Friday, June 4, 2010

A Shrewd Businessman I am Not

Met a nice Irish fellow in Irdeto, who had a contact with a property to rent on a good bus route. Currently living in a hotel, I was naturally interested. So earlier today we piled into his flashy BMW and fnipped down the motorway to take a look. Now, a few days ago, a Portuguese fellow had told me that Dutch apartments were odd. He wasn't far wrong.
Snuggled away in a massive house, was a room. In the room there was a bed, a desk and a wardrobe as you might expect. What I didn't expect was the shower and kitchen-in-a-cupboard which occupied the same space. Of course at this point I'm close to paying for my own hotel room, so I just took the first offer. Colum from Offaly, who introduced me to the Dutch landlady, later called me a gobshite for not haggling more on the way back. It's not the first time this has been pointed out to me.

I later found out that Colum was Global Director of Customer Services for the company. Spending his time sending his crack team of engineers around the world to troubleshoot television network issues, and spending his money on expensive IBM servers. It's nice to know that one of the higher ups would take an hour out of his day at the spur of a moment to help an Intern get set up with a house. He also introduced me to some other managers in the company over lunch, including a chap who graduated from DCU back before it was called DCU.

Today I spent reading more technet articles and discussions regarding troubleshooting windows servers and virtual machines, as well as more Irdeto manuals. I've yet to do anything meaningful, but I'm still enjoying it. I also had the chance to watch some of the development teams demonstrate some fixes for various security problems they've been working on. The workforce here really is diverse, in IKEA I was working with British, Americans, Australians, Brazilians and Swedes, but that feels relatively tame compared to the multi-national crack team of programmers and developers they have here. I quite like the atmosphere of it.

I've eaten more burgers and club sandwiches in the past week, than I have in the past year. They really do make a good substitute for dinner when you're paying restaurant prices. Less than half the price and just as filling.

2 comments:

  1. When you come home, go to sutton and to a shop called coffeys, they do one of the best club sandwitches...

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