Employed By Bo-ny Europe

Now that I've logged two full weeks and received my first pay-check, it is as good a time as any to present the long-overdue run-down of my new place of employment at the European headquarters of Bo-ny Corporation.

As of one month ago, Bo-ny moved from a building in Brussels to a much larger and nicer facility in Zaventem, near the airport. It is the second largest building in a new "corporate village" which consists of six similarly shaped, yet increasing in size, futuristic looking buildings.

This past Friday they had a fancy inaugural party in a huge tent right in front of the building. Free fancy-food, wine, beer, and drinks. The "suits" got up on stage to give self-congratulatory speeches and then they used ice-picks to hack three bottles of champagne out of a huge ice-sculpture shaped like the Bo-ny building. Glasses of this champagne were circulated through crowd as the band launched into their long set. I stayed until about 10pm, catching a ride with one of my colleagues (Andres The Spaniard). Nice party... I'm sure there will be some stories told tomorrow!

The aforementioned colleague was nice enough to offer himself as the "Spanish Taxi" to me and two others (Kristofer The Swede and Juuso The Finn). So, rather than deal with the sometimes irritating hassle of public transportation, we catch a ride with him to and from work. A great windfall since Zaventem is not easy to reach by bus or train. Even still, there will be days when those of us without a car will have to go back to public transport because we won't always have the same shift as Andres.

Anyway, we are still in training. Bo-ny trains its employees in staggered groups and subject matter. We are currently being trained to support their line of Vaio computers. There are about 10 people in the class. The majority of them have been at Bo-ny for a little over one month. They have already been trained to support the Bo-ny Plie line and the DVD-burners. When the Craio training is done, they will go back to taking calls while The Finn, The Swede, and I will be trained on the software we use to log calls. Then the three of us will be placed into circulation in the call center. The three of us are in for another three weeks of training before that happens, I think. I assume that after a while we will also be trained on the Plie PDAs, the DVD-burners, and the robot dogs.

So, that's basically it for now. Sitting through training every day gets a little dull, but a lot of the people who work on the CSA floor are a little bit off kilter (i.e.- a bit zany), so we joke around a lot. Keeps it from getting too dull. I've started preaching the "good word" to my colleagues about good quality beer. They are very receptive and have started asking me about different beer-related subjects on their own. It is fertile ground, so I may soon have some budding connoisseurs working next to me. That's reason enough to stay with this job!

--RP--