This week started out well, but quickly became frustrating. On Wednesday, there were a number of conversations with my co-workers over work I'd recently completed where it felt like dense, technical, rapidly-spoken German was almost being used as a weapon -- eventually, I broke down and said that, look, if you want me to completely understand you, and especially if you want to ask me to make any changes, I'm sorry, but we need to switch to speaking English. So I switched to English, but everyone else kept speaking German! (I know, I know, I'm in their country and all that, but they've been speaking technical English for years longer than I've been speaking any German. And it's not like I usually act like the Ugly American -- these days, I rarely speak any English in the office, unless someone chooses to address me in English first.) And then we went on for quite a while like that. Argh. I was feeling shaky and sweaty by the time it was all over.
Yesterday, I was looking at the lists of files that other people have checked out of our version-control system, and one of the co-workers from yesterday's conversation seems to be taking it upon himself to rewrite the two weeks of work that I'd checked in the day before. I don't know whether he's just frustrated from not getting his point across yesterday, and feels like he can make the changes he wants in less time than it would take to explain them to me, or if he feels my work is just total garbage, and only he can write the code as God intended it to be written. Either way, it's the ultimate passive-aggressive response -- I pretty much ignored it yesterday, but I think that I need to say something today, because not saying something in similar situations has caused problems in the past. (I don't know if it's a cultural thing, or just a matter of the people in our particular workgroup, but people tend to not say anything for the longest time, until the lid blows off of a situation, when addressing a problem early would have left us all happier and healthier. My all-American workgroups have been much more direct.)
To top it all off, one of my expense reports -- the company is paying for our household goods to be stored in a storage locker in San Jose while we're here in Hamburg -- has been working its way through the system and this week ended up in front of a vice president, who had two questions: "Why is this expense report late? And what are "storage fees", and why is our company paying them anyway?" It looks like everything will work out fine -- payment for storage fees is in my relocation contract, and I've now been given the okay to submit a printout of the Web version of my credit card statement as the "official receipt" that accompanies the expense report (rather than waiting for the charge to show up on the monthly credit card bill, waiting for that to be forwarded to us here, and then mailing it back to Accounts Payable in the States, which is what always made my expense report late). And as my stateside manager pointed out to the VP, even with storage fees, our six-month stay here in Hamburg is still more productive and cheaper for the company than the average marketing guy's or UI designer's one-week stay at the Park Hyatt Hamburg.
Still, you only want the corporate higher-ups to pay attention to you for the good things ...
Posted by Kevin at May 14, 2004 08:55 AM