Minutes
Meeting number 208 was a special meeting with a Christmas theme. I gave a very quick opening remark introducing this year’s Chinese character which is 災(pronounced sai) which means disaster. I said I wanted the meeting to be a different sai i.e. 祭which means festival.
We welcomed 3 guests. The more the merrier!
TMoE was SK who conducted the meeting beautifully. The word of the evening was ‘present’. It was perfect for the occasion. All role explanations were super smooth and I loved them.
The gift exchange session was a lot of fun. Compared with last year I think there were more varieties this year in what people had brought. I received a non-alcoholic champagne and chocolate. I actually wanted those as they were very nicely wrapped and the biggest gift. I brought warm eye-masks.
The table topics session was conducted by SS. His questions were all thought provoking. What was the word for you this year, what was the best/worst news for you this year, do you think December is the busiest month of a year…All questions were fun to answer.
The prepared speech session was amazing. HS said he had not prepared and he blanked out a little bit but he recovered and managed to deliver his speech successfully, which was impressive. KK talked about his challenge of being VPPR. I was relieved to hear that he had been enjoying his job in his current capacity. YT leveraged her expertise to the fullest and shared all sorts of facts about diamonds. Finally YU talked about Japan’s public finance. He originally wanted to use PPT but we could not borrow the projector so he used the whiteboard instead but it actually worked for the better. I have a very short attention span but I did not even look at the timing card until 7 and half minutes had passed.
MS gave an incredible general evaluation. It was fast-paced and concise. Still she managed to touch upon every aspect of the meeting! I was so impressed.
On top of our normal award ceremony, the most impressive gift was also chosen. The award went to clear files brought by our dedicated VPE YT. They had ‘heisei’ on them and I thought they were pretty cool.
Thank you so much for all your support over the past year…. Without your help I could have never had such a good 6 months. Happy holidays to you all and keep up the good work next year as well!