Day 17

Meetings, so many meetings - it’s a wonder they get anything done.  Started the day with our weekly team meeting to review the events of the past week.  Then a weekly catch up with the guys at Volvo IT (the company that runs our data centre in EMEA), followed by an hour long kick-off meeting for the EMEA AD/Exchange migration project team.  Phew. 

For those of you that haven’t nodded off already, EMEA stands for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.  It’s one of three global ‘regions’ that ASSA ABLOY’s structure is broken into – the others being the Americas and, of course, Asia Pacific.

Only the first meeting was face to face – the others were via phone conference.  One of the by-products of working with a geographically separated team is that most of your contact is via email or phone.  As an example, the project team in the last meeting consisted of a German, a Norwegian, a Brit, a Dutchman, a Frenchman and a Finn.  It works okay, but is not a perfect substitute for traditional interactions.

Lunch today was a bit of a crap-shoot.  I picked the vegetarian option – baked potato and something something.  Turns out the ‘something something’ was steamed cauliflower and a weird-looking pink sauce.  It was actually pretty tasty, the ‘sauce’ was cold and had small pieces of vegetables in it – I couldn’t quite place the taste but it was good with the potato. 

As I was queuing for lunch today I noticed that Swedes actually are pretty tall.  I was far from the tallest person in the lunch room, and there were quite a few people my height.  Most of the time I’m among the tallest in most rooms so it was a bit of a shock.  Now that I think of it, I was in a lift at the hotel in Stockholm and one guy actually had to duck to get through the doorway!  Now that's tall.

After lunch I spent three hours with Magnus again.  He used to work for the SSC team here in Landskrona (in fact I’m sitting at his old desk) and is now being called in as a contractor when needed.  He’s been giving me a handover on one of the projects I’m working on.  I won’t go into details, but it’s the type of project that management wants done without understanding the complexities.  The project started, got nowhere, stalled and has been sitting there without a project manager since Magnus left.  No one wants to do it so guess what – they’ve given it to me!  Let’s just say it’s the least enjoyable part of my trip so far…

Having no luck with my Olympics streaming tonight, only catching bits and pieces.  I found an official EurovisionSports site that is playing live streams from a bunch of events – good quality and not many drop-outs.  But when they say ‘live feed’ they mean just that – there’s no commentary at all; just the sound of skis on snow, PA announcements and the occasional helicopter.  Bummer.

[Update] Found a decent web stream - http://www.vip--tv.com/londoner.php - watching Men's downhill.  Woohoo!!