Hold on to that nut!

After a month of working with tonnes of hyphenated names ( ending with 'z') which I would have frowned at a decade ago because of all the crappy formulas I associated with such names from the Physics book, I am ready for my take on the German workplace. Here's my laundry list of achievements and headaches:

1. My first 7 hour meeting.
2. Got used to decision making in the higher echelons. You make cool ideas, great ways to implement them, send them to the audience before the presentation, get their approval before you present it and then on D-day go in front of them and present the idea - "Yawn, tha looks familiar, oh I remember, I asked the color to be changed from Blue 132 to Blue 131 and the idiot presenter changed it to Blue 133". Wow, it kinda is tough when you deliver the 'zing' in the idea at 7 pm on the evening before the meeting by email and wait for the response for 6 more hours of work. Is this only a European thing? ( I resist from saying just 'German' because I heard from folks in similar positions that the rest of Europe is even worse). Learn from this,
   
   
   Imagine all the guys in the room getting an email the day before saying, there"s gonna be a bald old guy jumping around like a monkey tommorrow and you are supposed to cheer. I am overdoing it, but yeah you get the general drift I hope!
3. Can decipher English phrases. Well, er, I mean English phases which are direct translations of German ones, like'cut the elephant into two' ( means break/divide the problem, hard not to laugh when you hear "First we go to China, find a partner and then cut the elephant into two"
4. Work till 9 pm, go around pub hopping past midnight and have an insane meeting at 7:30 am the next morning- day-after-day!
5. Never say that a meeting was good. Pick out flaws like, "yeah, the guy in the pale blue tie kept drinking too much coffee and we did not get anything" or I swear this one is real " the power cord could have been longer in that conference room - it impacted the zoom of the beamer"
6. Say "Tschuss!" in atleast 10 different ways ranging from the kiss-friendly to the fuck off variety
   
7. Eat fast, although I must say I am not making much progress on this one. Man, do Germans eat fast! And to think my Mom kept telling me to eat slowly because I dont chew stuff properly and I was the shining example of the perfect kid at the table who finished everything on his plate first. All that bad karma from my cousins!
   
8. Create cool sounding words - nachhaltigkeitverbesserungsmanagementsysteme!
9. Run down four floors, 500m of park, 2 stairs and 2 escalators under 4 min - everyday at 8;20 am if u see a guy doing this around Duisburg Hauptbahnhof (Central Station), it"s me