Of summer parties

The company summer party was on Wednesday. I've been to one of N's summer parties before in San Diego and the whole nature of the event was completely different. In San Diego the event was a whole family event on the beach and had this nice laid back atmosphere and people were just mingling. A very nice event, all in all...

In Finland, however, it was completely different. When I first got the email about the party, the first thing which popped up from it was the age limit; 18 or older. This sort of gave away the theme of the party: drink as much as you for free before heading off to the after party where drinks cost money. This seems to be the general way things in Finland are celebrated, so I guess I'm just fighting windmills. But still.

The actual party was at a parking lot-ish area, where thousands of people were crammed together. And all in all I found it fairly stressful. The positive things, however, were that I got to meet some of the other summer trainees and they seem like an interesting bunch. Fairly international, so I even got to practice my English a bit again and overall networking is always a good thing.

Spontaneity

Spontaneity is a dying thing these days, apparently. At least forms of it. Back in the good ol' days people would just drop by unannounced and going to the park to just hang around didn't need to go through a process that makes the decision making at Brussels look agile. Or perhaps I'm just spending too much time with the wrong type of people.

But regardless, mobile phones are here to stay and everyone has their calendars synch'ed to their phones, their laptops, their PDAs and some calendar application online. That's fine, but is everyone really so busy that all that is warranted? I mean, come on, that's not quality of life if you have to run around all the time and to meet friends you have to book appointments weeks in advance...

Anyway, we did a spontaneous trip to ESO (Eteläsuomalainen Osakunta, a type of fraternity appartment) after hearing that there was supposed to be a party there from a friend who'd heard it from a friend. Turned out that there really wasn't that big a party there and that initially they didn't really want to let our group of four people in, but after some chatting, we finally wound up inside drinking beer and making new friends. The worst part was the slight hangover this morning, but even that was beat and I ended up doing a 13 hour day at work. Well, at least now I can leave work somewhat earlier on Friday and catch a train to Salo to go meet up with some older friends.

Work as usual

I started as a seasonal trainee at a large telecommunications company about four weeks ago and things are finally starting to normalize. Of course the hype around trainee positions at such companies is huge and the first few weeks fly by with a continous feeling of euphoria. But then the honeymoon is over and you realize that it's typical company, just like anything else, just like those smaller companies you've worked for before. Don't get me wrong, this'll look good on my CV and I do learn lots of things daily, but the problem from my point of view is that I'm not getting very much technological competence as I'd like to; instead I am learning about how large organizations work and how things get done or don't. That's of course very important too, but...

On the plus side, the benefits are great. Gyms, saunas, phones, etc. The pay is decent and of course since it's a trainee position, the tasks given are also such. So yeah, overall, this is a good place and offers good networking possibilities, but it isn't exactly what I imagined it to be, but then again, nothing that's hyped will ever meet expectations.

Summer's here

Summer's here again and I'm giving another shot at blogging (actually the fourth shot, to be precise). Let's see what'll happen. Hopefully this will beat my previous record of two years. And yes, it is possible that I can actually keep something up for at least two years...

So anyway, a quick combination of mission statements, visions and whatnots, or a short description of what I'll be writing about: this blog will most likely contain random rants and tiny mundane bits of events that have happened to me. Nothing big, nothing glorious, just some things from my life, my work and my studies.

Oh, and why the name? I really don't know. I guess it's a combination of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the fact that coffee breaks seem to be the best things in life, at least sometimes. And supposedly someone else has also thought up of the phrase, since Google returned some results on it when I did a quick search shortly before setting up this blog. But such is life.