, one of whom drilled Bob with suspicious sounding questions all the way back to the US. This trip, according to my boss, would be over for me in a week or less. Just enough time to make sure Bob could deal with the situation and then come on home. Almost immediately though, it was obvious to me that things were not in good shape in China. After I arrived, the directive changed to "Don't come back until the problem is fixed and the animation is done". Needless to say, I didn't come home that week. |
