6 -(Almost) the whole gang's here - Dax and Castets

 Tuesday - November 21, 2023

The rest of this week is going to be a bunch of meetings large group meetings at work - more people associated with the project are traveling on site.  Of course, when all this was planned, the idea was for us to be ready to conduct a few tests and be on our merry way, but I think there's more mechanical issues plaguing the installation than had initially been accounted for.  Two of the people who came on site today were supposed to have arrived the previous night but their flight was delayed due to a strike (une grève) of the air traffic controllers in France.  There were multiple people coming who I had only interacted with over video calls, so it was nice to engage face-à-face.  They also told me they thought I'd be shorter 😂.  

Slight tangent: apparently the term for air traffic controllers here is "les aiguilleurs (eye-gwee~yurs)".  What struck me is how similar this word is to "l'aiguille" (eye-gwee), needle.  Years ago, I had visited L'Aiguille du Midi near Mt. Blanc which certainly resembled a needle in it's construction.  Anyhow, I was wondering if les aiguilleurs are associated with les aiguilles in any way.  Apparently it's also the same term used for train signal/pointsmen; I feel like it kinda makes sense for a needle to point a direction on the track but I'm not sure if it applies to granting planes permission to takeoff and land... Thinking to too many steps in about words is also exactly why I'm such a terrible team mate for boardgames (les jeus de societé) like Codenames or Decrypto that are reliant on word association.

The big thing on today's agenda was for me to present about my plan for what we needed to do to get this system safely started up and producing good material.  And so I spent the morning cobbling together a slide deck for just such a presentation, using a Word document I had prepped back in the states as my basis.

 At dinner the previous night, one of the engineers had a question for me: "What the hell is a carte de feuille?  I saw that you were working really hard on a document titled Carte de Feuilles."  To answer this, I'll need to go back about 2 months ago when I was still in discussions with the project manager about when the startup & move would happen as well as what my role would be.  He had recommended that I put together a roadmap for the team of what needed to be accomplished to reach our goal of successfully starting up the plant.  What he had probably told me was that the French word for roadmap is "feuille de routes", literally translated as leaf/sheet of roads; what I remembered was a map of leaves 😅

What's funny about the meeting is that I think most of the others thought it was very good and informational.  I'd say one of my bullet points and then discussion in rapid French would kick off, some of which I caught and most of which never entered my cranium.  When the dust settled, I'd kick the bees nest again until we finished everything.  So while I did gain some information about the current status of our installation, I still have no clue about how we're doing 😅

Wednesday - November 22, 2023

Another day in the conference room with lots of meetings.  I think large group meetings are a particular challenge for me, even though several of the calls were in English with other people, I found myself just mentally exhausted despite having very little to add to the discussions.  French is coming particularly slowly to me today, for the most part I sat, smiled, and nodded but comprehended very little 😅😅😅 Maybe I need more sleep to be able to keep up?   

Dinner tonight was similar to the workday: 6 of us returned to Chez Nous in Dax.  There was a lot of discussion at the table and jokes about all the issues with the project (at least I assume based on context).  They were very gracious in periodically asking/engaging me specifically about something or clarifying something, my speech center was just so frazzled I really couldn't socialize.  

Me when my French is running on fumes at dinner:

 

Oh, Wednesday is board game night (jeu de societé) for Chez Nous, but I didn't see any boardgames; instead, the place had videogame consoles & monitors set up for people to compete in the latest fighting games like Tekken, Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, or Super Smash Bros (there was even two guys commenting on fights and streaming them live (en direct) via Twitch).  I haven't seen a setup quite like that since the Super LAN parties at Stevens; I was tempted to line up for a turn but didn't quite feel like having my butt handed to me in a fighting game by somebody I couldn't even do the honor of understanding their smack talk, that's just common decency.