45 - Week 7 1iere: Old Dogs & Wild Hogs - Geneve
Monday, April 7
Thus marks the beginning of the goodbye tour. I had a lot of good discussions today, most involving a café. And each one led right into the next such that I didn't have time to record my notes 😅 I'm realizing the wisdom in leaving a bit more buffer period between discussions, something to remember the next time I'm planning visits/discussions like a crazy person.
In my discussions, the subject of tarifs kept coming up; it seems my ostrich routine here can only be so effective when the landscape is ablaze. Four separate people of 4 very different departments mentioned them, I suppose after we'd exhausted work topics it is only natural to move to current American-inflicted events.
I took dinner this evening with a colleague who I'd first met on my very first visit to the site in France for what would be my first big-boy business trip. It was great to be able to sit 1:1 and learn more about his career (he plans to retire this year); turns out he's been involved in some pretty pivotal items in the company, things that I'm now following up on for what comes next. He's Swiss/French and has grown out his hair, grown a handlebar mustache and almost exclusively commutes to work now by motorcycle 😆 I was enthused with his tail of two opposite extremes of motorcycle trips he'd made: the depths of Death Valley and the dizzying heights of the Himalayas. Turns out the dress code is pretty similar for both locations: layers and protection.
We had a couple good laughs remembering my first visit to France in 2017 (he was really impressed with an American ordering snails and daring to eat an odiferous andouillette in an Ibis hotel), about the restaurants around New York I recommended when he and his team visited my facility a few years later, and about the colleagues who'd left the company only to be reabsorbed by our company's merger.
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