Gainfully employed

I resolve that the beginning of work will not mark the end of fun things to post to this blog. I promise I'll be vigilant on this front. Actually, I probably won't talk much about work here, but wanted to give you an initial sense of how I'll be spending ~1/3 of my hours in Hungary!

Funnily enough, I began work on Labor Day. Most everyone was back from August vacation, so I think I've met nearly the entire office. Everyone's been incredibly friendly and approachable - most people eat lunch together in the kitchen, and people just as readily stop by each other's offices as pick up the phone. The office is smaller than what I was used to in Chicago (~30 consultants vs. 200): everyone knows one another, and some of the processes differ slightly as a result. It's been interesting to see!

I got off to a quick start and began my first project today. The client is a large energy company, and my first task is to benchmark relevant regulatory policies of different European countries. I'm pretty excited about it - energy is a geopolitical hot topic and the industry is in a state of flux as it's deregulating at different rates across the continent. This is exactly the different type of case material that I was hoping I'd be exposed to when I applied for my transfer (and I suspect the fact that it is a quintessential Budapest office case is one of the reasons I was staffed on it). I'll have a lot of responsibility/independence, which should make for a good challenge.

Beyond that:

• Get on skype, folks! It'll be the easiest way for us to chat live (for free!) these next few months. Email is fantastic, but it'd be good to hear your voices every now and then. Just go to http://www.skype.com/ and download away.
• I have learned enough Hungarian that I was able to (potentially?) decipher the sign posted on the front of the door to my building. It seems a theater will be co-opting my square on Saturday night for a Renaissance festival. I will need to spectate from my balcony.
• Hungarian has a lot of accents, so I invested a little time figuring out how to quickly toggle to the Hungarian setting on my keyboard and type them all. (I want to get client's names right, etc.) I stumbled across something interesting:
  "I think all Hungarian organizations (in fact all ethnic organizations) should nominate Bill Gates of Microsoft for their organization's highest award for doing the most of anyone in the world to preserve the Hungarian language and culture outside of Hungary by having made language support standard on every single PC in the world.
  In fact, since you can support as many languages and keyboards at the same time as you want, Microsoft is doing the same to preserve all of the minority languages of the world.
  Whether we realize it or not right now, language support in Windows is the greatest single thing ever done to save the world's smaller languages from an extinction due to the use of computers, since now it is the computer that makes it just as easy to write and communicate in any language as in English." --Hungarian Alliance