My job has me traveling again already. This time it’s just to LA for a short project, so I can come home on the weekends. Seems like all of our new business is in SoCal all of a sudden.

Bizarrely, the client is a block away from my company’s LA office. A walking commute in LA?

Tonight, I was supposed to see my friend CC and possibly her crew of Singapore Airlines flight attendants, who are coincidentally in LA for the rest of the week. But she had other plans tonight, and I have to fly back to SF tomorrow. Anyway it’s ok, because next Tuesday I get to see John Vanderslice bowl!

/s

I had brunch at The Ramp this morning with my friend Bee. The Ramp has been my default Sunday post-laundromat stop for the past couple of weeks (and for the month of May, when I was last in SF). The weather has been perfect, and The Ramp offers some of the best outdoor seating in the city, right beside the water in China Basin.

But that’s part of what bothers me about the place.

If I owned a restaurant in such a perfect location, I’d want to make the dining experience as special as the surroundings. The prime plot of land deserves it.

Instead, The Ramp is furnished with beat up old wooden tables and worn umbrellas. This would be charming if it felt intentionally old, like a $150 pair of distressed jeans, but it just feels sort of half-assed. Worse, the place serves mediocre food and drinks – using plastic cups and cheap cutlery.

Their bloody mary is decent, but the plastic cup subtracts a couple of points.

It irks me that the place has no commercial incentive to improve. It does a booming business. It’s packed every weekend, and I’m one of the suckers – which in turn irks me even more.

To kill the best part of an hour at Changi Airport, I went for a foot massage.

That, incidentally, is another thing I’ll miss about Singapore. Storefront massage. Why can’t our country – somewhere amongst the Radio Shacks, Foot Lockers and Jamba Juices – stick little, pretty massage and foot reflexology joints?

There were several young, spry looking people working there, but they were all occupied with other customers when I arrived. So I got an old Chinese uncle with one front tooth and the strongest fingers on the planet. I lucked out.

He inflicted great glorious pain upon me, and I loved it. He would look up at me during the most excruciating moments, and I – with jaw clenched and tears welling up in my eyes – would nod at him as if to say, “bring it on.”

He would nod back in silent acknowledgement and then press just a little bit harder. Each of us satisfied with his role in our brief partnership of pain.

For the past few days, I’ve taken every opportunity to tell people here that I’ve been in their country for close to a year, and that I’m headed home now. I suppose it’s as if I’m secretly begging Singapore to say it will miss me.

But the truth is I’m secretly telling Singapore I will miss it.

When I agreed to travel for this project last October, it was on the condition that it would be for 3-4 months. It became clear relatively early on, however, that we were in over our heads, and that I would have to stay longer.

The client expected us to take their website from its rather ragged, prehistoric (in Internet time) state, and make it the best in the industry. In seven months, with a small team, and a small budget.

I was asked to stay an extra month, then two, then just a bit more – for a big presentation. Then, I went home. Goodbye parties. Re-entry blues. Three weeks later I was asked to come back to Singapore for a month. Which turned into two. Now I’m leaving again, with no plans to return.

And such mixed feelings.

I’ve never worked so hard on anything in my career, and I’ve never been so beat up and exhausted by work. I’ve never had a more demanding and less appreciative client.

I’ve also never worked with a group of people who, through so many unbelievable challenges, were able to produce such consistently great results. There’s nothing like working with people who respond to adversity by laughing (and then, by the way, by overcoming it).

I hate adjectives like amazing, great, wonderful challenging, difficult. So imprecise. But it’s impossible to find any words that do justice to these last nine months.

I will miss Singapore.

The food. I sometimes felt like I’d reached my limit with the food here – fish porridge, chicken rice, wanton mee, laksa – but a big bowl of steaming noodles with some char siew on top sounds like the perfect thing right about now.

The weather. Sometimes I felt I’d had enough of the hot humid weather, but as my last days were waning, I thought about how much I’ll miss the Fraser Suites pool, swimming, spending the whole weekend in sandals.

The people. I’ll really miss the girls of Singapore. In San Francisco, beautiful girls (especially beautiful asian girls) are a hot commodity, and they know it. They always seem to be sizing you up with a sort of I think I can probably do better look.

In Singapore, if I smile at a girl, she’ll usually smile back. Then it’s pretty easy to approach her and strike up a conversation. More often than not, the conversation can lead to an exchange of phone numbers and at least one follow-up date. In San Francisco, if I smile at a girl, she’s thinking, who’s the creepy guy with no friends, and why is he looking at me?. And San Francisco girls always complain about a lack of eligible straight guys in the Bay Area. My advice: Try smiling. It’s more attractive than that scowl you think makes you seem cool. (Also, complaining does not count as conversation.)

But I’m getting off track.

Ah yes, I’ll miss friendly guileless, cynicism-free Singapore, where the cover bands rock, where the taxi drivers are half-mad and where every old man is your uncle. Where you can get almost anywhere in the entire country via the MRT (underground) in less than an hour, where you can spend the weekend experiencing any of dozens of other cultures or lazing on any of dozens of tropical beaches. Where you can party until 3am, then have your choice of thousands of snacks, party some more, always get home safely, then complain about how Singapore is too boring.

Ah yes until we meet again dear Singapore.

Soon after I arrived in Singapore last October, the Straits Times ran a series on customer service in Singapore. The paper’s assessment was pretty grim. It seemed the caliber of customer service in Singapore was awfully low.

This didn’t ring true to me. Or at least it wasn’t a reflection of my own experience. At that time, I had just finished a one-month stay in the Conrad Hotel, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been served so attentively and cheerfully in my life.

Whenever I would mention this to my Singaporean friends, they would shrug it off as a function of my skin color. “That’s because you’re caucasian.”

This may be true to a certain extent, but I attribute it more to the fact that I hadn’t made any special customer service requests to date. As a customer, I had so far managed to operate entirely within the accepted bounds of my role.

Yesterday, however, I tried to return a shirt I purchased last week, and I got a taste of what the Straits Times was talking about.

While ironing this shirt, I had inadvertantly melted some of the (apparently synthetic) stitching. The thing is, I had looked at the care label first, which I’ll admit is entirely uncharacteristic of me, but I really liked the shirt. The tag said the shirt was 100% cotton, and it had a little picture of an iron on it. I took this to mean that ironing it was ok, and I proceeded to set the iron’s temperature setting to ‘cotton’.

Then I smelled burning plastic. Stitching, ruined.

Now, it’s worth noting that when I took the shirt back to the shop, I wasn’t looking to get my money back, or even store credit. Again, I really liked the shirt. I just wanted a fresh, unburnt one.

The first girl I talked to at the cashier stand scrunched up her face and made a hmm sound. She consulted with her colleague, who pretty much did the same thing. They called another colleague over, and the three of them examined the burnt stitching, then the care label, then the stitching again.

“It looks like nylon.” One of them said to me.

“Yeah.” I said.

“You can’t iron nylon,” he said.

“I know. But I didn’t know it was nylon. The label says 100% cotton, and see that little picture of the iron?”

“This picture says 50 degrees. Did you have your iron set hotter than 50 degrees?”

“That 50 degrees is for the water temperature,” the first girl chimed in.

Nods. “Hmm.” Long pause.

“I’ll have to go confer with my manager. Would you like to have a look around?”

“Ok,” I said. I wandered over to the rack where I’d found the shirt the previous week. There was one left in my size. I picked it up and examined the stitching on the back, where I’d burnt the other one. It looked like cotton thread. I brought it over to the girl, who had seemed close to crossing over to my side of the negotiation. “Look at this thread,” I said, “it looks like cotton. How would I know I shouldn’t iron it, especially since the label says ’100% Cotton’?”

She nodded. “Maybe this one has different thread.”

I wasn’t sure whether this observation was for or against my case.

The other guy returned after a while with the burnt shirt. “We’ll have to keep this for a few days.”

“But I’m flying back to the US tomorrow.”

“Hmm.” Long pause “But you should not have had the iron so hot.”

“I just put it on the cotton setting. The label says 100% cotton, and see (showing him the new shirt) this looks like cotton thread.”

“But it must be nylon or something.”

“I know that now, but how could I have known that before?”

“You must have had the iron very hot.”

“I just had it on the cotton setting.”

We went back and forth on this two or three more times, before he finally said, “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll exchange it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! Thank you so much!” Not sarcasm, but relief, like a drink of water after a desert crossing.