Sydney, week 1 - Work

On Monday January 17th I showed up at work, my manager welcomed me and she was kind and professional. She is pretty much as I imagined her: elegant, slim, straightforward. She showed me the floor, my desk, and she introduced me to most of my colleagues.

Oracle APAC (Asia Pacificic) structure is pretty similar to the one in EMEA (Europe – Middle East – Africa): in Sydney BDC - Business Developmente Consultants (like me) work side by side with ISR - Internal Sales Rapresentative (colleagues to whom we pass our filtered contacts); in addition, in this working area you can find people selling all products: Softwares, Middleware, Hardware, Database. It's difficult to understand who does what at first. They use slightly different terms for the same concepts (such as: system instead of Hardware; PSR instead of ISR...). They use GCM (Oracle global CRM) but not for campaigns, not for calling people, just to log opportunities.

People are friendly so far and I expect only to get better. They include: “Aussies”, few people from UK, Indians and Asians.

The building is majestic inside, the whole central part is “empty” meaning that once crossed the entrance, where the receptionist sits, from there you can see the bottom of the bulding (tables for chats \ breaks) and the top (the roof). The only thing...the location: we are very close to a crematorium! :-S To be honest I don't mind, being reminded about death should make us feel more alive in my opinion...

I am in level 4 … but in the Australian way to calculate floors! With this I mean that while in Europe we got ground floor, first floor, second and underground 1 or 2 for car park, in Australia they start to count from the very bottom. As a consequence, if a building has 2 floor underground dedicated to car parks, one, still underground, dedicated to the canteen, the ground floor becomes level 4 such in the Oracle building! It occurred that I went to a shopping center, looked up in the map the shop I was looking for, let's say 3' floor, then I would climb up the stairs 3 floors up and get totally lost as I had reached the 6th floor!!!

Nonetheless, the view from my “4th floor” is pretty good, pretty many trees in the area around.

The canteen exists but I was recommended to wait for the main cook to come back from holidays because she can cook delicious fish while the substitute does not match comparison...soooo just across the street there are a few food shops \ restaurants including a Japanese one!! So far I treated myself with sushi because it is very delicious, healthy and light. Aahhhh... it is just perfect to eat sushi in the shadow with a small river flowing by and many trees around...soon pictures of it will be posted don't worry!

I already had a lunch with the team, one meeting, several trainings. Every evening I was physically but mainly mentally destroyed because my brain had to process so many new things, places, people and their names!!! :-P

In addition, due to a little nasty thread inside my new shoe, I got a pretty deep blister in my right heel...which, once survived the first week, led me to wear flip flops. But I also got a blister from them!! So, as I wanted to take advantage of the hotel gym, and I could not wear any shoes at all, I ran barefooted...but I am so not used to it that I got additional blisters from there as well!! Disaster :-((

To conclude, I went out (just really out because the destination was the Chelsea pub located just beside Mantra Hotel) with 3 australian colleagues, 2 of them from Melbourne and 1 from Sydney. They were real aussies!! People you could see inside an Australian show on MTV, brilliant! I played pool with one of them and I won (yuppie yeah) and then we had a pleasant dinner. Another night of that week I went out with 2 Italian friends accidentally also in Sydney and we took our first night walk to Sydney Cove... spectacular.