Lunchtime

I was soooo glad to see that training class go away today. I don't do well with listening to someone talk all day. It reminds me way too much of the lectures in college that used to be my personal cure for insomnia on many an afternoon. The client wanted to take a picture with us to show the folks back home that they had indeed traveled the requisite 7,000 miles from Seoul to learn how to use our product. All of the class' attendees and I had dined together 5 times (4 lunches and a dinner)in all this week, but they would be heading out early this time.

This meant that I would have the option of going with the rest of the guys today. My new co-workers are a fairly tightly-knit bunch that seem to take pleasure in each other's company each day for a mid-day meal. This is taking some getting used to for me as my recent pattern has been to grab a quick meal to eat at my desk when I'm actually in the office and not working from home. I think the working from home deal has made me more cognizant of how much faster I can get the work done without long "distractions or breaks. I've always been of the mindset that I need not work 8 hours in a day if I can actually finish that work in 5 or 6. But keep that on the hush. I'm still doing research on this little theory.

Much like my crew from last night, these guys are diverse in their own right. Two Canadians (one French, one regular), an Englishman, an Asian man, a Colombian and I headed over to eat some pizza at a popular spot near the job. Predictably, all of these engineers talked "tech" during the ride over and for a moment after we sat down in the pizza parlor until the conversation was hijacked as suddenly as daybreak inside a railway tunnel.

"That Korean girl was cute, eh?"

Leave it to a group of men in a profession without an abundance of women to take it there not 15 minutes after our Korean contingent had driven away from our building. This was met to very mixed reviews at the table. I played fly on the wall with this group, being the new guy and all, offering only minimal input, choosing instead to make sure that I made the right facial expressions and added the occasional interested and concurring nod right on cue.

Of course the conversation went into the gutter from here, so I'll spare you the gruesome details. Suffice it to say that there will be nary a dull moment lunching with these guys from here on out.