06.05.06
Amadeus
I’m so tired. It’s been a long day.
This morning I, Steve and the Indian guy walked up to Amadeus, but split up when coming there since we were going to different receptions. I found my reception easily and asked for the person I was supposed to ask for. It was Securitas guards in the reception and I smiled for myself when I recognized the way they worked and compared it to the way I worked at Securitas at Volvo in Gothenburg. They didn’t understand English but finally they managed to call someone and gave me a card and a post it note with a room on and pointed towards a building. I walked off and in to a big house, up in an elevator and searched my way through a maze of corridors before I found the room. There were nice ladies in there who phoned Christoff who would guide me through the day.
I was told that the guy who had had the telephone interview with me had left a couple of month earlier and that Christoff had taken his place. I was also asked if it was okay for me to change project! They had a new project that was much more urgent than the other one. In this project I don’t have to learn C++ and it seems to be only to build a user interface in Java for tracking of what a system is up to. I only had a five minutes explanation of this project, so I can’t give you much detail now. I am a little bit worried that this new project won’t be complex enough for a theis work at Chalmers, but I’m thinking that if they think it will take me six month to do, then it probably is complex enough. We’ll see.
My new manager, which showed not to be Christoff either since he is on another team, was not at Amadeus today, and not Gregory who will be my closest supervisor either. A bit confusing, but every one were very nice to me and I said hello to about fifteen people. Didn’t even try to remember their names today.
My computer was not there when I came but it came some hours later. In the mean time I borrowed another computer and started with an online training on the Amadeus travel agency system. When my computer arrived I continued to read on it and the reading took me the whole day and will probably take me the whole day tomorrow as well. Not a very fun task, but it will give me a good overview of what Amadeus is doing.
The official language on Amadeus is English, therefore I was not worried about not knowing more than a few words in French. I even thought that I should get some activities outside of work where people spoke French so that I had a chance to know. Now I know that the in official language is French… which means that everyone speaks French. Unfortunately I am the only person on that department who doesn’t speak French. Everyone were kind to me and spoke English to me but there are some variations in how well they speak, so it seems hard for them to speak English between themselves. So, most of the day I found myself with a group of French speaking people and I didn’t understand a word (since the words I know were spoken so fast I couldn’t recognize them).
At lunch we went to the restaurant at Amadeus which turned out to be a really good place with around five different dishes to choose from. I think I had duck, and pasta, and it tasted really good. Especially compared to the dry bread and bad tasting water I had the night before and this morning.
At a quarter to six I asked the guys sitting in the same room as me (there are four people in each room), when they usually got home in the evenings. Ten, they said, and laughed but then answered that they used to leave sometime between six and seven, later if they had a lot to do. I don’t like this. In my papers it said that starting time is nine and leaving time 17.30. I hope I don’t have to stay until six every day, but maybe it’s better to follow the others before I know the place.
On my way home one of the guys on my team stopped and gave me a lift home. When back at the hotel I met Johan and Anna and spoke with them for a while. Johan is in my class at Chalmers and I knew he would be coming as well, but I didn’t speak to him until today. He seemed to have had roughly the same experience of his first day as I.
Now I have had “dinner” consisting of even dryer bread and today fresh, not boiled, water. At least the water was a lot more tasteful than the other days. Tomorrow I shall have breakfast at the restaurant up at Amadeus, and then in the evening try to find a grocery store.