work is play

Sitting down, sifting
Through, sending chats, emails, too,
Work is play.  It's true.


The European work ethic is not a joke.  We really do take a full hour (sometimes more!  gasp!) for lunch, with coffee breaks of half an hour or so in both morning and afternoon.  We arrive at 9 or 9:30 and leave at 5:30 or 6.  My first week, I would come in to an empty office at 8:30 and sit by myself for an hour before anyone else arrived, and they were all convinced that I was a crazy, workaholic American.  I wonder why we condition ourselves that way in the states?  It varies from industry to industry, too.  I know at Google we had a really great environment that encouraged people to be happy... and to stay as long as possible at the office, working.  I was on campus for more than 14 hours some days; after work, why not just stay for Frisbee, dinner, pool, a movie, and some Rock Band?  It was especially tempting for interns: we didn't have apartments that were furnished in particular, and getting to the City took an hour, so...

But the atmosphere at work is amazing for other reasons, too!  Maybe it's just because I'm new here and haven't had the chance to make many other friends, but the people I work with are definitely more than just "the people I work with."  We go skiing on the weekends, out to shows (we went to see "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde last night, which I highly recommend!), out for drinks, etc.  This weekend some of the guys are having a LAN party.  I get to talk to Joe a lot of days.  His boss takes him rock climbing, and keeps tabs on my apartment search (which, I do believe, is at an end now, finally).  We spent an afternoon building a snowman and having a snowball fight when CERN was buried under inches of the fluffy white stuff.

I guess I think the best work comes from happy people.  There's no shortage of intellectual stimulation; hell, the tables at Restaurant 1 are covered in visualisations of results from some of the experiments (ISOLDE, etc.).  There's a club for nearly everything: skiing, ballroom dancing, boxing, scuba, tai chi... dang.  Everyone uses personal email and work email interchangeably for communication; we sit in chatrooms with our GMail accounts and send event invites from our CERN accounts and... well, heaven only knows.

Well, in other news.... what.... I have an apartment to live in (14 Rue Jean Dassier, 1er étage), which I will be signing for tomorrow, assuming that I can acquire a legal paper that states that I am a Good Person.  That's kind of weird, but it's fine, I guess.  Today I'm planning to get a tour of the UN if I can: my roommate right now is a UN intern working at the German consulate.  Pretty awesome.

Still working on that camera thing.  It's really a shame that xD is incompatible with Linux.  I'll find someone with a Windows laptop and a card reader as soon as I can... eeps.