I know, I know - I'm overdoing it by calling Paris a third world city. But, really, am I? So, today was the first day in our "new" offices. Of course, that just means "new to us", not new as in newly constructed. The office/tech people knew we were arriving today to begin a month of training. Which means of course that nothing was ready. See the cables hanging from the ceiling? Yeah, well, it's hard to do training with no internet access.... Have another coffee or three - we'll be starting training kinda late today.....
They tell me that the building was a bank in a former life. It has a giant vault in the basement which is where we have all of our European servers. Something tells me the word "vault" is a misnomer too. I picture a cage with a bunch of dusty computers stacked on top of each other. The middle of our floor has a giant glass roof, which looks really cool. Of course, it only looks cool....
The poor people that work under that roof have resorted to putting up cafe umbrellas over their desks to reduce the heat and glare. Yes, this photo is a shot of the INSIDE of the building. They tell me that summer is great - apparently they all wear coats and gloves in the winter because it is absolutely freezing.
We have an "open plan" which is French for "a bunch of desks arranged in a room with no separation or walls." See the open window? Yeah, well that is our air conditioning. Yep, we don't have any air conditioning at all. Gotta love it. Our company is listed in the French CAC - the equivalent of the Dow 30. Hard to believe, ain't it?
3 comments:
Oooo... and this is only day 1. Guess we will be hearing a lot more happy news abt Paris... hmmm.. how long will you be there babe?
If it were up to me, I would be back in NY already. Why did this stupid project have to start during a global recession??
Arggggggg, I wanna poke my eyes out with a baguette!
Reminds me of the first class taught at University College of SU to secretaries about word processing back in the early 1980's. We were supposed to have 15 terminals to the mainframe (you heard me) all hooked up and networked. Didn't happen by the 1st class session & only half of the terminals were working by the 2nd session. Totally spooked the ladies who wanted to run back to their typewriters.
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