A New Job

I thought it was time to make it “official”: As many of you already know, I will be moving to Munich before the end of the month, to begin a new job in Munich on April 1st. I’ll leave Frankfurt behind and move further south. Go ahead, make the jokes about a Hamburgian in Bavaria. I’ve heard them all by now!

It also means that my nearly six years working for Lufthansa Systems are ending. My new job will be with Ironport, and I’m looking forward to it very much. I didn’t decide to move to Munich because I dislike Frankfurt (Frankfurt, despite rumors to the contrary, isn’t really all that bad) nor Lufthansa, nor “for the money”, but simply because Ironport offered me an interesting job, and I feel that it’s a cool company full of nice people. (I realize this may sound like a bit of boot licking, but whatever, those are the reasons, and I don’t care what you think.)

I’ll send around an email with my new contact information in early April; but you can always reach me at my known email address, or via jabber, icq, and so on.

Nils is Changing the World

I may have some tiny amount of fame, but it turns out I am also able to change the world.

Last winter, I noticed how colleagues working in the Lufthansa Aviation Center would run across the – very busy – street, trying to catch a bus. I thought it would be only a matter of time before one of them would be hit by a car in the dark. So I mailed a suggestion – first to my superiors, then to the cities of Frankfurt and Kelsterbach – suggesting that a fence should be erected on the middle strip on the road should.

At the time, I got only negative replies. However, after my vacation, I noticed that they had actually set that fence up while I wasn’t around. No plaque or dedication, but I am a little proud that they actually did it.

I may have saved someone’s life. ;-)

 

Lufthansa Aviation Center

Had lunch at the new HQ office building of Lufthansa the other day, the Lufthansa Aviation Center. Pretty nice building, although still unfinished. Many of the inside walls are fair-faced concrete, which looks a little strange and makes the building darker inside than you’d expect. There are also several atria with different sorts of plants – Bamboo with a Japanese garden; palm trees and so on. I do wonder how the building is coping with the current heat wave – it is entirely passively cooled.

Oh, yeah, the canteen was good.

Snowed In

As I wrote on Friday, [snow arrived in Frankfurt en masse](/2006/03/03/snowing-like-crazy/) that day. I cursed my bad luck, that I didn’t have a camera with me. In the morning it was snowing quite a lot, but this only increased. We easily had 15-20 centimeters by the late afternoon. Needless to say, few people were able to cope with the weather. Lufthansa alone had to cancel 150 flights. And it took me about two hours to go home.

I left my office at about 16:25. The bus was supposed to arrive at 16:29, but never came. Someone said there had been an accident with it earlier. Several other guys stood there and waited with me, but none of us was really willing to walk through the snow. Finally, at about 16:45, we decided that we might as well go ahead and walk to the next bus stop.

It was not pleasant. Within a few meters the wet snow entered my shoes and my feet were cold and wet. The bridge near our office was quite a sight. The icy, partially frozen snow was so slippery that the trucks and lorries were unable to drive unto the bridge – it was too steep. This also told us what had happened to the bus line. One truck was standing on the onramp of the bridge, and smaller cars tried to pass left of it – until one of them slid against the safety fence. There was no damage, but the car was unable to resume driving.

We continued our walk, until we arrived at the bus stop of the Flight Training Center. A bus just arrived; the rest of the way to Terminal 1 was just as slow as if we had walked, but at least it was warm.

The subways were also late. I finally arrived at home at about 6:40 or so. Freezing like crazy. The snow is still around, some of it anyway. I wonder if there will be more or if the winter is now finally over.