The SnippEthel

With Kate on holiday this week, I have twice as much work and with Amanda having a day off, I was on my own yesterday at the wheel of Igolus. Unfortunately, there was no way I could enjoy this little freedom by dancing around the office, as Sarah the trainee was here as well. Shame...
I still find it really weird to use that word: trainee. This is essentially because ‘trainee’ can also be understood as ‘trainée’, an old fashion French term meaning... whore. The coincidence of translations can be quite cruel. Being a trainee is hard enough (work with hardly any pay!) without having to be insulted all day long by your title (although I have a colleague who didn’t mind too much calling a trainee a ‘special needs monkey’, but well, he had his reasons and that’s another story anyway...)
For a long time, the double meaning didn’t occur to me. But I clearly remember the day it struck me.
When I was single and in London, I used to take the train every Saturday to Central London to get my French Saturday paper. I would sometimes have to search through five newsagents to find it. Then, I would end up in a café, order a black americano and start my reading, looking through the pictures first. One day, as I was comfortably sitting at a Caffe Nero, reading and sipping coffee, my attention was taken from my paper. In front of me, a member of staff was cleaning a table, her back to me and in large capital letters, I could read on her T-shirt: TRAINEE. For a moment, I was really upset, and it took me a while to understand she had just started her job and wasn’t here to offer an hour in the hotel next door.
Week after week, I would come back to that same café and notice the entire staff changed every two or three weeks. I like to think they found a better place. Somewhere they were given a T-shirt that said: ‘I’m great’.

Despite having no electricity, no hot water, no furniture and no food, Leo & I decided to spend our first night in our brand new flat in Lyon.
After a nice meal chez Maminou (delicious crepes !), we took a walk back to our flat and came accross the Albion, a nice pub, two minutes from our building. Our feet took us almost automatically inside and it suddenly just felt like home. On a board, the prices for pints of Carlsberg, Fosters (pouah!) & Strongbow. In a corner, a dartboard, a giant screen, and a familiar voice : the Sky football commentator we heard so many times in the pubs of the British capital. We stayed and watch the end of Arsenal/Villareal (quite a good game, for what we saw). I guess we're going to be regulars...
Once the game finished, we walked home (5th floor and the elevator is due to work... tomorrow). There isn't much to do in a flat when you cannot put the lights on, apart from spying on the neighbours... so we just opened our sleeping bags.
The big move is planned for this Saturday.

I spent the whole Easter weekend in Avignon with Leo.
On this day, a year ago, we were celebrating Juju's birthday... oh and yes, this is when we met!

I thought I had readapted quite well to life in France. I haven't been run over by any car, looking the wrong way. I have stopped eating crisps all the time. I haven't drunk one pint of beer. I haven't checked the BBC Sport News website once to tease Mike.
But things could not be that simple. Of course, they couldn't! How naïve I was, thinking I had overcome any symptoms of Britishness! Two years in Britain cannot leave sane French people without any kind of trauma (apart from the fact you have dramatically put on weight because of all those crisps you ate and all that beer you drank).
Today at work, everything seemed normal. Amanda was getting bored on the phone with a major client named Peter (I'm pretty sure I will have good material to share about him in the near future). Sarah was apparently trying to see if she could place her head inside her computer screen (hasn't succeeded yet). Kate was complaining about her phone she keeps dropping on the floor and Nikky was trying to finish stuff so she could give birth to her twin girls without worrying about cleaning her desktop.
I was quietly going through a technical guide sent by our spanish agent when the incident occurred. So you may well say it was all the fault of the Spanish.
As I tried to concentrate as hard as I could to read that boring document in English, Nikky felt appropriate to call me. Instead of replying by a gentle and very appropriate 'oui ?', my brain got confused in translation, and to my greatest terror, I heard myself giving her a far-too-loud-to-be-mistaken 'yeeeaaahh ?'. Before I could bury my head in the carpet, I saw three heads (thank god Amanda has her own office) looking at me with eyebrows raised to the ceiling. AArrrgghh, I still feel ridiculous. Life is hard. I am a misfit.

...em, maybe not quite yet (picture taken outside the house this morning).

In Lyon, we don't have the Swiss Tower, that beautiful Norman Foster building commonly known as the Gherkin which brings beauty to the City of London. However, in Lyon, we have 'le Crayon' aka 'the Pencil'. It's probably the tallest building (no time for research, sorry) and it's called like that because it looks like a pencil, only much... bigger (you may pronounce this last word with an american accent, as I very much like to say it, 'bigger' being one of my favourite words to say in American - thanks to Comfort Eagle by the great band Cake - 'liar' is another word of the kind... I could say 'liar' all day long just for fun...)

I have completed my fourth day at Igolus and it's going well. I have discovered a new thing I did not believe existed anymore: good senior management.
During two years at Maggy Peppins, my big boss spent nine months on maternity leave and came an average of one day a week during the rest of the time. When the evil Veronica would be at Maggy Peppins, she would barely talk to me, only saying hello and goodbye. She was a bad bad bad director and most of the staff hated her. Then there was Bernie, who assumed he was the boss because she was never there. But Bernie is buried deep deep down so let him rest in peace!
Anyway, Amanda my new boss has created and managed her own company for the last 23 years. She knows her stuff. She is there when I arrive and there when I leave. She doesn't hold any information she has because she is not scared to lose power by doing so. Even though I arrived four days ago, she is still interested in listening to any crap ideas I might come up with. Amanda my new boss brings back very nice expressos at tea time from the café next door for everybody. She will leave me in charge of Igolus tomorrow afternoon because noone else can be there (apart from Sarah who seems terrified of phones and is hiding most of the time behind mountains of technical documents). Amanda is taking me to Biarritz in June for a congress (and I have heard Bernie is going too... oooh dear, is it my fate ? is it my destiny ?). Amanda is respected by everyone... but she can be a bit scary sometimes when she points her glasses at me...

Yesterday was my first day at work. After two years at Maggy Peppins with a bunch of great people (and a couple of evil ones), I was feeling a bit apprehensive for several reasons. There are only three people working there (one of them leaving next week). The two women (yes, girls only...) I will spend most of my time with have been working together for the past twenty years, they are much older and have kids my age... I guess we won't go for a pint after work!
Anyway, I arrived at Igolus on Monday morning at 9.30 and met the staff: Amanda the boss, Kate her assistant/admin/researcher & Nikky who is heavily pregnant with twins. Then I met Sarah who arrived last week to do some work experience. Guess what... yes, she is older than me... damn!
Amanda took almost all morning to tell me what I will have to do. Then I went for lunch with Sarah who went to the same university and told me our old alcoholic russian teacher is still in operation. In the afternoon, I had some time to get started and while going through my new contract of employment, I discovered I had been hired as a 'development manager'.... oooups!! I don't even know what that means. I guess this is going to get messy.

6am on Thursday morning. After a quick coffee, we put all our mess in the car, leave the keys in the kitchen and our flatmate Toto asleep in his bed. Here we go.

By 10.30, we are at the other end of the Tunnel, ready to cross France from North to South. Along the road, we see fields after fields, and in the middle of them, a dozen tiny square cemeteries in memory of the WW1 soldiers.

We pass Dijon and all the vineyards, and Lyon, where we will go back so soon. Finally, 12 hours later, we arrive in a little village where we will rest for a few days before the beginning of our new life.