Crazy week!

Once again, work has become nuts last week. On Saturday night, while I was in Italy for the weekend to celebrate the Sponsor's birthday, I got an sms from a senior manager of the Paris office:

From: Senior Manager

To: DDgirl

Hey DDgirl! we have to provide additional information and analyses to our client, and a report to issue for Monday evening. I understand from your ususal manager (agreed with the partner) that you could come up to Paris on Monday for the day. I do not know if you were aware. Please call me on my mobile so we can discuss. Thanx have a nice wekend. SM.

Now, first of all, since she had not picked up the damned phone to tell me before, of course I was not aware. Secondly I was on another project (I still am) and I was already running late on it, so that would mean losing a whole day on my prior project.

Furthermore, during the whole weekend the railway site often does not work.

So I got up at 4:30 AM on Monday, went to the rilway station and jumped on the 5:30 bullet train to Paris. Of course it was full, so I had to stand into the bar wagon for two solid hours. Once in Paris, our ffice is almost one hour from the station, so I jumped into the cab I had booke on the evening before (gettin a cab on monday morning in paris = crazy), and continued working on project 1 on the whole way.

When I finally got to the Paris office, the Senior Manager was not there (8:30) because she has kids and she's always late in the morning. Let me say tht I hate someone who makes you wake up at 4:30 in the morning and than cannot manage herself to be on time.

The good thing is I could continue working on project 1 until she finally dragged her butt to the office 9:30AM!!!!! WTF!!!!

Now let me explain that the reason I'm the only one who is able to work on this job is that the whole documentation is only available in Italian, and noone but me is fluent in Italian in the whole French office (we're talking about 3000 people). Anyway.

By this time I had talked to my usual boss on the phone, and she had made me promise I would be back in my city office on Tuesday morning, and not to be too tired because we were going to have a tough week (great...)

Needless to say, even by skipping lunch we were still far from issuing a report by 8:30PM. At this point, I was granted permission to leave, which means I managed to take the bullet train leaving at 10PM and that I was at home at 12:15.

Of course I went to the office at 7AM on Tuesday morning... So it was a crazy week, and so will be next one.

The cute thing is that one of my best friends from college who now lives in London (we'll call her business girl, because she has a great creer going on) came to visit me and KS with her boyfriend (The Icelander, because he's from Iceland and I don't know anyone else from Iceland, even though they both live in London now...).

It was so good to be able to catch up and gossip, to complain about our expat situation, to go shopping together and all this stuff! Plus the boys did get along very well, so we're planning to visit them in London at the end of the summer, whih is great, especially sinc ealthough I used to live in England, well, I've never been in London!!

Okay, just because I had said I would post it, this is a picture of the cake I've prepared for my dad's and my birthdays...