Lunch Groups

At lunch one more time you can see the implicit separation of the ABN-AMRO population.

While dutch people mostly buy their food at the restaurant, the indian people bring their food from home, so there is a long queue of them in front of the array of microwave ovens.

Since I keep on having my good old habits of bringing my own food from home, I always find myself in the microwave ovens queue...
And there I see that the indians look at me and at my food as if I was coming from an other planet!
My food is usually a rice tart or spinach tart slice, and I feel that they have no idea of what the hell is that.
They instead usually have rice, meat cooked in spicy soup, indian bread, "just" the usual food from an indian restaurant, spicy and probably testy, for sure filling up all the air and the oven with a strong curry smell...

Someday I'll ask them if I can taste their food!

Toilets

Even the most trivial places of companies can show differences.

So I can now easily assert that the toilet of the Orange Tree and of the Watermelon Field are different.
Of course is not that the plumbing is different or that the functionalities offered are different.
The differences are in the fact that in the Field the toilets are almost never dirty and bad smelling!

I got quite a different experience when I was at the Orange,where often the toilets were in a very poor conditions, just to use an euphemism...
And I would instead expect the opposite, because of the number of Indians here.
But don't take me wrong: I'm not racist, who knows me and my story knows that I just can't be raciest, specially with Indians.
It's that when ever I eat Indian food, the so wonderfully testy spiced Indian food, I have just a couple of hours of time before I need to go to the toilet and have a post apocalyptic experience... So I thought I would have faced the result of such kind of food.
It seems that my Indian colleagues don't have my issues!

When they talk to me...

When I meet someone I don't know, most of the time he/she start talking to me in Dutch.
Why?

The number of foreign people here is maybe not as high as on the Orange tree, but not so much less to justify the assumption that all here are Dutch.
No, there is a very big percentage of foreign people and it's not possible to ignore it.
And the people here are not dumb, so they could as well talk to me in English instead of Dutch.

So why?
Because I'm not the "typical" foreign for them.
Strangely enough for most of them I look much more Dutch then foreign, even if I'm not tall or blond...

It's that I look much more Dutch then Indian, and since 90% of the foreign here are Indians I get classified as Dutch!
So both Dutch and Indians (if they are able) try to talk with me in Dutch.... I have to learn Dutch quickly...

Please just listen to each other

It was sometime happening even on the Orange tree, but here in the Watermelon field it's the standard way of communication.
During meetings, discussions, work sessions, each participant talks, talks, talks, but almost never listen to what the other are saying!
I keep on observing this pattern and it makes me crazy: two persons (if not more) talking of two different things, arguing and not agreeing just because they do not understand that they are not talking of the same thing!
So one says one thing x about A, the other object with an other thing y about B, both true (maybe), not in contrast, probably compatible, but since x is not y the two persons think they disagree.... so frustrating... specially when you try to make them understand that they actually agree but of course they don't listen to you!!!!

Age...

I feel I'm a bit an exception in this environment...

Why?
Because of my age and because of my nationality and because of my area of expertise, or better because of the three of them together.
Let me be an engineer for a moment...

If I divide the colleagues by area of expertise, age and nationality I would got eight groups:

1. Techy, Young and Dutch
2. Techy, Young and not Dutch
3. Techy, Old and Dutch
4. Techy, Old and not Dutch
5. Non Techy, Young and Dutch
6. Non Techy, Young and not Dutch
7. Non Techy, Old and Dutch
8. Non Techy, Old and not Dutch

Not all the groups have the same number of representatives, and some groups are almost empty.
This is obvious, but... which are the empty or almost empty ones?

I'd say that the empty one is "Non Techy, Old and not Dutch", while the "Techy, Old and not Dutch" and the "Techy, Old and Dutch" are almost empty.

So the old people are mostly in the "Non Techy, Old and Dutch", and this is natural: the Dutch are the one who control the company in most of its aspects and they need Tech people who are mostly young, and a lot from India.

I'm old (yes I am, no doubt about it), I'm not Dutch (or at least not yet...), and I'm a technical person.

This combination is quite rare here, and this makes of me one of the few old techy...

I'm one of the few survivors of the age of the IT Dinosaurs still risking his life on the keyboard! 

The most precious item in the Field

Depending on the place where you go different items have different values.
Here in the Watermelons Field the most precious one is the PEN!
Yes: the pen, the simple easygoing good old writing pen!

I've to guard mine as if it was a special item, a sweet candy, a drop of water in the desert....
I've checked yesterday and discovered that in my working place (a group of 8 desks in a bigger open space), I'm the only proud owner of a pen 😄
So it often happen that some of my colleagues steals it, and I of course get really upset because I'm very jealous of my pen... but on the other side it's very easy to find it again: it is the only one standing around!