From Pepsi to EST

And so for some reasons, Pepsi’s local partnership with Serm Suk bottling plant ended in the beginning of Nov 2012. No more Pepsi production in Thailand. Thais were even saying Kentucky Fried Chicken does not serve no Pepsi no more. That remains to be seen, I seem to be able to order Pepsi through their online menu. Anyway, EST had blanketed the Kingdom by storm. Why let the distribution channel got to waste Serm Suk would ask themselves. Instead of delivering no nothing to the retailers, they cooked out their own recipe and called it EST. No idea what that means. Retailers continued with whatever Serm Suk sent and sold what was received. In metro, yes we know what EST with their deceiving Pepsi matching colors is and so we went over to the Coke faction if there is a choice. At restaurants and food outlets, they would say “sorry no more Pepsi… we have EST”. But guess what when upcountry. A fellow mate of mine asked for Pepsi and was given EST. The outlets in the provinces had associated Pepsi with Serm Suk. They see the same delivery man. They pay to the same account. They order through the same channel and receive the bottles from the same truck with deceiving stickers in the same blue red white colors. To them Serm Suk water = Pepsi. I have heard of color blind, but this is either word or brand blind.

How do we solve problems here?

As I did ever blogged before, if any sections of roads suffers from extreme congestion due to cars queuing up for that u-turn, traffic police here simply blocks off that u-turn. Drivers go find a u-turn somewhere else. Same concept goes for toilet in the block I work in. To solve the problem of too many dirty toilets, simply just locked many of them up. If no one can use it, it won’t be dirty. And so I ran from floors to floor looking for that open toilet, shit leaking as I did. And in my dash seeking critically needed relief, I came across the cleaners sitting down at corners yakking away about which pa-la (fermented fish) from whatever province makes their som-tam (Thai Papaya Salad) better. Amazing Thailand.

A380 Introduced

The Thai Airways fleet recently had a new member. The famed giant of the skies - A380. The in-flight magazines are sprawled with pages on this plane. The media updated with images of this massive technology marvel in the skies. So proud, so glorious the carrier is now. Well guess what, they only have one. And it flies only the short routes between Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore. Theses giants are suppose to be for long haul. What the heck are they thinking? And they are promoting wildly the airfares so cheap to be on the A380. And so the topic on us Thai frequent flyers here is that we are guinea pigs. We think they are doing a load test, stuff the A380 full and make it takeoff and land as many times as possible just to make sure a nut don’t fall out, a bolt don’t fracture, the wings don’t snap, the engine don’t independently fly off in different directions, the brake works, the toilet flushes, the aircrew gets familiar, the ground crew accustoms to maintenance, the pilot don’t push the wrong button that open doors in mid air… practice makes perfection before the long haul assignment.