The Sad Story of Expat Bob from Sudbury
Have I told you the story about Expat Bob? Get your tissue out because this is a very sad tale.

Expat Bob is a friend who moved to Hong Kong from our home town of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (aka ‘The Rock’, home of ‘The Big Nickel’) in 1998 on the advice of me and SG Ed who told him there was huge opportunity to sell poutine in Hong Kong. So, he sold his snowmobile, packed up his gear and jumped the first Air Canada flight and immediately set up a shop selling poutine in the Soho area of Hong Kong.

Expat Bob had a nice business with wealthy expats from Central making the trek to Expat Bob’s restaurant for his famous poutine. Expat Bob’s kids were in HKIS, he had a membership at the DB golf club, a south-side apartment with a seaview and he and his wife had just built their new holiday villa in Bali. Life was good!

Little did Expat Bob know that he was treading on some toes by opening a poutine shop in the heart of dim sum country. The business of the dim sum vendors in Soho dropped sharply because not only did the expat bankers and lawyers frequent Expat Bob’s shop, so did the newspaper vendors, shopkeepers, market stall workers, housewives and other ordinary folk who had acquired a taste for Expat Bob’s poutine.

Then, in 1999, AsiaXPAT launched the Ask an Expat Forums. And then the dim sum shopkeepers of Soho banded together and hired an aggressive PR firm called the ‘14K’. And the 14K logged onto AsiaXPAT and started to post untrue negative comments on the Ask an Expat forums. Stuff like ‘I saw Expat Bob spit in the poutine mix once…or Expat Bob makes passes at my wife when she goes to buy poutine’.

And we, not knowing this was a set-up, allowed the 14K to publish these comments on AsiaXPAT. And then AsiaXPAT’s traffic grew into the hundreds of thousands and many of those people were reading the Ask an Expat Forums. And then Expat Bob’s business started to go downhill, nobody went for poutine at Expat Bob’s no more. And then Expat Bob’s wife left him to marry the chairman of Goldwomens Slax. And Expat Bob lost his Bali villa and his apartment in Repulse Bay and he’s now living in a large cardboard packing box.

And the only job Expat Bob has been able to find is a part time position driving the 28 minibus from Central to Causeway Bay on US$4/hr. And the ultimate insult is that Expat Bob has taken to foraging through the seat cracks at the end of his shift for lost coins to buy Molson from the 711. Indeed things are not looking bright for Expat Bob. Boo hoo, poor Expat Bob! Too bad for him eh?

Well we sure have learned our lesson at AsiaXPAT and we will no longer allow anyone to say anything bad about anyone or any company on the Ask an Expat Forums because we have no way of knowing if such comments were placed legitimately or if the 14K PR firm was engaged by an unscrupulous competitor to bring down someone’s business with untruths.

So please don’t place negative comments on the Ask an Expat Forums because how can I know that you are not a 14K employee? Who is going to check out every single person who places negative comments about people like Expat Bob on this site? SG Ed could do it but he’s busy looking out the window and filling the fridge with Molson. And Vivian our admin manager is busy sending out invoices. And VGER our programmer is busy putting more banners up. And I am busy with the marine architects designing the AsiaXPAT Yacht. We are very, very bithy. So instead we just delete the bad stuff to thwart those evil 14K’s. Sorry but that’s the way it has to be because we will not have another Expat Bob on our hands – it is bad for karma.