| 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. |
