Lausanne & Laax

Okey doke, here we go with the rest of the story (Paul Harvey, anyone?). So despite the commute from Zürich to Lausanne not being ideal, my new company and I shared a good vibe with each other during the interview and reached a workable compromise. I'll work 2-3 days a week at the office (actually outside of Lausanne in an industrial area of a neaby town) and 2-3 days at home, when I'm not otherwise globetrotting.

I'm wary of naming names (especially of the corporate variety) on Blogspot because it seems tightly intertwined with Google's spiders; I've been burned not once but twice with blog-named-company employees jumping on me the morning after a post, as some desktop Google alert of theirs goes off. So we'll simply call my new employer TSF Corp., a $9 billion U.S. corporation headquartered in Massachusetts with offices all over the world for the manufacture, distribution and sales of various chemical laboratory equipment and analytical instruments; if you work anywhere near chemistry, you'd probably recognize their name (but not as I've given it...ha!).

The French-Swiss site hired me to develop the petrochemical market for their certain type of elemental analytical instrument. In other words, for example, I have to figure out how to convince oil refineries to spend $100K-250K for TSF machines that measure the amount of sulfur or other things in oil. They currently have a 5% market share and of course would rather have 50% and need someone to devise and execute the plan. The territory is basically the world everywhere oil is produced, except for the U.S. Think glamorous locations like the Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia. Who knows, we'll see. It was quite a stretch for both of us, seeing as I have no deep petrochemical or analytical instrument experience, and they're three hours from home and I don't speak the office language. But a good vibe and some flexibility overcame those hurdles, I guess.

So for the first four weeks, I'm spending all week in Lausanne to meet people and understand the products, how to operate the analytical instruments as well as the cafeteria espresso machine, etc. I'm living in a hotel until they remodel the corporate apartment near the office. A lot of the long-term logistical details have yet to be worked out, but I'm keeping the faith. Surprisingly (or not), work itself after a 13-month break isn't really so bad. Everyone has been very nice--despite not understanding why I don't speak a word of French when I live in the GERMAN region--and the cafeteria food isn't half bad.

I have to wind it up because I only bought a 2-hour Internet card, but those are the salient details. Steph and I also went Swiss skiing for the first time last weekend at an area in the Alps east of Zurich called Flims-Laax-Falera. The snow was unbelievably perfect...Switzerland isn't Europe's ski capital for no reason. Our group was 22 people strong (!), as our friend-of-friend network keeps growing. Maybe I'll elaborate more on that trip because of course there are a zillion crazy details, but in the meantime here are some pictures from Steph's and my scouting trip to Lausanne the week before I started work, and skiing pics:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=2hd8fyj.2lwxh0yj&x=0&y=qhfjdf&localeid=en_US