I’ve comminicated with a French Mooppet!

Tomorrow will be the last day of my first week in a new contract, and things just got off to an amazing start this week. So far, I’m not sure of what I’m doing, who I actually work for and what we’re actually trying to achieve. I currently work in an office with two other techies, one of whom is leaving at the end of August. We are in a building with five floors, I would say that there are around 40 people here – each person has a few thousand square feet they can call their own. In actual fact everyone has a toilet cubicle that they can call their own.

When I was advised that I had this contract I decided that I wasn’t going to be cynical or grumpy, I managed for about the first 30 minutes that I was on site. My task would seem to encompass relocating fifteen two metre racks of equipment without any outages, sounds pretty easy doesn’t it. The day I started the eight node CAD cluster was down, just like it is every Monday morning – bursting out laughing is OK if you are dealing with the British, but doesn’t seem to go down so well with the French. Anyway it would seem that there is a little politicking going on, I have to report to France and not tell anyone in the UK what I’m doing.

So what to do, I need the help of the British guys, if I’m going to understand the systems and how they work. But their new French masters have explicitly told me not to talk to them about anything, so I’l just do what I normally do and make the decision on the day. There isn’t much else happening at the moment, the French offices are being relocated over the next three weeks – then all the French will bugger off on holiday for the duration. So the whole thing is a bloody farce, I could have stayed at home for an other month, then came to the office to be depressed.

Anyway, there are some plusses with this contract. Firstly I get to work with things I haven’t worked with before (French Muppets for one!)  there is equipment I haven’t seen before. The second plus I already mentioned, my own private toilet cubicle and car parking isn’t a problem. I’m back on a stable operating system for my desktop with Windows XP and Office 2003, so everything almost works. And finally the coffee is free, pretty disgusting but it’s free – so hey ho! Anyway tomorrow is my first Friday and as I’ve been over dressed all week (those readers that know me will be surprised to hear this), I’m probably going to go into the office with no arse in my trousers.

And on a final note, the reason that I’m so pumped about this is as follows, my nice new shiny or should that be whiney French boss wanted a conference call yesterday. I was prepared ready in the conference room that he told me to be in, only to find out that he couldn’t phone the room and could I move – which I  did. Although 15 minutes late off we went, over the next 30 minutes I had the same conversation with him that I’d had on two previous occasions and he was unable to answer any of the seven questions that I’d prepared. I was really hyped for this job and I find out that I’m dealing with Muppets that cant communicate. So it fits well with the stuff that I’ve done over the last year, just fit in with the other Moopeets and you’ll be just fine.