Early in the week the client invited me to have pints at lunch on Friday. Well today is Friday and I was quite looking forward to the pints after two very successful meetings where I discussed my findings from the week. As it turns out, I get quite a lot of work done in my hotel room when Joni isn’t trying to drag me to bars named “the bugle” every five minutes!
So they drove me to this small town called Sutton that is just east of Reading. We stopped at this old british inn that also has a restaurant and pub attached. It is myself and 3 other guys that work for the internal audit group for this client. They were gentlemen and asked me what I wanted to drink first. I tried to get them to surprise me, but they weren’t budging on that one. So I asked for a pint of Kroenenburg. Slowly the director who has taken us all there goes around the table – orange juice, tomato juice, and water were the other three orders. I was certain I was about to be fired. I think I still hear them across the way making fun of my reaction (and we’re back at the office now).
I can’t believe I got bamboozled like that! They distinctly said “pints” for lunch…and it was reiterated this morning. “are you still up for grabbing some pints for lunch?” Luckily one of the guys changed his ordered after he saw how big my eyes were. I’m not quite sure how the exchange worked…because I saw both of the other guys turn to him and then he changed it…I’m not sure if that’s some sort of british version of “not it.”
So all of the excitement this week is centered around the Tour de France starting in London. I should probably look into the logistics of this race, because last time I looked…England was an island of sort that is not connected to France at all. I wouldn’t want to sound silly in a discussion about how they will get from England to France.
The poor chap who lost the game of “not it” mentioned something about a cycling movie that was just made. He said it was about a guy who broke a world biking record with a bike that he made out of washing machine parts. He drew a lot of blank stares from the other brits, so I felt comfortable when I made fun of him once no one said anything in response. It went something like “Did you guys say you let him drink during lunch every Friday?”
He vowed to google the story when he got back to the office. I told him he was going to get a response from google’s search that says…did you mean…I have no idea what you meant!”
One of the guys piped in and said that when you type “French military victories” into the google search, it comes back with “did you mean…French Military Defeats?” So clever. I’m going to wrap this up quickly now, because I’m certain I just lost my audience to google!
Lucky for him though, he did just walk over to my desk with a story printed out. I will have to re-google it myself though, because it doesn’t have any markings as if he grabbed it from a website, and I’m fairly certain he might have just merged three different stories together. The story he printed doesn’t really flow that well…I’ll let you know what I find.
No comments:
Post a Comment