Life and its little pleasures

My NY office

(jaja, rommel, ik weet het)

Bienvenido

I've made it to Miami again! 4.5 days of stress, hard work, babysitting, late nights, early mornings, fun and frustrations to look forward to now. And after that, 2 days of vacation! Or burning on the beach as some may call it and getting some rest.

The hotel is gorgious, the food already good and the mood is high. This is going to be a good week! Now let's just hope everyone who is supposed to get here, gets here as scheduled... We seem to have a curse on Capco with this since I joined...

Today is all about setting up the office, making sure the speeches all get submitted and make sense, welcoming the management committee, finalising all the lunch/coffee breaks locations and making sure the electrical equipment works. Should be all going smoothly...

Btw, I'm typing this as I'm sitting on my hotel balcony, overlooking the ocean with the sun blaring down on me.

Hurt

Somebody told me today that my English sucks... I'll tell you one thing though, their Dutch is ... Well, I don't think they even know what Dutch is!

Ha!

Ikke ook!

I so could enjoy working there (just like about 5000 applicants every day). I told you about my little venture into their NY office for lunch, but check out how beautifully they redid the Zurich office. Jonah, you are one lucky bastard!

Update: I found this film of the Zurich google office in action (thanks Tobi!). Only in Swiss German though... How cool are those aquariums!!!

Bingo!

If you have one of these jobs where you have to go to a lot of meetings and you are sometimes bored in them, here's a good tip: Play bullshit bingo!

Just go here, and print out a card for you alone or different cards (just refresh) for multiple people and see who wins! I guarantee you that you will be much more attentive to what is being said during the meeting!

New job

I get a lot of emails for job openings at my company as they come in through the website. Some of them very business like, some of them quite personal, some of them ridiculous and some where the writer hasn't heard of BCC yet and puts all the companies in the world in the To -field.
Today, I got a mail that started with this gem of a sentence:

"Most respectfully I beg to state that i have come to know that some posts are lying vacant under your kind authority."

It sure made me smile...

Ladies

Tonight it's Ladies drinks night. As we work in a quite male dominated environment (Banking and Consulting), some girls at work decided to have this monthly event for the females at the London office. After some convincing of the local management, we now even get a little bit of sponsoring every time we get together (about enough for 2 bottles of champagne). Of course, the male population at work experience this is a blatant sexist thing and they all think they should be invited, but we are quite attached to our girls night out. We change our location every month, so if the boys find us one time, they won't neccessarily find us the next time. We even tried to do something exciting, like a laughter course, but it seems that just going out to a bar and having drinks is the most popular. Guess I already know now that I won't be going home soon tonight...

Quiet

It's been a bit quiet here lately. I guess it's the summer (or lack thereof) blues. Work is taking up a lot of my time and now I'm also trying to organize my move as smooth as possible. In the rare spare moments I have then, I prefer to read, hang out with friends or just do nothing. Picking up my computer and going online is honestly one of the last things on my mind. So bare with me for a week or two and things will pick up again. I know I owe Dikkie (via Ine) a list of my favorite spots in London, but I'm working on that (or at least thinking about it)... More to follow soon.

Growing

Finally, it's announced... This has taken up a lot of my workhours in the last couple of months...

Violence @ work

This is how the partner community treats me at work...

All pics by Pieter