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.
![switch_update-min](https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/afibinirland2017/files/2017/06/switch_update-min-300x169.jpg)
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.