... notable events : Strange Places to meet Alumni

Back in 1997, I was on the RAPP pulp and paper mill project at Pekan
Kerinchi, Sumatera, Indonesia. I was flying into the place from my
office in Singapore a couple days at a time to meet and coordinate with
both local and North American engineers to get the structure up and ready for
operations. The regular trips into Pekan Kerinchi was for me something to look forward to, not the least because it was a welcome change to the tedium of normal office schedules but also because of some rather pretty female engineers from various firms around the globe who also flew in regularly for one aspect or other on the RAPP project. However, on this trip, things were different. The pace of the project was running at full steam and problems of coordination and schedules were beginning to intrude.


One early morning I arrived at the site office after a 2 hour jeep
ride through the jungle from the Pekan Baru airport for a meeting with
the Mechanical Engineer in charge of the piping and conduits which were
to sit on my pipe bridges. I walked into the room with my senior colleague and
sat opposite a fairly old gentleman with a hard set face, who was ready to give
us hell for a delay in the design schedule. Suddenly, right after the
introductions, he looked curiously at my right hand having seen my Iron Ring said, "You're a Canadian Engineer."



Expecting and having braced the who morning for a tough meeting, I was rather taken back.
Nodding my head I replied that I was. Then he asked me which university
I was from, and I promptly replied "UBC". The old man shook his head with an incredulous look on his face. That grim facade of his cracked
with a smile, exclaimed "Gosh! That's my university!"



Apparently, he graduated in the 1950s and here we were, two UBC
engineering alumni, meeting of all places, in the middle of the
Indonesia jungle on a remote project tens of thousands of miles from
UBC!



The meeting quickly devolved into a casual chat about UBC and
whether either of us was getting the Trek magazine and how much UBC has
changed over the 40 odd years since he graduated, all thoughts of the
design delay forgotten or maybe forgiven. The other two people in the meeting room, my senior colleague and another from the other side sat quietly throughout the exchange, bewildered and probably not a little confused and relieved since the whole axis of the meeting was supposed to have revolved around the problems of interface between my bridges and the old engineer's mechanical pipes, and the two were only too happy to let us chat. :)



In the end, the old engineer got his pipes and mechanical systems seated satisfactorily and I got my pipe bridges constructed on reasonable schedule. I also helped him reconnect with the UBC Alumni office at Cecil Green to get his copy of the Trek magazine upon my return to Singapore. I never met him again but that was a chance encounter that continues to amaze me and serves as one of my favourite stories to tell at university alumni events and every year during pre-departure send-offs for new UBC students from Singapore.