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August 30, 2007

To All My Friends

Dear you,

Thanks for the e-mail. How have you been? I too miss hanging out together. Remember the time at that place with the thing? Well, something almost exactly like that happened to me in my first week in London. Except this time, the cars drove on the other side of the road – if you know what I mean.

London has been fantastic. In the two weeks before school started I spent time searching for a place to live. My flatmates are probably the best people in the entire year. We have an American girl who's real voice I have yet to hear, an Aussie girl who must have been an actress or a spy before the program and an American guy who has been described as "strikingly handsome". We spent the whole two weeks hunting down flats - hasn't been that easy looking for a 4 bedroom place. Most of the places we saw were tiny and overpriced. I'm amazed that many of the people I've talked to are paying over £200(!) per person per week. Ridiculous. We were lucky enough to run into a builder during our hunt and ended up dealing directly with a landlord. We're in a temporary place right now - a three bedroom flat - but we're moving to a four bedroom next month. The neighbourhood that we're in is great. Maida Vale - residential mainly with some quaint shops, restaurants and pubs.

It hasn't been all work. The evenings were filled with the Flat Hunters' Pub Crawl. It was more or less an excuse to get togther and answer the questions about where I was from, what I did and what I'm doing over and over again. This is all while feeling bad about not having found a flat, but good with the increasing number of beers imbibed. The Americans in the crowd lead the charge to the clubs afterwards. I'm thoroughly impressed by their exuberance.

School officially started with registration, Pimms and a barbeque this past Monday. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday at Lord's Cricket Grounds hearing about what a great and diverse group of people we are. We did something called The Intenational Citizens Game. Essentially the countries present had to do 2 minute skits to introduce themselves to the rest of the class. It was hilarious. The South Koreans came in singing this traditional korean boating song. The Germans tried to sell themselves off. As expected from anyone in Canada, we blatantly ripped off the I Am Canadian rant. Figures that we'd present a beer commercial to tout our national identity. I didn't realize the number of Americans and Indians in the course. Though about 53 countries are represented in our class.

I've been introduced to my study group - the people I'm going to spend the most time with for the rest of the year. They're a pretty cool group. More about them later. I have to run off now to find some food before our career services talk.

Tah for now, write back soon.

Wince

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Posted at 2:06 PM
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August 28, 2007

Ping

I'm not dead. Just very busy.

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Posted at 8:09 PM
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August 15, 2007

Rah Rah Jetlag

Well, here I am in London.

It's 5:30 in the morning. I've had a grand total of two hours of sleep tonight and it doesn't look like I'll be getting back to the delightful world of REM land any time soon. Jetlag after only being here for two days is acceptable, I guess. Personally I believe that my body hates me for some reason. Maybe it's the abuse I put it through ever since landing here.

The flight over was uneventful. A minor annoyance took the form of a baby two rows ahead of me that enjoyed wailing intermittently. After landing, I dropped off my things at London House at Goodenough College and ran off to get my HSBC account set up. The day was capped off with too much drinking at the Windsor Castle for the Flat Hunters' Pub Crawl kickoff. Pictures ici.

Next time - flathunting...

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Posted at 5:58 AM
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August 12, 2007

But First - Finish Packing

Guess this is it.

This time tomorrow, I should be getting ready to drink my face off at the Flat Hunters' Pub Crawl.

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Posted at 6:05 PM
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August 04, 2007

Leaving Toronto

It's been over a week now since I've said good bye to to Toronto for the final time. My last day at work was greeted with a minor prank. The Summit wouldn't start, so I thought the boys had drained my battery. In actuality though, they only removed a fuse from the car. This was tame compared to their other ideas of potentially removing the driver's seat, putting an inflatable woman in the passenger seat and parking it up front or going down to Kingston road and getting the much dirtier, cracked out non-inflatable version.

I suppose the tameness of this prank was too little for one Bradley Allan Waller. Brad has taken it upon himself to give me personal wake up calls between 6:30am - 8:00am every day this week. This would be nice under any other circumstances except that Brad finds himself in EDT, while I'm in MDT. A full 2 hours behind him. Waking up to a cellphone at 4:30 in my time off is no treat.

My old company has treated me reasonably well in the five years that I've spent there. I belive that I was incredibly lucky in getting my first big break as a co-op in the labs. From there, my career has been a string of fortunate coincidences leading up to London Business School. It's bittersweet to be leaving as there are difficult times ahead for the company. There's light at the end of the tunnel, but it's going to be a hard road ahead. There are a number of issues which will make it difficult for people there - The most of which I've experienced is that for a mid-sized company, it's rather fat and slow.

Operations and compliance wise, there are more streamlined ways of achieving the same results. I have faith that there are good people that are able to institute change, unfortunately everyone is so swamped dealing with/working in the existing inefficiencies to do so. Compounding the isssue are some of the newer policies around personnel. The best and the brightest are filtering out and for the most part, they won't be replaced. Eventually people will be scrambling to get day-to-day operations under control will open up even bigger issues for the company. This is particularly evident from a suggestion from a director heard just before I left which has potential SOX implications. It is unfortunate that the company is hanging its hat purely on six-sigma for process change rather than empowering the people who work within the process every single day to drive improvements.

Best of luck to my friends still there. In spite of everything else I've said, I still beileve the company is still trying to do the right thing and it's comforting to know that employees are protected.

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Posted at 11:59 PM
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