The SnippEthel

Being alone in the office for the whole month, I decided to be a good girl and come and work on Friday afternoon for a change (did I ever mention I never work on Friday afternoons..?).

Arriving at 2pm, I launched Excel for a bit of keyword translation (I'm supposed to translate more than 33,000 keywords from English to French... quite an easy thing you might think but when you come accross Anolis equestris or Alopecia, it gets a bit depressing... any help welcome!). At 2.10pm, the phone rang... amazing! Who can be working today in France, I wondered. I answered : 'Igolus, bonjour'... and all just made sense, it was a phone call from Alex, my Swiss mentor who fancied a little chat on that cloudy and quiet Friday afternoon. After talking about the history of Rock and watching simultaneously YouTube videos, I put the phone down and realized it was 4pm... and now I must go, because I want to catch a film at 4.30... not a very productive afternoon, I guess, a good thing I wasn't paid for it!
Have a good weekend everyone...

I spent the day in Geneva with my boss Amanda.
Amanda picked me up this morning and drove us to Geneva to see a business partner and a potential client. During the five hours we spent in the car, Amanda asked me stuff about my boyfriend, my flat, my step family. She told me where I could buy nice jewelry and which doctor I should go to for each and every problem. She bought me a magnum ice cream and said I could take a nap in the car on our way back.
Oh god! I think I've just got myself a second mother...

Yesterday, as I was coming back to the office after lunch, I was stunned to discover Amanda lying on her office's floor. I was about to panic when I noticed a little piece of clothing comfortably put under her head.
Bewildered, I went to Kate's desk to ask what on earth was going on... had Amanda collapsed? Was it because of the heat? Were the paramedics on their way? Weren't we supposed to do something in the meantime?
Kate looked at me probably thinking I was utterly stupid and told me, as if it was obvious: 'she's just having a nap.'
oh, alright then... why not, after all? Maybe next week, I could bring my bathtub in the office to relax...
Ten minutes later, Amanda woke up, fresh as a rose and went back to work.
I'm not quite sure who would be the lucky winner of the nutter price in this company if we had such a competition...

It's been going on for a while... It always starts in the same way... Early afternoon, a little noise coming from the office window. Kate gets up and you can see her face making a disagreable gesture. She walks to the window, while Sarah and I exchange curious looks: what's it going to be today?
The window opens to display a little blond head chewing gum and... asking for a bank note, or two. Yes, Kate is living this delicate period: two teenage children, both quite ungrateful and greedy for cash, to the great despair of their oh-so-nice-and-weak mother.
Gilly, who's just turned thirteen knows the trick to its perfection. She usually asks for two or three euros, to eat she says (although she is supposed to eat at school, apparently). Mother Kate wouldn't let her daughter starve, would she? Guilt. Works every single time. Gilly expects her mother not to have the change, which is usually the case and ends up with ten euros, or if lucky, twenty. As soon as she gets what she came for, the little blond head disappears without 'thank you' or any other word.
That's when it gets worse... for us! Amanda is used to this and has already closed her office door when Kate returns to her desk with her now empty wallet, whispering things we prefer not to understand. By the time she is back in front of her computer screen, she is already all grumpy. She tries to get her can't-be-bothered husband on the phone but fails inevitably, gets even more grumpy and decides, for some obscure reason, to call her seventeen year old son. Christian, like many boys of his age, doesn't like:
1. to speak on the phone
2. to speak to his mother
3. to speak to any adults
4. and more generally, to speak to anyone who wears trousers above the arse.
That's the moment Kate chooses to ask Christian about his homework and if he is at school and what he is doing, etc. We don't get to hear what is said at the other end of the phone, but it seems Christian invariably answers with two simple words : 'get lost'. When she hangs up, Kate's face is unrecognizable with anger. She tries the husband again - not available, his secretary said - and gives up.
After this little interlude, she finally decides to get back to work and that's when the trouble really starts for us. She either breaks something on her desk, can't find an email she needs, has trouble with a computer programme or gets furious because she forgot how to access our... homepage. She wouldn't deal with this on her own though and shouts at us to come and help. We usually take rounds with Sarah. But Sarah's internship is ending on Friday. Friday... and then it's just going to be me and the Fury. This is going to be a long summer...

Don't look for me this week, I'm away in Biarritz until Sunday... and this is where I will be having dinner tomorrow night... Byyyeee!

Amanda is in a funny mood this week. She has been listening to harpsichord music the whole time she has been in the office. This event has had a weird effect on the crew. Overstressed nicotined workaholic Kate is even more grumpy than usual (if that was at all possible). I can see the top of Sarah's head above my computer screen making little movements from top to bottom following the music... quite funny to watch really, especially when you should concentrate on something you were supposed to finish days ago. I also surprised her twice, half dancing on her way to the printer. As for me, I still desperately contemplate Amanda's door in expectation of Louis XIV any minute now (hasn't appeared yet, I'm sure he will be dressed in blue & gold, just an intuition). Not sure what I'll do when he shows up... enjoy a waltz with the sun king or cut his head off with my scissors ?

Just a little post for those who are nice enough to carry on checking this snoozy website (yes, this is a word of my invention and I'm very proud of it) and to make you wait until I finally get the Internet at home (at this rate, probably 2007).

It has been two months now, since I started working at Igolus. I now know my colleagues a bit better and I can say what I like about them, and what I don't like.
Take Kate for example. Kate is part of a species widely developed on French soil : the smokers. I don't like Kate in the morning. Kate always has something to tell me when I arrive at the office, when I only dream to start work smoothly by checking my emails. That's the first thing I don't like about Kate : she talks to me in the morning. The second thing I don't like about Kate is that not only does she talk to me in the morning, but she likes to talk to me right in my face, so I can smell her lovely breath. Puke time! Sometimes, Kate thinks wise to chew a gum after a cigarette. You would think that would make things better. You would think wrong. Kate likes to chew her gum very loudly. while talking. and far too close to my face. again. in the morning. I'm pretty sure people get jailed for less than that.

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’.

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.

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...