It's the Thrill of the Fight...

In my mind, I am shadow boxing around my desk and singing “eye of the tiger.” Why, you ask? Is there a particular reason for a shadow boxing kind of celebration, or is Emily just being weird…again. HA, the joke’s on you, because I am celebrating. I actually made visible, tangible, looks-like-I’m-actually-doing-work progress. Basically, I figured out how to find year to date sales for my boss. He’ll have been gone all but two days of my first two weeks here, so I’ve had to create some work for myself. In general, my job is to analyze a bunch of data and decide what’s important (what indicates problems, growth, etc.) and put it on one excel spreadsheet that would make a monthly scoreboard for manufacturing. Right now, I am interviewing the other demand planners (in French no less) and seeing if I have a jumping off point or if I have to do this stuff from scratch. Please God, don’t let it be totally from scratch. The more I get into it the more complicated it becomes, so really I have no idea what to include and what not to.

In other, apartment related news, I ran into this little French girl who lives in my building while I was waiting for the elevator and she stuck her tongue out at me and I was so offended that I gasped and so then she was like pardon, pardon, bllalhahd margot. And I just smiled and said no problem (oh, universal smile and nod, how I love you). And then she started shouting why aren’t you responding to me, why aren’t you responding to me and I was like oh, sorry, I’m Emily and then her mom came up and said, honey that girl doesn’t speak French, leave her alone. And so I said I speak a little and the mom kind of brushed me off. That’s my story, schooled by a four year old. I met another neighbour and she invited me to a party on Tuesday, May 25th, so basically I don’t know if it was Friday the 25th or if it’s actually Tuesday. Crazy old coot. But she seemed nice. Plus free apertifs, if I can ever figure out when the party is.

Then, this morning I ran into the guy who is supposed to read the water meter. He basically came up behind me as I was trying to lock the door and scared the crap out of me. But, then I had to let him in and explain that it wasn’t just one apartment, the lady had turned it into four and I didn’t know where the meter was. He’s like, it’s in the kitchen. And I said, um, there are four kitchens in four separate apartments and I only have keys to one. So, then we actually found the meter in the hall hidden under a bench, not in anyone’s kitchen, so he was happy, then he complimented me on my French, so I was happy. All in all, a good morning.
This weekend was fairly uneventful. It was rainy and gross, so Saturday I got up the courage to get my hair cut. Try saying, if you give me bangs, I will be forced to punch you in the face in a foreign language. Or, better yet, if you give me anything even resembling a mullet, in exchange, I will shave off your eyebrows while you sleep. Not so easy now, is it? But once again, I was in luck and the lady who was cutting my hair spoke near perfect English. So, no bangs and no mullet, hooray! Sunday was even more disgusting than Saturday, so I went to the movies and saw Zodiac (two thumbs up) and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (one thumb up, better than the second, worse than the first). I was excited because the version in english was the only one that wasn’t sold out and it made me laugh that the French people in line with me were irritated that they had to see it in English. So, a low key, but good weekend.

This week is my first full week and tomorrow I have an all day meeting in French. We’ll see how it goes.