A look into the working world...Steve's world

Hello all readers, this is Steve, the authoresses’ husband.  As Mary has so graciously allowed I wanted to submit a “contributing editor” piece to this wonderful blog.  As Mary has done such a wonderful job of blogging on life in Belgium I’ll focus on a few items from the workplace.  Here we go…

Free Coffee:  Coffee is automatic here, no standard coffee machines.  Not sure if you have seen the automatic machines or the ones where you pick a “pod” and then put it in the machine and Voila’ a hot cup of what you wanted comes out or the ones where you key in what you want and then BAM hot cup of deliciousness.  This seems to be the standard here.  In my now 5-6 weeks in total here I have yet to see one standard coffee pot.

Abbreviations = Am I am 16 again?  In Belgium people like to abbreviate  the word assessment or assistant with ass. on whiteboards, flipcharts and emails.  Now I recall one time when a substitute teacher of mine did this by accident in high school and we had a field day with it.  Thankfully I managed to keep my chuckles under wraps in the meeting where a sr. manager I work with did it in front of a group of 20.  At first I thought uh excuse me you just wrote ass on the board, but then when I saw no chuckles I though ahh cultural difference.

Office Attire:  For the most part is exactly the same, business casual.  What is odd though is that I will often see the big shots wearing suits both men and women and then some of the other people around my office the “common folk” just throw in some random jeans from time to time.  A 3 year employee traveled to Belgium for meetings last week an wore jeans the entire week.  He also wore a blazer with them so it looked OK but he still had jeans on,  not sure what the rules are there.

Office Hours:  to Beat the traffic out of Brussels and because I don’t really sleep in on the week days I get to work at 8am.  At 8am the office is a ghost town.  People usually roll in here around 8:30 or 9:00 and leave about 4:00, 5:00 or 6:00.

No Cubes:  There is no cubes in our office at all!  It’s strange coming from cube land and now being in an office.  Thankfully for my transition I share an office with another HR team member so it’s better but just odd not being able to stand up and shout questions down the row.  Might get some odd looks if I tried that here.

Dutch Speaking, Flipping the Switch:  For those of you that thought, what the heck is Steve doing he can’t speak either Dutch or French, rest easy…our office is an English speaking office.  It is odd because due to the divide in Belgium there is a clear language split.   We live in Brussels 20-30 minutes south of my office where the main language is French and then I work in Mechelen where the main language is “Flemish” which is a dialect of Dutch.  I guess the historical reason for the language divide I am not fully in tune to yet but from what understand Brussels is actually in the northern Flemish speaking region however over time it seems to have adopted French as the mainly spoken language.  I guess way back when the “fancy” people that migrated to the city they wanted to show their “class” and speaking French was one way to do that.  People in the office are relatively friendly but due to the fact that most people here are from the region near the office here they will greet each other in Flemish, have lunch conversation in Flemish and then look at me and then just switch right over to English.  Pretty fascinating really that they can within the course of 1 second just flip the switch and they are speaking another language fluently.  Makes me feel super inferior!!

Radio on the commute no censorship:  On my drive to and from work I listen to Q-Music a radio station that has to be based somewhere in the north of the country.  All of the commentary is in Dutch so really all I can understand somewhat is the traffic report in the evenings as the Dutch numbers like “the E19” or “the A40” I can understand as they sound a lot like English numbers, but then when they give the report about what is going on , on these said highways I get lost.  Anyway the radio station was playing an Alanis Morrisette song the other day which I am very used to listening to the edited version of from radio stations at home.  Then as I continue to listen awaiting a cut out or a badly dubbed in word, there it was, a clean crisp F-Bomb dropped right on the public radio at 6:00pm on a Wednesday.  At first somewhat surprised I then thought to myself… if they played a Dutch song in the US would the Dutch curse words be edited out?  Now of course it’s somewhat different with most of the people I meet speaking English here and of course the first words you learn when you speak a new language are hello, thank you, good bye and then all the nasty ones!  Anyway an interesting observation to leave you with.

Hope you are all enjoying Mary’s blog and thanks for letting me contribute… Steve