Work

Typed on August 17th, Friday after work. This entry is about my second to last week at work.

So when I got to the office on Wednesday, there is a new girl at Christiane’s desk. I think she is joining the controlling department. Don’t think she speaks English either but she’s nice. I can tell she’s new since she had a guest card and she called Oli, Herr Raad. That sounded really weird. She was working with the laptop because they had a lot of trouble with the desktop. It took forever to turn on. At one point, she and Oli were both just staring at the screen for like 5 minutes.

My supervisor wasn’t here the whole week. So I didn’t really do much. Just searched the Internet some more and organized my stuff.

On Friday, I gave a presentation on the different project management styles of Germany versus the US to some Chinese and German students who were visiting Deutsche Bahn. Some people from the Strategy department came and gave a presentation. Long presentation and then the students asked a lot of questions. Some of those questions weren’t that great. Like, “why’s the Bahn Card so expensive?” Anyhow, I thought my presentation went okay. I rushed through the slides though. I have this really habit of making up a script in my head, rehearsing it, and then play it back. I don’t think that’s the best way of presenting. Really need to work on this. I think I should be more natural and just improvise more. Except that I have doubts about my ability to improvise. I just end up saying “uh” a lot, which is no good either. Sigh.

Afterwards, Lauren, the other intern who presented, and I went out to lunch. Apparently there is a restaurant at the Sony Center that has a special everyday for Deutsche Bahn employees. So the whole meal was only about 6 Euros. Which is really great. Don’t find out about stuff like this when your coworkers all eat at the office. We chatted about California and school. Lauren goes to Stanford and is from New York. Kati joined us later on and we talked about random stuff such as having siblings. Lauren’s an only child while Kati has at least one older sister. We didn’t really get to talk a whole lot since it was like 2:30pm and we all had to get back to work.

My stomach hasn’t been feeling too well lately. It was pretty bad in the afternoon. I should’ve just gone home early. But I stayed until both of my officemates left. I don’t think it’s actually that bad except that I was also really depressed about leaving Germany. I mean, I’m really glad to be going home but I’m really going to miss my coworkers. They’re such nice people. And fun to work with. I wish I can do it all over again except that I know German. I mean, they make an effort to eat lunch together everyday. You don’t find that everywhere. Not even in other departments of Deutsche Bahn. It makes people feel like they’re part of a family. And they are like a family. They know the names of each other’s family members, have each other’s cell phone numbers, and make fun of each other. I think when you can joke around with another person, poke fun at them, and laugh with them, that’s when you really get to know them. I only make fun of people that I consider friends. Because they know that I’m just joking around and not being mean.

Anyway, I came back to my dorm and took a short nap. All the FUBiS kids are leaving tomorrow. Well, except for one of the guys who is staying for the weekend. I don’t mind since that means I’ll have company. It’ll be really lonely when everyone leaves though. I just got really, really depressed thinking about leaving Germany and not working with my DB coworkers anymore. So I played some Starcraft to keep myself distracted. Didn’t help too much since I kept losing but it killed time. I feel better after writing this all down though.