I was really cocky the first few weeks. I thought I understood the Belfastians very well. I understood Sean, Josh and the most of the other people in the bureau very clearly. But then, this one Clarity guy appeared and my ego was put to rest. I did not grasp any of what this man said at all. Gladly, he talked to Sean and/or Stuart (boss of DATACTICS) most of the time. I can still see myself: standing in close proximity, smiling, nodding and acting like I’m understanding every word. I faked it well.
A similar situation is found on the ground floor of the new office. The receptionist Trevor (for some reason this is a name I memorized immediately) is dedicated to always use his unclassifiable accent. On a lighter note: We only exchange greetings and goodbyes. There is not much to misunderstand about that. As for the speaking aspect, I had a rather weird experience. On some days I speak better than on others. I got used to it by now, that’s commonplace. But this week I had a conversation with a guy in the company about the rack in the office. We had to switch out one of the switches on site, in order to have a better throughput. We talked about the possible approach. And I personally think that was the best spoken English I delivered (in Belfast) yet. What was so weird about it? It was a dialogue with a person whose mother tongue is German. He is an Austrian employee of the company who usually works abroad. I don’t even know why we didn’t talk in German at that time. We were probably both too lazy to initiate it.
Another one of those philosophy insights? Done. It’s time to talk about work again. The office move is over and only two and a half weeks to go. I completed designing the floor and network map. And I actually was about to continue with the cloud project when Josh opened up about another task. He wants to implement a (NAT) gateway machine in the AWS environment (VPC), because AWS only gives away 5 public IP addresses (insufficient for the company). Amazon offers the opportunity to use NAT gateways for a price. Why not configure a system as a NAT gateway ourselves? This is definitely the right job for a network intern. I am confident that I can finish this job soon.
