water at work :)

Japan

One of our colleagues is on a trip in Japan, where she ran into this picture, apparantly those pictures are all over the place, to make sure the telephone lines won't get cut. Which would make our job a lot easier if they'd put these signs up in Belgium as well... however, it might be interesting if they'd print the text in a comprehensional language for us though ;) I quite like this pic. If you'd like to see some more pics of Maaike's trip to Japan, you can click here.

Shoes at work II

Here's an update on the post I once published about shoes at work... the blue ones everyone loved have been replaced by the black and white ones in the first pic. Maybe you can all start bidding on the blue ones... I'll ask the owner to sign them to make them worth millions of euros in a few years time, when he's rich and famous ;)

El Shorty

He felt a bit outsided after I did not post a picture of his shoes, so to
make up for that, I'll post a pic of his shirt in stead...

There is a story to this shirt, which has been made for him, the story itself is quite hilarious, but I'll ask him to tell it himself in the comments. So, El Shorty, if you see this post before I see you, please tell everyone the 69-shirt story... LOL

Shoes at work

History

here's a tiny bit of telephone-history for you guys.


On Tuesday I was in the office building in Ghent for a course named "customer excellence", comments on that course will follow, but what I want to write about might me extremely boring for you guys, but to me it's actually quite fascinating. In that OB there are classrooms on the second floor and in the coffee area they keep an old telephone switch board (one of the first ones ever made) and some of the first phones, and to me it's quite interesting to see how it all worked in the old days.





This is the first switchboard, which had an operator sitting in front of it 24/7 (I do hope they took shifts though), when a customer wanted to make a call he'd wind up the handle on the right side of the phone (image underneath), then their number would appear because the small black valve covering the numbers would fall down, then the operator put a line in and talk to the other person to hear whom he or she wanted to be connected to and then he'd connect the two lines. If it was an interzonal call, he'd switch to the other operator, and so on and so on until the caller could be connected to his or her correspondent, pretty cool huh!?

here's an image of the first phone, I really like the design of it, especially since it kind of looks like a funny face to me... you'd put the faces ear to yours and speak in the mouth, the handle on the left is only to make contact to the operator.

cardboard rose

This morning there was a note at the entrance of our building, requesting a cardboard rose. The exact memo stated:

"hey

who happens to have a cardboard rose to spare? (it might be a stupid question, but you never know)

I'm one short for my best friend

Who won't do anything with it, I could really use it

persons name

persons perid

persons phonenumber (I won't print this, protection of the privacy)

Thanks in advance"

I thought it was rather amusing, personally I haven't got a cardboard rose, wouldn't even know what it looks like, I do know how paper roses look like... and if your best friend is that dear to you, buy her a bloody rose, or make her one yourself... jeez... :-)

coffee at work

Lars likes his random challenge, and I always enjoy his too, here's my answer to it; two pics I took at work today, I hope you'll enjoy these Lars!? However, I'll never meet up with the master, but I wanted to give it a go.

BTW normally the machine gives us plastic cups, which you down in just a sec, and I don't really think it's that tasteful, but one of my colleagues, Michaël, gave me this cup, and I'm still grateful for that, because it brightens up my desk! So, thanks again Michaël!

I go to that machine about three times an hour or so, should you ever look for me at our office and not find me behind a PC, check at the coffee machine, he's my best fwiend ;-)