I can’t call myself a feminist. It’s a hard word to define but I’m pretty sure it involves some kind of activism and that’s not me. But I do think I’m at least a righteous guy that does “the right thing” and try to be a gentleman to ladies – but stopping short of making them feel incompetent. And in my opinion – women are just better in every way. And the fact that guys again and again take advantage of being physically stronger sickens me!
This week I posted what was supposed to be a funny joke on Facebook with a funny pun. But what I didn’t reflect on at first was that the joke was about a guy doing a guy thing and taking sexual advantage of a woman in a very exposed situation. So when thinking about it like that it really wasn’t funny. But it took someone pointing that out to me that even though it was a pun-joke, the situation itself was anything but funny. The person pointing this out knew I wasn’t the kind of person to think a guy sexually assaulting a woman is funny but the point was that I didn’t even think of it that way. And that guys rarely think of it that way. And I couldn’t really argue against it!
I also remember back in high school when the guys are talking about home many girls they grabbed on the ass and I can honestly tell you my score was 0. Because it was just a completely strange concept to me – what was the point?? Back then one could blame it on hormones and “guys being guys” but nowadays it’s so very common for guys to still do things like that and I still don’t get it. But reading what happened with our prime minster Ulf Kristersson the other day it’s clear that it’s very common.
If you didn’t hear the story, he was doing a round with the local police and ended up comforting a woman in Gröna Lund that had been the victim of some guy being a complete asshole – and fortunately he got taken in by the police. And in a public response to the family of the victim that thanked him, he made a awesome point by stating that this is not ok and it’s up to everyone to stop this behaviour now.
Some might say this is “an imported problem”, with the meaning that this is young Muslim boys who don’t respect women and behaves in Muslim ways – which I don’t buy at all. As I said, this was a thing that happened 30 years ago when I was in high school! And swedes have been raping women since the age of the Vikings so I don’t buy that. But I don’t get where these guys are – because no one I personally know would think it’s ok to go around grabbing women at a concert or crowded subway or something like that, let alone raping anyone.
And speaking of rape, if anyone thinks a rape is just rough sex and then it’s done and over with, I want you to read this PDF about how a rape and the failure of the legal system can destroy the victim. Everyone should actually read it, it s a very good read and something I hope with our new “mutual consent” law in Sweden won’t be as much of an issue as it has been. Or go read statistics about how a rape can destroy a person’s life with a lot of victims ending up in some addiction hellhole!
So no, “guys being guys” isn’t ok, it’s not an excuse, it’s a terrible way of trying to deflect from being an asshole!
But I still can’t undo being a part of the problem for posting a joke without thinking it through. Here’s hoping I’m not too old to learn and change my ways!
Thanks to the great article over here at Medium I finally have a diagnosis – I’m “Collapse Aware“.
I realized a long time ago that the civilization we have built for ourselves isn’t sustainable. For multiple reasons. And it will come crashing down – unless drastic measures that the public won’t want and thus no politician dares to propose, let alone enforce. It’s also a part of the diagnosis to feel frustrated, depressed, angry at how the rest of the world isn’t waking up to this fact and actually does something about it. And the diagnosis also comes with the doubt that I might be disillusioned and wrong about the whole thing.
I think it was back in 2004 back when I was finishing up my “world tour” working for our state department and traveling all over the world and I saw directly how different countries and cultures were living and using the resources of the earth that I had the first thoughts about “how in hell are we supposed to keep on going like this in our ‘western civilization’??”. The wasteful mindset of USA, the consumerism of Singapore contrasted by the “taking each day by day” in Kongo. Sitting in an airport counting the amount of planes every hour thinking how much fuel this is costing. The ever expanding population. How we keep getting older and older and not dying as much from diseases as we are ‘supposed to’. And this feeling just kept getting stronger and stronger over the years. It’s actually been growing for so long that I can’t even remember when it got to the point where I realized “this won’t hold for long”. But it was before I became a father because I remember having the feelings of “the last thing I should be doing is putting a child to this earth to hand over the mess we’ve made”. Which is one of the reasons we only had one.
But one pivotal thing I do remember was watching a documentary about the coral reefs and how they are slowly dying. And this I think was about 8 years ago. Also at this point I was having second thoughts about my job. I was working for one of the biggest charter/holiday companies in Scandinavia. Our bread and butter was flying people to Greek islands for all you can eat and drink vacations and back again. And even though that company was a leader in it’s field for fuel efficiency and being environmental aware, every time I was on one of those holidays and saw the waste at the buffet and the consumerism, it really didn’t feel good.
Since then it’s only gotten worse for our civilization – as far as I know. I try to be a critical thinker and not taking anything without checking the source but in these days it’s hard not to find a new scientific paper about how we’re sending this civilization down a spiral. Or listening to Johan Rockström (or watching his Netflix “Breaking Boundaries”) talking with all his years of research and studies, it all get’s a bit too much to ignore for anyone. What makes things even more frustrating is that conservative political parties are gaining grounds globally. And conservatives aren’t really known to put the planet first. Yet people are voting for them more and more globally. Even in Sweden, one year ago 18% of people voted for a party that gladly says the environmental problems are someone else’s problems to fix, not ours and also says “more people are dying from cold than heat”??
But then in 2020 something happened that gave me a little bit of hope. At first I thought it was nature’s “finding a way”. A new global pandemic to reduce our numbers. And with changing our way of living and with all resources thrown at that problem we got out of it pretty “successfully”. So we can change our behavior, we can change how we do business, we can change how we live our lives. But then we also proved how good we are at returning to the old ways as fast as possible even though we shouldn’t.
So now as the heatwaves of 2023 in Europe has dissipated and the storm seems to be easing up, what’s next for us? Are we going to continue like we have for the past decades? Or are we finally going to realize that the civilization we’ve built isn’t sustainable and start moving away from it?
What we need to do? (in no particular order)
But most of all we need to change our mindset. Because this isn’t going to end well and what we can’t do is saying “they will fix it” (who are they exactly?) or “it will sort itself out” (because we won’t let it).
I unfortunately see a future where countries go to war just because their country isn’t enough or they can’t live there anymore. Like 1 billion people in India facing a water shortage and daily temperature averaging over 40′. I’m seeing Spain being too dry and hot to grow food. I’m seeing USA taking over Canada for the colder climate. I’m seeing the world being dependent on Russia as the biggest land for farming in the areas we used to call “permafrost”. That is if a nuke or two doesn’t go off. And no more champagne as Champagne wine region will get too dry to grow grapes. We need politicians with balls to implement these changes but they won’t do that until there are enough of us wanting a change. Because me changing jobs to one that works for the science of how to beat this, me installing solar panels on our house, driving an electric car and reducing amount of meat, it’s all voluntarily and it’s not enough.
But I seem to be in the extreme minority to think we need a drastic change. And believe me, I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong about all of this. But the people doing the research agree that it’s not sustainable and we’ve entered damage limitation territory now. And we aren’t even doing that.
So it’s time for a general election again here in Sweden as is traditional every 4 years. On September 11th we’re heading out to cast our votes and both me and my wife definitely will. My son still has to sit out this and next election.
But I really have a problem with this election. Europe is suffering it’s worst heatwave ever and is drying up fast. There’s water shortages, rivers are so dry that boats can hardly transport freight and fish are dying by the tons, people are losing their homes and livelihoods and it’s all kinds of chaos caused by global warming. And you’d think that even after ignoring Greta protesting outside of parliament for over 4 years that surely this would wake politicians up? Nope. And why would it since the media isn’t holding them accountable. And worse yet, the voters aren’t holding them accountable.
Jimmie put it best during the “Aftonbladet” debate last night when he ‘attacked’ our environmental party by saying – “you only want to make things worse for everyone!”. And that’s exactly the problem. Elections used to be about people asking themselves “what party align best with what I want?” and vote for that. And nobody wants to make things worse for themselves. Nobody wants to give up their summer vacations by the mediterranean, take the bike instead of their car, go vegetarian and generally stop buying new stuff and focus on recycling. But in my opinion the time for “what I want” is over – now it’s critical for everyone to think “what does the planet want?”.
And it’s clear over the past 3 years that it certainly doesn’t want us! First it gave us the wildfires in Australia, then covid, then monkeypox and now a heatwave from hell.
So I wish that for once the voters would think more long term and more globally. Because yes, in the short term not going on vacation in Greece may suck but at least there’s a chance there will be a habitable Greece in 50 years!
As for who I’m going to vote for? Well I also always ask myself “what party align best with what I want?”. And I want a positive future for my son and the planet. And again there’s only one party that is taking any kind of attempts at doing anything about it so again I’m voting for our environmental party. I wish there was at least one more party that would at least try so I can look for other things that align with what I want but … nope!
Sorry but saying that “what Sweden does doesn’t matter and won’t affect anything” is a poor excuse for not doing anything (read “The Guardian” article here). And building nuclear powerplants won’t solve nothing since they won’t be operational for at least 12 years and by then the waters in the seas will be too hot to cool them (read analysis here, only in Swedish I’m afraid). And that’s about it. That’s all the options right there. So again I quote one of my all time favorite movies – “damn you for forcing me into this position!” (Ed Harris as General Hummel in “The Rock”).
But the way things are going we’re going to end up with team “do nothing since we’re so small what does it really matter” & “build nuclear powerplants”. So that’ll be interesting and I really do hope it doesn’t matter. But I wish I could say “we did our best” to our son but it really doesn’t feel like we did. Even going flexitarian, voting green every time, driving electric car and solar panels on the house, it’s not enough.
As previously mentioned Covid did eventually get me but fortunately I had 2 doses of the vaccine so it was fortunately mild-ish.
But I remember back in January of 2020 when I and a colleague at work discussed it and started hypotheticals about how bad it would get. And in February I realised that it wasn’t going to just go away so I did a bit of prepping- and yes I was one of the reasons there wasn’t enough toilet paper at our local store. Also bought masks, blood oxygen checker and stuff like that just in case.
And then me, the wife and our son got knocked out by something that could have been Covid but in late February 2020 they were only testing people that hade travelled to the high risk areas since it wasn’t out in the wild in Sweden yet. They said. And then we went to the Swedish Eurovision finale with thousands of people crammed into an arena. Right after that the shit hit the fan and those events became unthinkable because by now it was officially out in the wild in Sweden too.
And even though we took precautions and we spent over a year doing our best to social distance and going out as little as possible, I was never really afraid that I wouldn’t make it if I did get it because.. statistics! My wife’s grandmother unfortunately died from it just a few weeks shy of her 90th birthday. But when Adam Alsing died from it I actually did get a bit nervous.
At work this was a disaster since we pretty much had to stop working. No one was allowed to travel so very little we could do. After a few months of furlough for most of the staff (except me that kept on working at 100%, but from home) they eventually had to cut down on the staff. A lot of people in my IT operations team, a few of which I considered friends, was let go but I made the cut. Unfortunately my wife didn’t make the cut and her job so she was unemployed for a few months before finding another job.
Fast forward to October and my sister got it. She works at a hospital so it was just a matter of time. And she got it bad – not bad enough for hospital but bad. I don’t think her sense of smell and taste is fully back yet! But I was mostly worried for my parents and for my other sister in Scotland with comorbidity.
The winter was uneventful as was spring of 2021. During the summer we had a “staycation” on Gotland during which I felt that my place of work had lost its appeal a bit after so many people had left and things were really slow and no one knew how long this would go on for, so I decide to look for another job and pretty quickly found one. And I also got the vaccine as fast as possible because I didn’t want to be worried about it all the time, I had lots of other medical things going on so one less to worry about.
During winter I started my new job and a few months into 2022 our son got a mild case of the flu but we kept him home just in case. And I was still working from home. And the week after I got symptoms so I ordered a test and yep, it was covid! I was knocked out and in bed for a few days but nothing bad. My wife got it after me but she had just taken her third dose so she was only knocked out for a day. So that was disappointingly uneventful but I guess we have the vaccine to thank for that. Go science!
As I mentioned in the last post I’ve been struggling with mental health during 2020 and 2021. After talking with my psychologist trying to explore exactly what it is it was pretty clear that the major cause behind it was me worrying about my health and lately also my son’s.
I don’t know if I watched too much “House” or if it’s the availability of information but I’ve been self diagnosing myself for years and most of the time it was harmless. But since summer of 2019 I’ve taken it up quite a few notches to the level that I got panic attacks over small things. It could be a pain in my arms, something with my breathing, it was always something terminal. Or something serious enough that I couldn’t work anymore or something like that. Unfortunately it didn’t stop there – I would keep playing out the scenario that would end with us losing the house and “what would my wife do if it really was terminal”, all those thoughts that I couldn’t help having and losing sleep over. It doesn’t help that I know on the intelligent level that it’s ridiculous, when my mind started racing away it was too late.
But it didn’t stop there, when I started doing the same every time my son complained about something being wrong that’s when it got totally out of control. In my defense – the doctors still haven’t diagnosed reasons behind some things. Then you add a pandemic on top of that and eventually I broke.
But seeing a professional and talking about it really helped. I got some tips how to try to control it, also some breathing exercises and I even tried happy pills for a while. And now I still find myself having these thoughts but I’m way better at controlling it, being able to distract my mind with something and it’s been quite a while since I lost sleep over it! And it helps that so far after some 15 examination (everything from MRI and a camera up my ass) no one has found anything serious wrong with me.
It’s been almost a year since my last update and there are a lot of reasons for that. The primary being I almost burnt myself out last year. And I changed jobs. And got covid. And stuff in the family.
But first thing first – how I almost burnt myself out from stress last year.
I pride myself in being efficient and optimising everything I do. This is required at work but when you start optimising how to empty the dishwasher it takes on a whole new level. And a few years ago my lovely wife almost got burnt out at her work, so we both try to be observant for one another when it comes to stress levels. And she’s told me that ever since we moved to our new house my stress levels have gone up and my mood gone down. Stupid male as I am I didn’t listen to her. But after 2 years of uncertainty at work thanks to a bankruptcy and covid, taking on extra on call duty to make more money, a year of panic attacks over my and my sons health (we’re fine!) and the life during the pandemic which cause agoraphobia, as well as a member of the family being very, very ill, after last summer I found myself in a meeting at work that I had organised and 10 minutes in I forgot where I was and what I was doing. My body had had enough. I had a meltdown in my head and took the rest of the week off. After trying to work 2 days the following week my body said “stop it” and I took 5 weeks off to get myself together. I sought medical help and met a psychologist for a few sessions and got a lot of help from my wife and eventually I made it back to work. But during this time I was also transitioning to a new job I managed to get and fortunately for me that job doesn’t require 24/7 on call duty and I’m starting fresh with no baggage or expectations of being a miracle worker which I had put on myself at my old work. So I’m going to set expectations low for myself at the new place but fortunately I won’t have to worry about us going out of business because of covid, heatwaves, airport chaos or any of the other things you have very little control over!
So to sum it up – I almost hit a brick wall but fortunately I had the help and means to stop it in time and I’m very grateful for my family and friends helping out because it would have ended very badly. And I have a newfound respect for mental health!
And my advice it simply – listen to your body. It will tell you way before it gets this far. I didn’t. And take things slowly. Go for a walk in a nature. Put your fork down between bites. Don’t try to get as much done as possible. Put your mobile away.
Yay – I ‘m finally fully vaccinated to combat covid19 should I get it!
During this entire pandemic I’ve been trying to be cautious – staying at home as much as possible, avoid crowded places, not going out to restaurants or anything like that, order things on the web, basically doing my best to limit the risk of getting covid. But at the same time you still want to live, not just survive right so there’s been a few exceptions. I’ve had to take my woman out to dinner a few times and we’ve had to go on a crowded boat to Gotland and so on. I haven’t been panicking about “oh my god I’ll die if I get it!”. I’ve followed the statistics and risk of dying and I’ve been countering them as best as I can. For example I’ve started to… exercise! Yeah I know, but when statistics show that the biggest contributing factor to sever Covid, besides age, is obesity then you bet I’m on that treadmill!
But now that I’m fully vaccinated, how much of this will change? Covid hasn’t gone away and the mask wearing is still a thing for me to protect others. So until the booster shot I think I’m still going to be somewhat conservative of being in crowded places.
As far as going back to work, the biggest issue there is the actual going to work. They still recommend people working from home and one of the reasons is to avoid crowded trains and buses and since I can’t take the car to work (way too expensive) that means I’ll be working from home until either told by my superior I can’t or the recommendation goes away in September. But I’ll miss it, even if I haven’t been as productive as I would have been at work it’s still been way better for us as a household with me being home more and not having to spend about 3 hours commuting.
Hey. It’s me. I know, it’s been a long, long time since I updated this place. But the past months have been pretty boring. Which considering everything that is happening is a good thing!
It got a bit depressing after summer when my wife lost her job and was unemployed for a while but she got a new job so that’s over and done with. But other than that we’re pretty much in a holding pattern until we get vaccinated (or infected) so we can start living again and society starting to open up. Because I’m pretty tired of our house by now after spending almost 12 months here. I’m one of the lucky ones that can do 99% of my job from home but that also means I don’t get out much. Or at all…
But so far we’ve been able to avoid getting covid19, the closest it has gotten was my sister that got symptoms day after she was here for an evening of F1. She had pretty rough 2 weeks and is still suffering a bit unfortunately even after 5 months!
So here’s hoping we can get vaccinated and start living again and people can start travelling so our company doesn’t go down as a result of this considering how much we’ve survived. Tsunami, ash clouds, bankruptcy, we beat them all!
Since I’ve worked for a charter company for a while now we’ve gone abroad to Spain, Greece or Turkey for the past decade or so. But given the current situation that wasn’t possible so we looked at around at some place to go in Sweden together with some friends. And we ended up with Daftö Resort – a camping resort on the west coast of Sweden which we hardly ever go to. So we booked a cabin from Thursday to Sunday and packed the car for a 6 hour road trip and off we went!
We made a quick stop in Mariestad to eat lunch and were happily surprised by the local restaurant “Kingfisher”, that Google suggested. Then some ice cream and off we went again.
When we arrived and tried checking in they looked at me like I was the town idiot. Which of course I was because we had booked Friday -> Monday! So there we were, outside Strömstad on the west coast with nowhere to stay! 4 calls later we had 2 rooms booked at a local “spa resort” which was a pretty damn good hotel. But they clearly didn’t care for the covid restrictions like “no hanging around the bars” so I wasn’t too comfortable there.
After spending the night there we went into Strömstad to explore what this coastal city had to offer. And there were some nice vistas and atmosphere and we even started fishing for some crabs down in the harbor. Not to eat though, just for fun!
Then back to Daftö resort and we were allowed to checking and get comfortable in our rather large 8 person cabin. Unfortunately they had some covid restrictions here that mostly applied to how many people could be in the pool area at any given time but we managed to get a spot to get some pool action but you can clearly see that people weren’t too concerned about covid here. Safe to say I wasn’t jumping in when it looked like this!
Another covid thing was that they had shut down their little ammusement park which was really sad for our kids. Even though we had told them it was closed so they didn’t mind much but we knew how much more fun they would have had with there. But I fully support them not having it open given the current situation.
What was open was their crazy golf course. And it was really, really good. Nice designs and themes, well maintained and if it wasn’t for the queuing I’d say it was perfect. I wait, we were at the front of the queue all the time! Unfortunately the restaurants at Daftö left a bit to be desired but I guess for a camping site it’s ok – we all got something to eat and it wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t up to our standards of “going out”.
We also got some time bathing in the sea and just kicking back in the cabin enjoying a few beers and I have to say that cabin was awesome – it had everything we needed and more (didn’t expect wifi!). We also tried some more restaurants in Strömstad and I can recommend the tapas restaurant “Il Toro” – but stick to the tapas. Not only was the tapas really good but the waiter even made a movie reference based off my wifes T-shirt that even I didn’t get, so kudos for that!
Then on Sunday it was time to pack up the cars and go back home. 6 hour drive back then unpacking and settling in to try to enjoy the F1 race from Silverstone. Which is hard since the Mercs are 1 sec faster than anyone else.
So that sums up our vacation for this year. Which was fun but also sad we didn’t do it more because our son really had fun without a computer!
I’m unfortunately not talking about that episode of Star Trek DS9 – it’s life in general right now. Not only is there a global pandemic that is crippling society and tanking our company and already caused my wife to lose her grandmother and her job.. now we got cancer in the family as well.
So now I’m gonna be one of those people who say – FUCK CANCER! Fuck it hard!!! Statistically it’s kind of amazing my family has been spared this long and I always assumed it would hit me because… well, not only am I the most expendable of the lot (in my opinion), I also live my life the least healthiest with all the chemical stuff I put in my body not to mention the red meat and then some lack of physical activities on top of that and sitting in front of a computer all day long, I thought it was a given! This fear is why I’m going to our local doctor so much and why I’ve have had two MRI scans in the past year. Both came back negative. But our luck had to run out.
We’re thinking of you and hoping for the best and let me know if there’s anything I can do!
So how are you handling this Corona thing?
Back in January even I thought China would manage to contain it. Neither the previous outbreaks had any major impact on life as I knew it. Even in the middle of the SARS outbreak I flew to Singapore without much hesitation because I had a job to do. But when we saw them building a hospital in what can only be described as panic I realised this would get out of hand. And boy did it ever!
But it didn’t take long for our CDC (“Folkhälsomyndigheten”, or “FOHM” for short) to tell people to work from home if possible. Which I gladly did and I’ve been to the office maybe four times in as many months. And working from home definitely has its challenges that I’ll make a separate post about. But I was still hoping it’d blow over rather quickly so we could all go back to normal but “little did I know” right…
In the middle of March my wife’s grandmother fell victim to our society’s failure to protect the elderly and she passed away which was a big shock to everyone because she was quite the iron lady and we thought that after a week of not getting worse that she’d pull through but unfortunately not.
So we, as in our family unit of 3, started doing our best to minimize the exposure. Not seeing as many people, not going out on many trips or excursions and staying home as much as possible. But the cabin fever of being home this much, especially when working from home, is rather intense and I’m so thankful that FOHM hasn’t instituted a lockdown in Sweden!
But by early April everyone realised how bad this situation was and all companies that were effected by this were allowed to give their employees a paid furlough – working from 20, 40, 60 or even 80% while retaining most of the salary. I wasn’t effected by this as I’m apparently that vital to our IT ops but most of my colleagues went down to 40% or less. And it also effected my wife’s work since people aren’t going out for coffee that much and B2B sales got hurt by everyone working from home so she went from working 5 days per week to 2. Which meant that for 3 days she was home while I was working from home which made it even more interesting.
In early June we finally got tested for antibodies which was negative so as it turns out, we just had the normal flu back in February.
Unfortunately that wasn’t sustainable and eventually there had to be downsizing. I survived the first round of layoffs but my wife didn’t so she’s soon out of a job. That sucks, not only because she’s unemployed but because this was a job where she worked with a product she loves – coffee.
But so far we’re in good health. Well more or less anyway, we’re not suffering from Covid at least. But I know 6 people that have had it and 3 of them are still suffering from fatigue, shortness of breath and heart arrhythmia, scary stuff to say the least so I’d rather sit this one out.
So right now we’re still doing the best we can in little family unit, limiting our exposure, shopping as much online as possible and trying not to go out unless we have to.
K mår bättre än bra
Yeah, I don’t know why but NASA has a special place in my heart. Maybe cause I’m a tech nerd, a scifi geek or just like to have my shit together, or maybe it’s some visionary part of me I don’t know I have but I just love it. In everything from fictional NASA in “Contact” to proper NASA in “From the Earth to the Moon” it’s an inspiration. That’s one of the reasons I made a point at going to Kennedy Space Centre when I was in Florida and one of the reasons that trip was an awesome success to me. And one of the reasons I didn’t have a problem opening up my wallet in the gift shop!
And yesterday I saw the movie/documentary “Mission Control” – about those 20-something engineers that made up the mission control team. I really recommend catching it on Netflix or renting it on bluray cause it’s awesome. One of the things that surprised me was the interview with one of the engineers who was there in the trench for a lot of the Apollo missions, even the moon landing, that said he regretted doing it because of the toll it took on his family! I mean, it’s one of the things I can only dream of doing so hearing that makes you wonder what really is important – making a mark in history or being with your family.
Another NASA “merchandise” I can recommend is the book “View From Above” by austronaut and “photographer in space” Terry Virts. You can get it from Amazon or something but it’s well worth it. Not only because of the awesome pictures that makes you feel tiny and insignificant but also because of the stories he has to tell.
Lobby of OCCC South
And it really was fortunate that we were the ones to go since sooooo many of the sessions and talk was about Office 365, Azure and the cloud! It was really hard to find sessions that talked about on premises stuff but I managed to go to a few! The event started officially on Monday morning with a vision keynote by Satya, the CEO of Microsoft and had a bit of this and that in it.
Trying to get the new about OneDrive
Another great thing about these events is that you meet the people who are actually working on the other side – when I’m freaking out over the bad SharePoint Online admin center “well that guy right over there is the program manager of that, go talk to him”. Which I did. “Well you’ll glad to know we’re working on version 2, mail us and we’ll get you into the preview”. Done and done! And seeing some really pros at doing presentations, like Anne Michels who constantly made jokes on her expense (and sometimes even Mr. Michels).
And on Thursday evening Microsoft had “rented” the entire Universal Studios Orlando theme park for us! All you can eat, drink and ride all evening long! That was certainly an experience since we don’t have anything close to these theme parks in Sweden! We have plenty of amusement parks, but no theme parks, certainly not like this where you can walk into Jurassic Park and have a dinoburger!
Then friday was kind of winding down and collecting thoughts and writing reports on what I’ve learnt and then on Saturday the long trek back to Stockholm began. I checked in at the airport at about 2pm on Saturday and passed through customs in Stockholm at about 1pm on the Sunday.
But all in all it was an absolutely awesome experience and conference to attend for me. The downside was of course being away from my family for 8 days, that really felt long in the end. My and the wife have never been away from each other for that long since we moved in together 8 years ago!
KFC monument för JFK
SpaceX byggnad & launchpad
After that 2 hour ride we were dropped of a the Saturn station (or whatever it was called) which was just this huge museum for the Apollo program! I completely geeked out there, running around photographing every mission banner there was and every little thing!
After a quick lunch we set off back to the Visitor center where they had a Atlantis museum which was an awesome 3-stage display climaxing in a reveal of the actual space shuttle Atlantis! Completely geeked out again! Like a kid in a candy store on Christmas!! Then it got really emotional! I still don’t know why I get all somber up and even tear up at it, but at the end of the exhibit was the Challenger and Columbia memorials.
We spent a total of 7 hours there and I could’ve stayed a while longer! Absolutely one of the best experiences of my life. My only regret is that my wife and son wasn’t there to share it or see me get that excited about it.
Then we went to what these IT nerds who have been here a few times before thought was the greatest steakhouse ever – Morton’s. To sum it up and as my wife could say – I could’ve done more for less. I mean, it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t all that and it was a pretty pretentious restaurant. But at least the company was good.
All in all a really great day!!
If you’ve followed this blog long enough or have heard me ranting you may know I’m not that big of a fan of US of A. And not only because of their most recent choice of president although that hasn’t helped. But a few months ago my supervisor asked me if I wanted to go to Microsoft Ignite. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a huge convention that Microsoft holds once a year in USA. It’s their greatest week of the year when they release a lot of new stuff for our techies and declares their visions for the future.
At first I didn’t know if I even wanted to go since it would mean actually going to the US. The only time I’ve been here before was when I went to Guatemala and had to pass security when going from one international terminal to another so I’ve never actually sat foot on their soil. But much like 14 years ago when I was asked to work on the project for the state department my initial feeling was “I don’t want to leave my comfort zone”. But realizing that.. I had to accept! After making sure my wife was OK with it I signed up. Fortunately a colleague of mine is also attending so I won’t be alone. And he has a lot of friends in the consultancy business so we’ll be hanging out with them. And there’s always the big “Swedes only” party to go to.
Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida
So on Saturday my wife dropped me off at Arlanda, we kissed good bye and I went off through security checkpoint to start my journey… and flight delayed!! Some part of the plane broke and they had to fly in a new one from Copenhagen (which I believe is airliner talk for “the crew wasn’t allowed to fly anymore because if union rules and we had to fly in a replacement crew). So about 3 hours later (plus one free beer!) we lifted of for Newark airport at New York. After passing through security, customs, security, passport check, customs, security and a tram between the terminals we arrived at the new gate with about 2 hours to spare. We were supposed to have a 6 hour wait, but 3 hours late departure plus all those lines meant we only got 2. And that was plenty because unfortunately Newark airport is something out of the 70’s. It really does need a fix up! Then we went for a bite to eat but when I went to the food court I got this familiar smell of deep fry oil from my days working at a fast food restaurant so my heart told my body I don’t want to eat here. So I didn’t. Fortunately my metabolism goes down, way down, on airplanes to it really wasn’t a problem!
The New York skyline, all the way from Newark
Then onto that airplane that was gonna take us to Orlando in Florida. And when we were supposed to lift off we hadn’t even left the gate yet. The captain announced they had to reboot the plane! I shit you not, it was a literal “have you tried turning it off and on again”-moment!! But it actually worked and off we went. Slept all the way!
After arriving something happened that has never happened in all my travels – my luggage was already waiting for me!! I think there was a mixup in Newark and the flew my baggage out on the flight 2 hours before ours, which goes totally against international regulations of not allowing a bag onto the plane without it’s owner! But I didn’t complain, we went out to grab a cab… and no! Not a cab in sight! Another first for all of my travels, an airport with no cabs! We only had to wait 15-20 minutes for one but they are usually lined up!
So, off to the hotel and sleep ahead of the new days travel to Kennedy Space Center. I’m hoping I’ll get to post about that soon, but I’m actually here to work so not sure when I’ll have the time for that!
So now that we have our new car we begin the task of selling off our old car. We’ve tried selling off old cars ourselves before and it’s never ended well. I expect too much professionalism for that when we’re talking about this much money and I’ve always ended up with the complete opposite so I didn’t want to go the private route. Even though it means getting less I wanted to sell it to a dealer who could do the work. After trying out different “what’s my car worth” sites I ended up trying out a company called “Vi Köper Din Bil” (“we buy your car”) with the website “vikoperdinbil.se”. I’m typing it there because my hopes are anyone googling it will see this and stay away!!
On their website you simply enter the model, make, year and mileage of your car and they will guestimate it’s worth. For our Seat Leon they guestimated about 112.000:- “plus any extra options” which we had plenty of on that car. That’s about half of what we paid for it three years later but sounded ok. I mean the “street value” of the car would be 130.000:- but they needed a cut of that so ofcourse I couldn’t get that. But based on that estimate I made an appointment to take my car in to get a proper go-through and evaluation. I took time off work, I cleaned the car, loaded her up with the summer tyres and coordinated with the wife to come pick me up afterwards. But at the station they went through it (and didn’t find anything wrong with it at all), sent everything off to their expert who came back with an offer. 90.000:-! That’s 22.000 less, or more accurately 22% less, than their gustimate which included the comment “plus any extra options”!
Their business strategy is pretty obvious – give customers an optimistic guestimations and then when they’ve take the time and make the effort of going into their station they can just slash 20% off that and some people will go for it. Or “lockpriser” as we say in swedish. Real estate agents are given warnings whenever they are caught using tactics like that but for cardealers this is totally acceptable?! Even going through their own “what our customers think of us” turns up a gem where a guy says that he was happy even though they slashed 20% off the initial guestimate! There are also plenty of reviews on Trustpilot against them for this tactic!
Naturually I said “get the fuck out of here!” and left on the spot. So beware of “vikoperdinbil.se” unless you’re ready to get an offer about 40.000:- less than the street value. How do I know that? Well my option B was to take it to the authorized Seat dealer in Täby. They gave us 110.000:- for it and put it up for sale for 130.000:- and in 3 days the ad was taken down!
[Previously on the blog – me and the wife wanted to buy a new car and ordered an Audi A5 for 492.000 SEK and it was delivered in late February but only after wondering if this was their first car delivery ever!]
Now that was 3 weeks ago. And in those three weeks unfortunately enough has happened to make me say “I won’t go back there again”.
Not only because of the reasons I’ve already listed (1) them telling us to go away from the business section in a rather rude manner, 2) the unprofessional way of handling the tyre situation 3) noone informed us of the deposit we had to make before we got there) but as it turns out they made even bigger mistakes – one huge mistake during the ordering process and two pretty big mistakes with the delivery.
When delivering an Audi, the representative is supposed to help you sign up to the myAudi account and tie your car to that account. Nope, didn’t happend! Fortunately I know my way around Internet and websites but it led me to the next big issue. They also failed to inform us that the little plastic badge on the set of keys we got was actually very, VERY valuable since it had a PIN to enable remote access of the car! Without this I couldn’t use the electronics I paid for and selling it would be pretty damn hard! Fortunately we hadn’t thrown that little plastic thing in the bin yet but at no point did we think it was something we needed to keep! But the major f*ck up was discovered when we were loading up the car with some kids and realised this model didn’t have 3 seatbelts in the back, only 2!!! I didn’t even know that was possible but apparently it’s an extra option for Audi that costs a mere 3.600 SEK! Had the original salesguy informed us about that we would absolutely have clicked it. But he didn’t so now we’re stuck with a car that only has 4 seatbelts! This was a dealbreaker when we started this (one of the reasons we didn’t go for a Mustang!) and we made sure to check that it did have it when we were in the showroom! I can only imagine the salesguy picked up on us only having one kid and in an attempt to keep the price below 500.000 didn’t click it but it leaves a very sour taste! Fortunately we have a cheap ass VW Polo that has 3 seatbelts in the back so if we ever need one extra seat we can use that. But still… And “we should have checked it ourselves”, yeah you could say that, but as I said in part I, it’s a freaking jungle!! Unless you work there knowing what’s included in the “2017 A5 Sportback Proline Sport Edition” from the go, it’s damn impossible! And when adding stuff BAM! you’re told that it’s not compatible with the current loadout! It’s rediculous! Sometimes I think those configurations should have a “these things are NOT included in your layout”-list, that would have spelt it out for us that it was an extra option.
So, expect a new one of these in 3 years when it’s time to buy a new car again. Maybe we’ll go for a Mustang that time around or maybe Tesla if they are affordable by then.
[Previously on the blog – me and the wife wanted to buy a new car and ordered an Audi A5 for 492.000:- and was told it would be delivered end of March]
And so we waited. And waited.
Eventually in mid February we got an e-mail from the insurance company telling us it was time to insure our Audi. ??.. so we called up the dealer in Järva, got put on hold and eventually told by the manager that “I’m gonna have to call you back”. And so he did. And yeah, the car had arrived and we were free to pick it up next week. At this point I’m wondering “how long has it been there and when were you going to tell us!?” but I was just too excited and grateful that it was already here to question that. After our dealing with Toyota I thought it’d be best if we gave them the week and come in on Friday afternoon. This gave them over 8 days to get the car ready. And then he assigned the delivery to another salesman which I thought was weird but as it turns out the salesman, Daniel, that I liked so much and ordered the car from was no longer working there for reasons noone wanted to get into. When I woke up on Tuesday, 3 days before the delivery, it was snowing. And I remembered we hadn’t ordered the winter tyres so it would be illegal for us to drive our new car home from the dealer without it! So I called them up and asked what they usually do in this situation when customers have ordered cars without winter tyres and it’s snowing. And he had no clue. His first response was just hoping it would get warmer and thaw so it wouldn’t be a problem. I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or serious but it was absolutely unprofessional! So I had to ask him if he could fix winter tyres for us which he ofcourse was willing to try to do but couldn’t make a promise he’d get them in time. Seriously, he had 3 days to find new wintertyres for a new car in Stockholm, how hard can that be, pick up the phone to Euromasters and have them send over a set with DHL!? Well, he couldn’t just call anyone to get any kind of tyres, he had to order Audi originals regardless if we wanted it or not! Then we didn’t hear anything from him and we were just left assuming it was sorted when we went in to pick up the car on Friday afternoon. And much to our delight and surprise he had sorted it. On the car was now brand new Audi original winter tyres! “Great, so can we get the car now” … “well not really because you still haven’t paid us the 130.000 that was due”. Huh? Well, as it turns out we were supposed to send in the money to them so they had it before we could pick up the car and noone had told us about this. He said it was the “other guy” that had missed informing us of that. Personally I think it should be on a check list when preparing to deliver a car to make sure the car is legal to drive on the day of delivery and that the payment was settled, but apparently this guy didn’t think that was on them, those were my problems to solve!
So I ended up using Swish, a Swedish “send money instantly to another phone number” system that is quite a common way to send money here – just not supposed to be used for transactions of this size!! Fortunately my bank allowed the transaction, otherwise I don’t know what they’d do but I was furious enough to leave there and then and have another look at the Cupra – just ask Toyota. So now that that was sorted we got a big, long debriefing on insurance options. After that he unveiled our new car. And it was glorious!! I knew the car was so hitech that we were in for long education of what everything did.. but nope, he wasn’t into that, “I could spend an hour talking about everything but you pretty much want to get on the road huh?”.. well that didn’t stop him from talking insurances for a very long time but ok so let’s get on the road.. nope, we had to take a detour to their servicecenter to pay for the tyres. Fortunately the guy there was an absolute professional and got that over with quickly in the kind of “getting it done!” method I love. After that we got an ok to go out on the road, finally!
To be continued tomorrow…
Me and the wife were in the market to buy a car. And my wife has expensive taste. And we had the cash to spend. Sounds like a dream for any car dealer, right? But you know after our dealings with Toyota last year that I didn’t think very highly of car dealers… and that was about to get even lower!
My wife have always wanted to buy a Mustang. But purchasing a new Mustang in Stockholm proved pretty impossible as the only dealer we were in contact with didn’t have any available for us to try as other customers had crashed them both and we didn’t want to order one blindly. Besides I got the feeling he wasn’t too eager to sell one to us anyway. So we checked out a secondhand dealer that had a great Mustang waiting to be bought. After sitting in it we both kinda realised this isn’t the kind of car you use driving back and forth to school or to Ikea. So that idea was put on hold.
The next idea was a Tesla. But in Sweden the start at about 750.000 SEK which is shitload of money but when you start adding on stuff it goes up to 7 digits quite fast. So no, not yet.
Then we went for a sport version of the car we have today, a Seat Leon Cupra. The only dealer we had even remotely close to us turned out to be amateurs! They only had one for customers to try out. And the owner was using it as his private car. And we had to book an appointment to testdrive it! Well we did but it turns out the boss’s wife or daughter had taken the car for high street shopping that afternoon and got stuck in traffic. Who knew there might be traffic jams when going from Stockholm city to Barkarby at 5pm!? And when we test drove it we found their candy stash, we found her wallet and some left over shopping. As I said, amateur hour. Unfortunately the car was an absolut beast and we were tempted to buy one had it not been for the dealer.
So then we raised the bar! As we’ve been happy with both our Volkswagens and our Seat we decided to test the upgrade in the family and go for an Audi! Now I wanted to use Möller Bil again since we were so pleased with how the Seat turned out and how professional they’ve been but no Möller retailer close to us sells Audi. So we went to the Audi retailer in Järva. First thing that happened was they didn’t respond to my e-mail requests. Usually not a big thing but car dealers are supposed to be more eager than this, but oh well. So we went to their showroom and were told that we weren’t welcomed because we were in the business section! Should have gone home right there and then to be honest because the only reason we were in the business area was poor signage from their end! But we didn’t go home, we went up a floor to the consumer section and met a really friendly and nice salesguy, Daniel. He tried to understand what we wanted and our criterias – the wife wanted a bit of luxury but I wanted to pay the least amount for it! We went there looking at an A4 but when the wife saw their latest A5 Sportback she was totally sold! And when I saw their virtual cockpit, so was I. We tested sitting in an A5 to get the feel for the interior, noting that there was indeed 3 seatbelts in the back (more why that was important later!) and then we testdrove an A4 with identical engine to get the feel for the cars power. We were both very, very pleased. So we sat down to go through the list of options for the car to try to come up with a good car that fit our needs and what that would cost us. He went through every option (or so we thought!) with us and based on what he knew of our needs made recommendations. Since every manufacturer has their own terms/language, options and editions it’s a real jungle to sort it out but he did a good job of explaining it. I really liked this guy! So he came up with a car for 492.000 SEK, almost half a million. Naturually we needed to have a talk about it but after two days we made the decision to go for it. We went back and talked with him again to place the order. No fuzz at all, we agreed we’d put down 130.000 which we’d get from selling our current car when we got the new car. It would take “about 5 months” to get the car. A bit long but it would be worth waiting for. Now, did we want winter tyres on this or not? That was an extra 20.000 SEK. I knew I could get tyres for about half that price, and 5 months from end of October would be and of March so no really need for it, so no thanks. And the order was placed and we were happy with it all.
And then we waited. And waited…
As you may have guessed it’s been a lot happening in my little piece of Earth. But beyond that it’s been a pretty shitty year! That’s no excuse for not posting anything here for months though. But there hasn’t been that much great or interesting things to post about.
But now 2016 is coming to a close and it can’t come soon enough! With Brexit, Trump and the year that musical icons died it’s hard to look at 2016 and think “yeah, that was a great year”. Sure some good things happened, especially on these 1000 square meters of Earth that we own, but I’m not that ego that I think that just because we’ve had it good that makes for a good year! Because for the world as a whole 2016 was a stinker. And I’m hoping 2017 will be better but unfortunately I think it’ll be 4 years that will stink for the world thanks to Trump but maybe, just maybe, it won’t be that bad. One can hope, right 🙂
But tonight we’re celebrating New Years with friends and will try not to care too much about the bad things and just focus on the fact that we’re all still here, pretty healthy (although I’m just recovering from another man-flu) and have jobs, roof over our heads and food on the table 🙂
Happy new years! 🙂