Tuesday, October 1, 2013

October 1 - Language Barriers

Sorry folks, no Flat Tony pics today, but I do have a short story, which proves the point that I should have thought about this assignment a tad more before making my decision (due to language barriers).

As usual, I was at train station #3 20-minutes before my last train leaves for work this morning. About 2 minutes before the train should be there I hear them say "Estewelda" (sp?), which is the train I need to be on - so all is normal...or so I thought! This section of the train station has 8 platforms, and the train always comes to Platform 3. Well, 10 minutes after the scheduled departure time, I go upstairs to the information booth. Apparently, the message that I couldn't understand was telling me that the Platform changed from 3 to 4 this morning. Whoops. But she informed me that I could take 2 more trains, and 2 buses, to get to where I needed to be.

Well, I made an executive decision at that point. Those extra trains and buses were going to add another hour to my trip. So I decided to just take the same two back to where I started, and work from my apartment, which actually had me online and working 15 minutes before I would have been there had I taken my normal train!

So there you go - nothing like a day in the life of corporate Germany.

Good-night and God-bless,
from Berlin

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