Day 1 in the Refridgerator

I will say, the hotel does provide a nice breakfast. They'll whip up a batch of eggs any way you want, and there was a nice assortment of fresh fruit, muffins, cereal and juices. It was "free" which made it all that much better. As Grant noted, the coffee in the atrium area was far better than that brewed in our little underpowered room machines.

We piled onto buses for the trek to the Siemens motherland. There was at least three small buses the a packed in an assortment of Siemens folks destined to become more educated in the Siemens way or on Siemens equipment. What I could see of the snow-covered city reminded me of my childhood days in Michigan, and of why I got sick of living in the fridgid North.

The training facility was quite impressive. Rooms held an assortment of equipment mounted to the walls. Our teacher was very good and had just the right mix of enthusiasm to make the coursework enjoyable but not annoy. We all discovered our strengths of personality while understanding why some of us display certain annoying tendencies in the perception of other personality types. My DISC profile suggests that I'm perfectly evolved to get on a certain QA Manager's nerves. Ah, we all have our strengths :) Of course, he's perfectly adapted and positioned to make my life a living hell, so I'll behave.

We ventured out in the evening in search of pizza, and once again Jeff displayed superior winter driving survival skills - once we had dug the car out of the snowdrift and cleared the ice from the windows: once from the snow-fall, and yet again after he decided to hit the washers shooting a stream of water that instantly froze on the window. The pizza was nice, but IMHO somewhat bland.

After the previous night devoid of sleep I went to bed around 8:00 local time. We're now filled with coffee and breakfast ready of another day of indoctrination - er, training... The fun part will be returning to Atlanta to try all our new voodoo on our unsuspecting office peers (queue dramatic music and fade with demonic laughter...)