Clean Slate

(And I thought things were going to change…)

Part I
I know it’s been a week already but until the flat-thing goes through it’ll be difficult for me to do more than this. Anyway, I want to share with you my experience as I come back from my first team event. For those of you who remember it, I have a history of team meetings with my team at Mars that were a complete piss-ups. It usually involved flying 15 people somewhere and making sure to get very drunk in between a presentation about what our strategy should have been, a dinner and a hangover. The point I’m trying to make here is that at Mars we used to have very alcoholic team meetings and some of you guys may even remember some of the stories: senior manager getting involved with the cutie in the team, a guy in hospital going through skull X-Rays and not remembering anything the next day, people losing bits and bobs (that was me) and much more. A lot of young people, in a foreign environment, able to write-off unlimited expenses and with (old school) alcoholic managers, you can imagine what the end result is. Not good for the concentration level but clearly very good for building up the team spirit. I still keep very fond memories of those events and lots of stupid pictures. Here’s one (the lucky guy getting licked is me and the other one was a manager!)


Now that I started the new job, you can imagine what went though my mind when I was told about the annual team meeting. In my head this should have been the opportunity to get a fresh start, a clean slate. Drink a couple of glasses of wine at dinner (not to be completely dumb and be in the same spirit as the rest of the team) but clearly avoid the killer night out on my second week. Well, I’ll blame a series of coincidences more than anything else, I swear I really wanted to keep it quiet. To start with the team event was in Strasbourg. Now the only thing I know about Strasbourg (because of my frequent business trips over there) is where to eat, where to have a drink and where to get stupidly drunk. When the word spread that I knew where to go and what to do, I had little choice but give in to my new team mates hoping at least I’d get their appreciation for sharing my expertise. I guess I did, but not without paying the price for it.

Apologies in advance to the Alsacian posse reading this blog but to tell the truth Strasbourg is not the biggest party town ever. It is a mid-sized French town with a German spin to tell the truth. And the bars you find in Strasbourg are consistent with the spirit of the city. So we got to this place (bar des aviateurs) and on a Wed night there isn’t a lot of people out in town at 1 in the morning. So the bar was fairly empty. General mood was getting calmer because we left the restaurant a while before so the alcohol level was clearly going down. Feeling guilty of not delivering what was expected by my new team mates I really only had one way out. The round of tequila shots. Ok, it was my idea, but I just wanted to kick-start the evening (or the end of it) in the hope people wouldn’t remember about the crappy bar. It all went wrong when the initial round was followed by many more (but they switched to jagermaster). 3 hours later we closed tha bar and made our way home. Next day I had the worst hangover of my life. Serious. Fat boy Eddy did train me to get around a couple of shots of jag but nothing close to what happened in Strasbourg. The worst part is that as only a few (selected) ones came with me, the next day everybody wanted to repeat the experience with me. Well, guess what, it did happen again. We got very drunk again. No surprise there. I hope I demonstrated the team my capacity to deliver under any circumstance. This time though I stayed clear of jag (or nearly) and the hangover was soooo much nicer. Anyway all I wanted to say is that I was given an opportunity to start a new reputation and it just didn’t work. To blame Strasbourg would be easy, I’ll blame my (stupid) idea of pleasing everyone…

Right now I’m on the plane and I feel like absolute shit. Needless to say that tonight I won’t be able to get to bed early because we’re seeing some friends for dinner. Even though it’s got a limited interest I’ll publish a couple of pictures about my first team meeting, but one thing I’ll clearly remember is never to drink jagermaster again!

Part II
Back at Victor’s workshop/gallery to steal a bit of bandwidth. It’s Monday morning and instead of being in the office or on a plane I’m kind of chilling out after having done quite a bit of paperwork. Well to tell the truth I had to take a day off in order to deal with all the bureocracy and hope that’ll be it, but I know they’ve got more in store for me. The good news is that we now have a date for signing the final contract and getting the keys (so the time you guys can come and stay at ours is getting closer). Time for me to go now. See you guys soon.

Part III
Nearly forgot. I’ll be in brussels this week. I’m coming up for work on Tuesday morning and off on Thursday. I don’t know if I’ll have much free time, but if any of the bxl resident is up for a drink on Wed, give me a shout. ciao