28/02/2007 by Lyndon.

Day 2 in India and straight into the office.  It’s a bit daunting here, everything is just at such a much larger scale.  In the London office we have less than 200 people, and the majority of those work on client site so it’s a bit of a shock to be in a building with 2500+ people.  There are around 40-50 people working on my project in India (and 15-20 in China, and 5 in London), including a pile developing against the designs I did before christmas.  Hopefully I did an ok job and they won’t want to kill me.  Time will tell I guess …

So anyway, I had a rough idea what I’d be doing when I got here but I didn’t realise the full extent of it.  I’ve been made a track lead for the piece of work I’ve been designing over the past month.  Over the next few weeks I have to put together the plan and prepare everything, knock out some POCs and then I’ll be off to China to manage a team of 7 developers.  Bit of a step up!  Should be great for my career growth though as well as giving me insight into the offshore side of things.

Wish me luck!

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27/02/2007 by Lyndon.

I was warned that the roads in India are a little crazy, so I looked upon the taxi journey from the airport to the apartment as more of a funfair ride.  I wasn’t disapointed; drivers here seem to drive wherever they want.  Road markings, signs, pedestrians - nothing makes any difference.  For most of the journey my driver used the lane divider as a central guide, turning the 2 lane road into 3!

The best part of the journey was right at the end.  My driver pulled into the apartments on the wrong side of the road, and upon realising his mistake decided the quickest route would be to drive back up the road (going against the traffic flow) to the nearest break in the central reservation, do a U turn into on-coming traffic and drive the 50m to the entrance to the apartments.  A little adrenalin is good for the heart, right? 

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27/02/2007 by Lyndon.

So the whole airport thing was a bit annoying.  We arrived with 2.5 hours to spare, but the check-in queue was huge.  We spent about 45 mins in the queue before Taylan somehow pursuaded one of the staff to let us jump the rest of the queue.  Result!  I knew the baby would come in handy someday :-)  I knew my baggage was overweight so I little creative temporary redistribution to mum’s bag meant I was only 4 kg over.  I couldn’t believe it when the guy at the desk told me that’d be £108 please!!!  £27 per bloody kilo!  So a little more creative repacking, and I got it down to the limit.  God knows how I’m going to get it all back …

Going through security was crazy, it was all very un-British with pushing and shoving and a very slow trapse through to the usual set of xray machines.  I was slightly worried they’d question why I had two laptops but in the end it was no problem.  So, having arrived at the airport 2.5 hours before my flight I end up getting to the gate just as they announced the door was closing!!!

Overheating due to wearing too many layers of clothing (worn to reduce the weight of my bags) I was slightly more irritated to discover my pre-booked aisle seat had somehow turned into a seat between a window and a 18 month baby.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love babies (especially Taylan!) but sitting next to a little bugger that doesn’t sit still, throws drink over you and whinges isn’t my idea of a quality flight.  Neither is an air steward who evidently believes flights would be so much more enjoyable without any passengers.  Thumbs down this time Mr Branson.

Still, we arrived into Delhi international airport on time and I didn’t have any issues at immigration or customs.  My taxi driver was waiting for me, and with the exception of both currency exchange desks refusing to take cards my arrival went smoothly.

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25/02/2007 by Lyndon.

So it’s taken me a while to get a blog…but hey, better late than never huh?  Considering I’ve been using the internet for around 11 years now I figured it was about time to start one up.  So here it is, and over the next couple of months I’ll be using it to track my travels with work to India and China.  That is, assuming I’m not chained to my desk 24/7!

 Look out for the next installment very soon…

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