Saturday, January 10, 2009

January 8, 2009: Multilingual Madness

Woke up to some Dr. Dre this morning, made me remember Victoria for some reason. At the bus stop a disgruntled old man gave the bus driver a piece of his mind thinking that the bus should have left earlier, turns out that his watch was wrong. I arrived at work and spent a lazy morning reading over material relevant to the project that I am working on. Had a pizza for the third day in a row, they are really good but a bit pricy at 5-8 Euro.

 

The best part of my day today started after lunch when Dr. Rau, Roman and myself piled into Dr. Rau’s Audi A6 and hit the Autobahn en route to one of the companies that Dynetek sub-contracts to. We were cruising at 140 km/h and I noticed that there was a small sticker on the speedometer, turns out that with the winter tires on the car was limited to a recommended 210 km/h. People were passing us going easily 190-200 km/h while we calmly pushed towards this warehouse in the middle of a rural area about an hour out of Lintorf.

 

We arrived, shook hands with the people who worked there and got a tour of the factory. The factory had a magical duo of machines, a CNC laser sheet cutter and a CNC laser tube cutter. I stood memorized by the high power laser as it went from engraving serial numbers to cutting elaborate shapes into sheet metal. There were also small welding machines designed to weld 1/8” to 1” stainless steel tubing, they were also fun to watch.

 

We arrived at the area of the factory designated to assembling Dynetek products. Everyone began discussing the details of the project in German as I looked around while trying to translate pieces of the conversation. Our client took me aside and tried to talk to me in French thinking that all Canadians speak French; he then switched to perfect English when he figured out that that was my language of choice/only language. He immediately continued the technical discussion in perfect English. Everyone else took a cue and switched to English. It is amazing here how so many people can speak all these languages so well. After the discussion we all shook hands and I was back on the Autobahn heading to Lintorf.

 

After a quick bus ride I bought some candy, vegetables, beer and onions and arrived at home. Tonight was a particularly good night for the Internet harvest and I was able to talk to both my mother and Sarah on Skype. I hope my mom can figure it out for next time. Well . . . goodnight world, see you again on the morrow.

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