First impression

I promised this one is gonna be in English, so here it is. My first impressions at work and first weeks in Dublin. 

Let's start with the bad thing.

Public transport

Public transport in Dublin is an absolute disaster. Traffic in rush hours is a hell on Earth. You are in a constant traffic jam from your front door to anywhere you wanna go. Buses are absolutely terrible. The only plus is that there is a wi-fi in every bus which is cool. Irish people like wi-fi. I like wi-fi, too. In Prague, I haven't used it for months as my previous job came with iPhone and 20GB data plan. No company phone and plan at this one ☹️

Public transport in Dublin is definitely worse and less developed than in Prague. The key thing is that it is not build as a network like in Prague, but all the buses go to or from the city centre. So the travel to HPE in Leixlip which took me one hour on the bike, takes me about two hours by two buses. From Whitehall Park to the centre 40 mins then 10 mins waiting and another bus to Leixlip which is 1hr. I didn't think it would be that bad. I was wrong.

First day at work

Monday 25th February

I got up at 5.30am. It is not that harsh as it sounds. I'm an early bird. There is one small difference. In Prague I used to chill out for two hours before I left my flat to take a tram or metro. And it took me half an hour to get to the office. In Dublin it's waaay different.

My team

We are a team of ten. Three of us are based in Ireland, the rest of the analysts is spread all around the Europe. My Manager is in Milan, there are analysts in France, Italy, Germany, Portugal and Russia. In Dublin we support UK & Ireland and Nordic countries. I'm not sure how strict my confidentiality agreement is so I will be rather general. Right in the morning on my first day I have my laptop on the table, email is working, Skype is working, I receive many emails with regards to the accesses to all the systems we use. My colleagues are super nice and very helpful. We already work on two cases (still talking about the day 1!). The analysis we do is very thorough and focused on cash flow. Customers are from various industries and of various size, but my team focuses on big deals and the analysis takes us on average two days from requests to the decision / approval. But obviously you can have a clear straight forward deal you have ready in one hour and on the other hand you can deal with a complicated case when you need to request more details which can take weeks. Next to our "Enterprise" team there is another "Channel" team which deals with smaller deals and the analysis is probably not so detailed as they have 3 hours to deliver the result. Two customers we analyze on my first day are one small software company and one global luxury cars manufacturer. Lovely. I'm excited from the work, customers, sophistication of the work, the pace. I'm gonna love it here! In the afternoon I talk to my boss who is on a business trip in Lisbon. Warm welcome. I'm told to settle down, take it easy, take my time to go through our credit policy and to make everything work.

Transport home is a tragedy. I open google maps, I walk for 20 minutes then I wait for my bus for 15 minutes and go to Dublin. Shortly before 8pm I'm home. This is not gonna work. I have to plan it better tomorrow. And I really really really need a car.

Small improvements

When I found the best possible connections, it takes me only 1 hour and 40 minutes to get to the office. Yeeey! This is really the best time I can make with the fucking buses. 150 to Parliament, walk to the river and 66B to Leixlip. Same for the return route. But the total time differs, sometimes I'm at home around 7pm, some days I arrive after 7.30.

I'm getting used to the traffic, get up time and coming back home time. I am trying to to buy a Mini Cooper on Facebook marketplace, I still research how to do it with the car. It would definitely increase my happiness in Ireland a lot driving to work and back in a cute car and saving at least two hours a day on commuting. But: car insurance in Ireland is a really bad joke. One can end up with two to four thousand euro insurance policy when he used to drive on the "wrong side of the road" in past. I'm really afraid that I will pay a fortune for the useless insurance, maybe even higher amount than I will pay for the car.

Otherwise at work I am getting into it, but I have a 1-1 with my boss tomorrow and I'm gonna write more about the work in a separate post.

The beautiful weather which welcome me when I arrived in Ireland is gone. Now we experience as Irish people say "soft and fresh" weather. It's cold, very strong wind and it rains.

Today our wi-fi is down so I made myself to finish and post this. Hopefully you'll enjoy 😉 

I will be more than happy if you drop me a note, short comment or any question you might have!

Ciaaaaooo