Ten years after Bangkok's overheated economy hit the skids, triggering a regional recession, many Thai businessmen still wince at the unhappy memories. The baht's dramatic devaluation and the tough-love medicine dished out by the International Monetary Fund are the stuff that nightmares are made of from the boardroom to the bedroom.
It is a memory that hits former stockbroker Sirivat Voravetvuthikun square in the face every day when he goes to work. His company logo celebrates the topsy-turvy events of 1997: a hot-air balloon stamped with a giant B for baht hovers over a stack of banknotes marked IMF. The balloon appears to be sinking down to earth.
It is a joke about the baht's flotation in 1997, the event that wrenched Mr Sirivat from his luxurious life as a high-flying investor and sent him on to the streets of Bangkok to hawk sandwiches in the depths of the crisis. He soon became Mr Sandwich, an icon of the Asian financial crisis.
Today, his celebrated riches-to-rags story is centre stage in his second career as the owner of a food and drinks company. He declared bankruptcy in 2003, owing nearly 1 billion baht in debt, but is now solvent again.
Despite his recovery at the helm of Sirivat Sandwich, he is sanguine about the risks of expanding too fast. He worries that the lessons of the crisis have not been learned in Thailand and that consumers are piling up debt they can not afford to service. At the counter of one of the two coffee shops that he runs in Bangkok, Mr Sirivat, 58, poses next to a life-sized cardboard cut-out of him in a white cap, carrying his sandwich box with the company logo on the front.
'It's like KFC's Colonel Sanders, except that I'm younger than him,' he joked.