Climbing back up to that 35,000 foot motorway above the clouds. The moon, seriously full on the trip out, has waned only slightly in the intervening days. On night flights they dim the cabin lights during takeoff and landing. For my money (or in this case, the company’s money), on nights like this they could keep the interior lights off for the entire journey. There are mountains up here, vaporous though they may be, which assume an entirely new vision of loveliness under a stark white moon. This panorama is obliterated completely by the pizza-parlour lighting from the inside of an Airbus.
My band of merry men and I have been spending quite a bit of time in Germany as of late. Outside the UK, Germany is our company’s largest European market. Lots of good consumers in Deutschland, despite their anachronistic policy of closing all shops on Sundays. If you find yourself famished in Hamburg on Sunday and your fridge contains two packets of mustard and a jar of expired mayonnaise, you’re pretty much fucked. You might find a few petrol stations open but those hotdogs have been twirling on their little circular runs since at least last Spring so the smart money would be on giving them a miss.
In past posts I have raged against stereotyping entire cultures based on individual behaviour or idiosyncrasies. The US is not filled to the brim with gun-toting, slack-jawed, rednecks named Bubba-Billy-Bob (a full 49% do not fall into that category) and although popular reality TV shows might lead viewers to believe otherwise, not all the English are Chaves. Likewise I am not going to pigeon-hole all of Germany based on my experiences with a handful of IT geeks- I’ll leave that up to you.
I’m one of those cowboy-type IT guys who pretty much makes it up as I go along. Sure, I’ve done a lot of project management stuff with wall-sized charts, graphs and Post-it notes but at the end of the day I’m the guy they pay to make it work- no matter what -and I better not think about getting on the plane back to London unless the Finance Director from whatever remote outpost I’ve been working in is so happy he shits rose pedals.
Working alongside my German colleagues has been, continues to be, an enlightening experience. They take nothing for granted, trust no procedure unless it has been demonstrated to them and consider anything less than complete success a dismal failure. They like plans and structure and are uncomfortable when things deviate from what’s on their worksheets.
Since I’ve been doing these rollouts for over two years I have become a bit, shall we say, complacent about the process. One site visit, a couple of days of prep work and one weekend to migrate usually does the trick. When things go wrong, and they always do, we’re there to make it all better. We get the place running and hand off to Core Services for on-going support. We don’t have the time to baby-sit because come Monday night, we’re off to our next job. My boys and I are fixers and like smoke-jumpers everywhere we take huge, chest-expanding pride in the job we do.
Looking at these two very divergent attitudes, one might think that there would arise a good deal of friction between the teams. In reality, we complement each other fairly well. They force us to be more precise and process driven and for our part we bring to the party an aptitude for adaptation and think-on-your-feet cleverness. It’s up to me to make sure everyone plays nice, catch the flack and push things along. It is almost, but not completely, like herding cats.
Fast forward.
It’s been months since I have been to Paris and I can’t say I have really missed it. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Paris as a place to holiday: the food is great, the shops are lovely and there are no end of little streets to explore. Unfortunately I have spent far too much time working in the suburbs of Paris in offices that have Neanderthal IT infrastructures and appallingly rude employees who smoke at their desks and throw their laptops if they don’t get their way. Experiences such as these knocked the stuffing out of the joy I once felt whenever I arrived at The City of Lights.
Added to my justifiable trepidation is the fact that I have just had the extremely unfortunate experience of catching the Eurostar from its new domicile at St. Pancras. On November 14th the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo was closed and moved to the refurbished St. Pancras station. The retrofit cost more than the GDP of Africa and provides a direct high-speed link to Paris. Trains from Waterloo travelled on the conventional, slower, tracks on the English side before speeding up once they got into France. It took the British 11 years to install their high-speed line while the French had their tracks ready nearly as soon as the last scoop of earth was removed from the Chunnel.
The upshot of all this upheaval has been to transform a dingy 19th station into a soulless 21st century station- and save 20 min on the journey time to Paris and Brussels. Ken Livingstone, the Lord Mayor of London, recently asked “why would anyone fly to Paris anymore?” Allow me to tell you: St. Pancras is a bloody nightmare. Let’s hope it’s still a work in progress because if this is a finished product Eurostar is doomed.
There is no doubt they increased the space available but whomever they got to allocate that space must be one for hard nights on the town. They created a huge ticket counter but reduced the number of automatic ticket machines. They spaced out security and passport control but since there seems to be less staff available it takes longer to get through. The lounge hasn’t been built yet so they put up a curtain around a bunch of garden chairs and shoved us all in there. Outside in cattle class they also have fewer seats with backs and have littered the area with a bunch of padded benches. They changed our gate assignment three times and the rush to the trains was only slightly less frantic than a rugby scrum. The signage is minimal and placed exactly where it is least visible. In short, in every conceivable way they have managed to transform the reasonably pleasant and hassle-free experience of boarding a train at Waterloo into a painful, dehumanizing and loathsome enterprise. Well done!
Even 1st class can’t save this trip. They didn’t put on enough food, the train is standing-room-only and as usual the loos have gone beyond filthy into a realm of wretchedness only approached by open sewers or Edgware Road kebab shops.
We’re coming up to Paris now and the world outside my window has descended into darkness. The transport strike is over now but several of the more disenfranchised suburbs are burning. For the French, this is the sort of equilibrium that allows them to simultaneously feel good and miserable and makes for good conversations over wine.
Four days later and I’m outbound from Paris. The train is much less crowded and they actually put on enough food for everyone. A pod of art dealers is sitting across from me; we’ve been chatting about their most recent acquisition- a small rectangular cast of St. Sebastian having his wounds attended by women. It’s a bit of an odd piece of a type generally created for nunneries. As an 18th century work it’s a bit past my normal area of expertise and taste but it does have a delicate charm. They sank into a heated debate about the volatility of the contemporary art market so I bowed out to try and put a ribbon around this entry.
Between now and the end of the year we have to finish up three more German sites, attend a staggering array of office parties and beg The Powers That Be for the money to keep my boys and I in nice hotels for a few months longer. We all know that sooner or later the golden tap of funding is going to be turned off and eventually we will have to return to more conventional jobs or unemployment. After two and a half years of this gig, the thought of riding a desk again makes the bile rise into my mouth.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. At the agency I used to work at they lost one of their only clients and offered voluntary redundancy to the entire staff. 43 took them up on it even though they only really needed 20 to fall on their swords. 43 out of 180 people decided that a payoff and the dole queue was preferable to sitting in a glass box staring at glowing monitors all day while their souls were slowly sucked from their bodies through their asses.
This gives me hope. No one who works in advertising, media, PR or any similar occupation should ever take their jobs seriously. Trust me on this, if the entire industry were to vanish tomorrow the only thing the huddled masses would notice, apart from a gigantic sucking sound, would be that they can now watch their favourite TV shows without being interrupted by people with perfect teeth making them feel inadequate about their choices in underarm deodorant.
We just cleared the channel tunnel. From this point it used to take about an hour to reach central London- they’ve cut that time in half, which is a nice trick even if we do have to go to the wretched St. Pancras. I’ll spare you a repeat of my tirade against Eurostar’s new London home and instead pass along a snippet of conversation I overheard at a dinner party: “St. Pancras might be pretty but I liked making the French arrive at Waterloo.” Some things never change.
