Happy hour
Filed under Work
As expected, it was a tough week at work. Ten out of fifteen people got the news on Monday that they will no longer be working for the organization. It’s not effective immediately – some are leaving at the end of the year, some in April next year, some in June – but it was still a tough day. TEN out of FIFTEEN. As you can probably gather from that, the entire company is being restructured and the Cologne office will eventually move to a different space. Everything will be centralized, those employees still left at the offices around the world will just execute orders coming from HQ in Holland and- well- it’s pretty depressing. Again, the people I work with are a great group. But news like this break even the most positive person’s spirit and I think everyone had exhausted their emotions by today.
Also, I had been given the task to organize a press trip to Amsterdam and it proved much more difficult than originally anticipated. All week I was worried I’d mess it up. I was facing a ton of responsibility and the producer (of the television crew going to Amsterdam) was extremely particular about everything, yet proved impossible to reach whenever I needed her to confirm things and- I learned a lot but it was stressful. It took up all of my time and I kept pushing everything else back until it was Friday and I still hadn’t finished the reporting (on Holland press coverage; think Excel sheets, stupid math, paperwork) for September.
So it was 5.30pm on a Friday and the other intern, Patricia, and I were still at the office working away. We usually leave around 5. By 6pm, the two senior colleagues who always stay longer than everyone else kicked us out. They were literally like, “Turn off the computers! Get out! WEEKEND! It’s sunny out there! Move!” – and locked the office behind us. Heh. So I didn’t get to finish the reporting. And Patricia was in fact just waiting for her boyfriend, who is Dutch, to make it into the city (traffic here is horrible, especially during rush hour on a Friday) from the Netherlands. She had some time to kill and I had nothing better to do so we walked a block or two and settled for a nice, Mexican cocktail bar and enjoyed our cocktails at half-price since it was still early. When her boyfriend finally got there and they ordered dinner, I left, slightly tipsy.
– A big city never really feels more like a Big City than it does during rush hour, at the end of the week, when it’s already dark out. The neon lights, the smells out of bars and restaurants, the sea of tail lights as far as the eye can see, honking and shouting, buses and bicycles, masses of people – most still in their work clothes – in a hurry to get places, bright and blurry billboards, people spilling in and out of subways in a constant replay of the same old scene. It’s FANTASTIC.
Oct14
