Sunday was spent in and on my bed. I did go out to buy a bag of Tesco’s finest Nuts & Raisins and a bottle of water for work but other than that I was in my room all day. I mostly read The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks because I have to give it back to Travelling Languages and I’d rather do that sooner than later.
Monday apparently was everybody’s first day of work. Interestingly enough, it was my first day at System Dynamics Group Ltd. Now, I had a general idea of the whereabouts of the company but decided to be there early to find out the exact location and be able to show off my German punctuality. I actually only planned on about a half hour window but when I went off the bus at Tara Station and boldly checked the time on my phone, it showed a very generous 75 minutes left until the appointment at 9:30 am. Not impressed by that much time but by this beautiful morning, I decided to go for a walk along the quay itself and to take pictures like a real tourist would do.
After walking around and taking pictures like a professional person of Asian ancestry, I used my phone to zero in on my target, the Whitaker Court. A last check up on my looks and I was ready to plunge into the adventure that was to be my first day.
When I went into the building, I spoke to the nice lady that kindly buzzed me through the door and told her who I was. She didn’t really care and sent me up to the first floor where I was greeted by yet another door that was locked. I huffed and puffed but I couldn’t blow down that wooden door. Turns out, I’m not such a big bad wolf after all. Anyways, another nice lady let me through that door and I told her my story. She seemed genuinely interested and called Eamonn McGinley after having me sit down in one of the two chairs opposite her desk. Eamonn came to the front desk only a few seconds later and introduced himself as Eamonn McGinley. I would have done the same but I quickly realized that he probably wouldn’t believe that my name was Eamonn McGinle, too. I settled on telling him the truth about me and together we went into the office which is basically almost the whole 1st floor of the building. We first went to his desk, where I put down my stuff and after a few words he realized, we might be better off utilizing one of the smaller conference rooms. We sat down and he showed me a printed version of a PowerPoint presentation that was supposed to introduce the company.
I have read most of the information from that presentation online and didn’t understand a lot of it because I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t more to this company than the website suggested. What I gathered is: System Dynamics Group Ltd develops and sells programs as well as selling licenses and providing experts for hire. It’s an interesting scheme because System Dynamics consists of about 200 people of which only a maximum of 25 – 30 people are present in the office at any given time.
Eamonn told me about how he came to this company and what he did before working as an IT Administrator at System Dynamics and in turn I told him about myself, the way the apprenticeship works in Germany and what I hoped to achieve in the internship. That last part was actually only addressed because he asked me about it and I told him honestly that I didn’t know an answer to his question and that I only hope to gain experience in any kind of work he could provide me with. He wasn’t sure what to give me at first so he showed me around the office a bit, introduced me to a couple of my new colleagues and let me set up my desk and computer.
The setup of the office is quite nice because the desks are big enough to comfortably sit at and the rows are facing each other so you could have up to eight people in a kind of a group together. The only problem about that is the division into these… mini-departments which means that even though you could talk about different projects and kind of work on them in an open discussion, it just doesn’t make sense because none of the people I, for example, am facing has anything to do with the IT in this company. They’re still nice people, though and have welcomed me very kindly.
Around 1ish, Eamonn took me for a walk around the neighborhood and showed me all the places where I could buy food in case I ever got filthy rich overnight. He then treated me to a nice sandwich and a cup of tea while we talked some more about how this whole internship program works. After our lunch break we went back to the office where I used the next 3 hours to try to figure out how I’m going to document the mess that is supposed to be System Dynamics’ network infrastructure.
Later that day, the Ladies Schulte-Clarke and Langnickel from the OSZ IMT wanted to meet to hear about our experience so far. We met right after work and went to the Stag’s Head, a pub near the Trinity College. While having a couple of Budweisers, they interviewed us about what we’re doing at work, how we’re accommodated and if we had any suggestions on what to improve. One thing you have to keep in mind in Ireland is to never lose track of time. We did exactly that and while most of the guys went earlier, Toni, George, Jonas and I stayed till well after 11pm. We ended up having to take a taxi and I walked another half hour after that because I had no money left to get a ride home.
After having not more than 5 hours of sleep and a morning with one of the best hangovers, I quickly got ready for work, took some Ibuprofen and left. I spent pretty much all Tuesday with configuring a Laptop for one of my colleagues. There was a lot of crappy HP and Microsoft software on it that I had to get rid of and after I’d done that, I had to install the software that he would really need.
System Dynamics is an IBM partner so they use a lot of IBM software as well as hardware although they’re trying to get rid of some of that. This is also a problem that you have to face when you try to understand SD’s network but that is a story for another day… 😉