First Day at Work

I was up quite early on Monday due to the residual jetlag, which was a good thing because I had to conquer the trouser press. The rooms here don’t have irons; they have these things stuck to the wall called trouser presses that remind me of a kind of pasta maker I saw on the TV once. It has a fifteen minute cycle, and it knows if you try to cheat and take your clothes out early.

I hobbled downstairs, where my free breakfast buffet was waiting. Again, the food was heel goed and everything was excellent quality. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to read an entire block of text about food, or if you’re hungry. They had bread for toast, croissants, and two kinds of cinnamon and raisin pastries, the good kind of non-saccharine yogurt with three kinds of granola, oats, and fruit slurry to put in it. Most sorts of fruit and juice were present, along with a spread of meats, cheeses, and two choices of chilled and thinly sliced fish (salmon was one for sure), little quiches, some kind of custard pie thingie, and they had mini-éclairs for dessert. Oh, and crème Brule. And of course the tea and coffee. I could sit in there all morning. You know how hotels have little soaps and sugar packets with the name of the establishment on it? They have their own branded cheese wheels here!

A taxi driver picked me and another person up to drop us off at our respective destinations, which happened to be in the same neighborhood. Her name was “Kim” from Beijing, and was heading to- wouldn’t you know it, the Bekaert corporate office near BTC. We talked during the drive, and she was very friendly and knows some of the senior management I know.

BTC itself is actually located in the town of Deerlijk, just past Zwevegem (8km/4mi) from Kortrijk. It borders some farmland, and I get the impression that it is out there because of all of the crazy things they do (more on that in a later post), but also because as part of their zoning they seem to encourage such places to be on the outskirts of towns. It abuts an industrial complex on one side, and a field of cows on the other. I signed in at the reception desk, and my new boss Peter came and took me to my new office. He was quite friendly as usual, and we exchanged pleasantries about my trip and his recent vacation. From there he drove me to the auto rental lot where I picked up my car (definitely more on that later), and we headed back to BTC.

I got the semi-grand tour of the facility, and met all of the key people who are go-to persons for various things. The HR manager isn’t back from holiday yet, but I met a lot of the people I had been communicating with via e-mail. I met lab mangers, secretaries, and project leaders, as well as associates that I will be working with. I was shown the supply area, cafeteria, and all of the usual places. I

Finally we settled down to business, and my key roles and responsibilities were outlined (I’ll bleed bits and pieces over time to avoid boring anyone with a barrage). For now I’ll just say I’m responsible for the “modeling and measurement” component of the advanced coatings and transformations film team subproject, and though I’ll use some optics, I was surprised to learn I will be using a great deal of thermal, as well as be doing some programming. I’ll be in the CAPSOL training next week (“Computer program to calculate multizonal transient heat transfer”). Peter clunked the manual in front of me, as well as a stack of research papers relevant to my project and pretty much said “get to reading”. I have two weeks to digest the literature and learn the program.

I made it back to the hotel, and ate a dinner of eel in chervil sauce with more pommes frites and bread. I then kept reading my papers into the evening… which will indeed take up most of my time these two weeks.