It is a saga that has gone on longer than anything the Vikings could have dreamt up during those long winter nights in the fiords - the supposed merger of satellite TV channels Asia Business News (ABN) and Hong Kong-based CNBC.
Almost a year has passed since rumours surfaced that the channels were going to join into one operation to staunch substantial start-up and operational costs.
Depending on who you spoke to, ABN's owners Dow Jones and TeleCommunications would swallow up CNBC, or General Electric, CNBC's parent company, would do the same to ABN.
Rumours came to a head in the past month when a fax arrived from CNBC's London operation to ABN's sister network in the British capital, European Business News (EBN) giving details of how much space CNBC would soon need in the EBN newsroom.
Then ABN's director of communications, Georgette Tan Adamopoulos, went on holiday and left journalists with a day-by-day holiday schedule where she could be reached around the clock.
Since her husband William Adamopoulos is near the top of the Dow Jones' hierarchy in Hong Kong most people believed she would be among the first to know.