After Hours

I just found out Youtube is currently banned in Turkey. Sarp also posted a Marcy Playground video on Facebook.
Two web2.0 in two sentences, is that over quota?
Anyways grade 5 called and I love it.

I'm working on re-writing our sales pitch. I've already done it once and to some accolade but I'm not all that pleased with it, after further review. A lot of my job is talking to people on the phone, it's like telemarketing but on coke mixed with speed, you might say. A lot of the conversations are varieties on the same theme. I consciously try each day to be the best. I look at call rates and push myself to make the most calls on the floor.

A lot of the sales themed books I've read talk about focussing on what you can control. In this game, it boils down to quality of calls and quantity of calls.

It's like what that guy Joey used to say, work hard but work smarter.

SUNDAY HANGOVER LIVEBLOG

12:16PM
There is a giant TV tower on the mountains to the North West. I like watching it play hide and seek as the clouds and fog consume it and then roll by, exposing it briefly before it vanishes again.

Following a 21 bar Bratislava Monopoly Pub Crawling I am in a dire state. I notice a nice plant on my window sill that I remember stealing circa round 17.

Watching episodes of House season 2 and plotting my next move. I found some gummy bears that will help moderate my blood glucose in the interim while I think of something better to eat and if in fact I will leave my bed today.

12:44PM
I fond this, start the slideshow it's cool. http://www.lifethroughtime.com/experience.html

2:38PM
Two cups of coffee, a chapter of Zig Ziglar, an hour of ironing and I am well on my way to salvaging the day. The TV tower is hiding again. I'm almost as wet from the humidity inside as if I were in the rain outside.

Also did some research to care for my new botanic friend. Apparently it is almost indestructible which ironically makes me somewhat more worried. In the event I neglect it too much and it does die I will know I definitively lack the green thumb.

4:44PM
Just got back from getting groceries with Sarp. I am unstoppable.

7:17PM
Did some writing and watched the TV tower reappear, it looks like a ray or two of sunshine has burned off ths vaporous cloak for now. I think another episode of House is in store while I eat dinner. Slovak lessons have gotten rescheduled to Monday morning from Tuesday so early bed will be the most beneficial thing for future-Jeff. I still have so much trouble with actually going to bed. I wish I just loved going to sleep, that would probably make mornings way easier. It must be a priority thing.
I'm going to bowl on some clowns this week.

A Midnight Stroll

As the Friday work day crawled to a close I made plans with a few of the fellas from the office to have some drinks. Nothing too crazy. I made it home before 8:00 to take a nap. For whatever reason I never believe that I will be able to fall asleep when I nap, I consistently fail to set an alarm and sleep for longer than I had expected. When in truth, I am an excellent napper.

I woke up around 10:30pm and tried to pull my life together and meet Sarp at the bar. As a direct cause of my shoddy planning I missed the last bus and was forced to resort to the heel-toe express. The sparsely populated residential streets, low lying fog and the eerie glow of struggling lights completed the feel that I was in a completely Alien world. Ten minutes into my walk I lost count of the ubiquitous unregistered gambling houses and the burly men standing in front of the neon signs regulating the trickle of shady characters in and out.

Crossing streets here is hard. Roads and sidewalks are separated by fences that have not been replaced since the tram line was thrown down. The intersections resemble the middle of an intricate spider web with cars flying in every direction showing an impressive lack of regard for the pedestrian life. Generally they are so complex and contain crosswalks on only one side, there are often tunnels underneath that bypass the entire mess. After the busses stop running the tunnels because some type of Gypsy night league where all bets are off, and are best avoided by anyone holding a 3rd grade education or higher. I cut through the Saint-Tropez parking lot to save time instead. It is important to note I was going to get my drank (sic) on so the most efficient route was the one I needed to take. This particular bar is worthy of note because it might not exist much longer. Sarp told me that in the 2 years he has been here it has changed names 7 times. Each because a trigger happy bouncer capped a 'roid-raging skinhead looking for trouble. I've been to bars with metal detectors before, but never one with such an overt no gun policy.


I arrived at Club 80's by pure luck, where a veritable Michael Jackson tribute was in effect. A dying cell phone battery prompted an early end to my night. I'm not that upset, tonight is going to be huge. The next morning my lungs struggle to expand and my eyes still ache like they've been washed with chlorine. The second-hand Marlboro smoke is something I'm still trying to come to terms with.

I am a full half-day ahead of Honolulu.

An Evening with Work

One of my friends had a going away party last night. Needless to say, this Thursday morning was a little more arduous than the average. 5 "International Business Development Executives" as we are known, have quit or been fired in the 5 weeks I've been on the job. I guess it's not for everyone. Afternoon reprieve came in the form of a network shutdown. When your job relies entirely on the phone and the internet little work can be done when neither of the communication vectors function.

At the afore referred-to shin-dig, I had much interesting conversation with a colleague of mine about twice my age. He is South African with a doctorate in theology. He had some interesting and informed opinions on the Palestine-Israel conflict. I also learned that he used to own a bar and live in the Canary Islands. He used it as his home based and launched deuce-weeklong missions to places around the world. He picked up a bad smoking habit after a vicious motorcycle accident in Singapore and the subsequent three weeks in a hospital with a chain smoking Mexican dude. He has now spent two years in Slovakia because his Slovak wife is getting her Ph.D. From the sound of it he is itching to move on and get out of here. I think the attitude of the people are the most difficult thing for him to deal with, sort of a slow erosive process I guess.

In a tunnel underground on the way to the party I saw a gypsy playing an imaginary game of soccer with himself and an empty beer can. There also would have been an award ceremony at the bus stop had the "Mullett Adjudication Committee walked by." The shit this guy sported was legendary.

Over shots of high potency homemade plum brandy and tallcans of Zlaty I learned more about politics in Slovakia that explained the frustration of one particular expat in the Slovak Republic. In this year's presidential election the vote coming out of Bratislava was for a change from the extremely socialist policies of the incumbent. The rest of the country voted overwhelmingly for the opposite and ended up getting their way. Apparently this president did a good job of getting Slovakia into the Euro zone but as is common of the Slovak people the concept of earning is a distant one and they are now failing in huge ways to uphold the minimal standards the EU expects. I can appreciate that the above generalizations about a people sound extremely prejudice but everyone else, including native Slovaks, within earshot shared an empathetic groan at the pandemic lack of motivation to work exhibited by the locals. I do not feel like I have been here for long enough to accurately gauge this for myself but when you look around while hearing people talk about how Bratislava is the most modern part of Slovakia it makes you wonder. I'm excited to take a jaunt into the countryside one of these days.

Playboy magazines at bagel shops, the liberalization of drinking and driving laws and the realization that if the liquor store here went on strike it wouldn't matter because you can buy shots at the bus stop, make up just a few of this week's other peculiar observations.

Have World Cup 2010 ads started playing in Canada? They are all the rage here.

Take Control

Earlier today I was kicked down a figurative stairwell by a verbal assault delivered to me by a Senior Director, Clinical Development Oncology of a major American pharmaceutical company.

I have some pretty ambitious, albeit lofty plans for how I want to make my mark in this world. They are more or less on the backburner. I think about them every now and then but I don't really have any even concrete goals. I admit, at first mention it doesn't look too promising.

It might at first sound a little counterintuitive, but actually it is all rather simple. I am not currently in any position to implement such said plans. I am not yet operating on anywhere near a global scale. I lack the resources, the abilities and the contacts to come anywhere near successful in pulling off the far fetched ideas that periodically occupy my cerebral cortex. More often they are previews and snippets of silent films shown only in the privacy of my own occipital lobe. I have bigger worries right now, like learning Slovak so that next time I need to cab home at 3:00am in the pouring rain with stolen beach chairs and bottles of wine I won't get hung up on four times in a row.

ASIDE: I now know what it feels like to be illiterate and it is awful. There is almost zero english signage. I buy things at the grocery store based on pictures and learning from bad experiences. Things are improving though, lessons help.

To make any big impact on humanity in the long term I am going to have to start taking some big steps in my day to day life. It is my firm belief, and I am going to do my best to implement it in my own life, that you need to change yourself before you change the world. The most obvious example is going to be at work, where I will have to persevere in the face of often immense frustration. Only with an indefatigable ethic will I enable myself, financially and professionally, to accomplish the lofty goals that brew in the depths of my subconscious mind. Listening to rap music helps.

More importantly though, I think the idea of incremental and perpetual improvement will have to be a lifestyle. I am willing to work hard now so that I can enjoy success later. As always, easier said than done but I think writing it down helps affirm it. And I have much fewer distractions on this side of the world than the one I've previously occupied for the 22 years prior.

Without actively trying to succeed on the day to day I don't think I will ever "make it big," so to speak. Fear complacency.

After getting chirped by the man leading genius researchers trying to cure cancer, my Sales manager, who observed the entire ordeal from my immediate left asked me why I didn't take control of the call. I was a little perplexed as to what he meant, but after some explanation and replaying the scenario approximately 294829 times in my head, I realize that it's up to us to make the most out of the situations we find ourselves in. There are things I could have said that might have been uncomfortable to orate but would have put me back in control of the situation.

Live and learn.

Another PartySlava Weekend

It is really nice to get visitors. This weekend I was lucky enough to host a friend from school. The last three days have been a lot of fun, if not a tad taxing. I'm writing this, sitting at my kitchen table with sunglasses on and a tallcan easily graspable with a slight lateral rotation of my dominant arm. I guess that's indicative of good times.

I was slightly better prepared than when Amit came to visit. The arrival and meet-up was much smoother this time around.

Binge behaviour more or less defined the three days concert girl spent here. Friday saw us at a Hawaiian themed party at a sailing club on the border of Austria. The event was the birthday of a friend of Sarp's. The liquor was free and the music extremely random. We brought a bottle of Absinth along for good measure. The night ended in the pouring rain when we managed to convince a cab driver to let us get in with stolen beach chairs. The balcony is now a little more pimped.

I don't know where the credit is due; but, someone made the conclusion that any girl whose last name ends in -"ova" is beautiful. I concur.

Saturday was Sarp's birthday. The suddenly poor weather and pickling livers left us lounging around the flat for the majority of the day save a prompt foray to the grocery store where we got food for a feast of near-epic proportions. We only ate once during the day though which resulted in what I like to call a "multi-kebab" evening. Good times, no doubt.

We did eventually move out to continue the slow euthanasia of our bodies via ethanol abuse. The first bar we were at closed around 10pm. Don't ask, "Welcome to Slovakia." This all came as something of a surprise and we couldn't convince the bartenders to pour us another beer because they had already closed the lines and cleaned the taps. Not to be defeated I managed to convince them it would be clean and easy to sell me a bottle of Smirnoff Vodka and some shot glasses. We settled on a price of 17.70 Euro.

The night continued on in much the same manner as the weather steadily improved. Sarp, Carlee and I were home and in bed by around 3:30am after a short post-bar drink at the kitchen table. I took Carlee to the Bus Station at 8:00am and have been doing some research for work and eating leftover pizza since.

I should crash about 7 hours from now, setting me up perfectly for what will no-doubt be a "Slam Dunk" Monday. Efficiency is a way of life, as far as I'm concerned.

UPDATE:
Bill Bryson on Stockholm:
"It had a kind of knocked out charm, but was surprisingly lacking in any air of prosperity. Most of the windows were dirty, the brass name plates and door knockers were generally unpolished, and almost every building was in serious need of a good coat of paint. It looked much as I would expect Cracow or Bratislava to look."

Who is Concert Girl?

Depending on how you know me she might be known as Commerce Girl or Concert Girl.

I literally bumped into Carlee, spilling her beer all over her, at a Matt Good Band concert at Bluesfest last year. For whatever reason, probably my boyish charm, we ended up interacting amicably for the subsequent two hours. That was it.

Three months later, after deciding to toy with Commerce oriented electives, I noticed this girl who looked quite familiar. A few days after mentioning that I was from Ottawa during the awkward class introduction stage, we ended up walking out of class at more or less the same time. We had to go in the same direction and she inquired about where in Ottawa I was from. A few minutes of lively discussion later she put on her sunglasses which triggered the vivid visual reminder of the girl at the concert with the huge sunglasses who was now covered in beer.Turns out it was the same person.

I just returned from the bus station as she is now headed to Praha (Prague). It was great having another visitor and I'm sad she is now on her way. It is worthy of note that I was less upset than when Mr. Ayer left. I think there are probably a few contributing factors to this but I'm going to say that I'm adjusting more and feeling a little bit more like home.

Last night was Sarp's birthday. The place is a mess and I am going to wait until he wakes up before passing the Hoover. Instead I will listen to the new Dave Matthews Band album, drink coffee and read the news. An update of the weekend will come soon enough.

Podcasts I'm hearing:
-LSAT Logic in Everyday Life
-Ideas, CBC Radio
-Business Week Innovation of the Week.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

NEWS UPDATE I: Shit is crazy. Quite graphic.

NEWS UPDATE II: Twitter and Iran, 6 lessons learned.