Dublin weekend

Another event during my recent blogging absence was a 4 day trip to Dublin, Ireland. This is still the most exciting part about moving to Europe. Two and a half hours and I was in Dublin. Four years ago I'd have been somewhere in the middle of the Tasman Sea. Never fails to excite.

This trip was with my little team from work. We roped in a couple more from the office management side, so we ended up being 11 in all. A perfect number to be together without too much splitting up into groups. I think I've said before that my employer has a good history of profit sharing which you simply would not find in NZ. As well as our annual personal bonus, which works out to about one month's salary, we also have an annual expenses paid trip somewhere. Where we travel to depends to an extent on the size of the overall office profit. This has led to a few grumbles in recent times. Some groups consistantly generate good income, while other groups get carried at times. This second group can drag down the total office profit and therefore the travel options available. Traditionally we have all travelled as an office. This year the decision was taken that travel would be offered only to those groups in the office who achieved the required profit. I'm not sure where I stand on this. I think that people should receive recognition for work they do which is above that which is excepted for the role. No worries there. At the same time, there is often an element of luck in the work obtained. We had luck in our team to be invited into a major mining upgrade which will generate 3 million kronor in fees for us this year. But if the mine hadn't decided to carry out that upgrade, we would have had nothing. We had a major contract looming which was cancelled at the last minute. So we would have been in real trouble without the mine, which popped up out of nowhere. The guys who design pipelines can't design if the local councils decide that all their pipes are fine this year. So sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down. But it generally balances out over time. Fragmenting a local office of 50 people may cause more problems than it solves, I feel.

But anyway, far be it from me to know more than our company managers. Our team was given a set amount of money and left to decide where we would go with it. Thoughts bounced around a bit before we settled on a trip to Dublin. The result meant that we would have all travel, accomodation and meal costs covered by the company. So it was a free trip, and you can't beat that. Had we travelled further afield we might have had to cover some costs ourselves, and that would have a different effect on different people. We left Luleå early on Friday morning and arrived home late on the Monday. A flying visit but it's amazing what you can pack into what was roughly 3 days in the city if you plan ahead. I think that we managed to tick off all the big tourist ticket items without too much stress and I even managed to squeeze in part of a football match. Because the company paid the expenses, we had to make it look like it was vaguely work related. To keep the Tax department happy. So we made sure to pick out some item in each pub we frequented which we could somehow connect to our particular industry, and took a few photos. The company is required to prepare and submit a "business trip" report to the Tax department, which a couple of us will work on over the next few weeks.

In the past these full office trips have tended to get a little out of hand in the evenings. We're lucky that our group are a pretty sensible lot so we were able to enjoy ourselves without things getting too silly. If you consider that 3 of our group were able to ask for pensioner discounts along the way, you'll get a reasonable idea of the demographics and the resulting activity levels. That actually suits me fine. I find that these trips away are often the only chance we get during the year to sit down and really get to know our work colleagues. That really is the point of the trip. We know what they all do professionally, but often not so much about them as people. 5 of us spent between midnight and 2am on a Saturday night in a semi deserted local fast food restaurant talking openly about love, life, happiness, and future dreams. In a way that we never would have done back in our office. It's not stuff that we will likely ever talk about again, but we came home with a tighter bond and a greater personal respect for each other. That has positives for the company.

Dublin is a very nice city, I have to say. If you have the chance to go there, take it. I kind of expected to find a grubby and drab town, but it was far from it. Maybe it's the result of EU money, I don't know. Either way, I found it to be bright, vibrant, and exceptionally clean. The big, and pleasant, surprise, was the people themselves. The people of Dublin are collectively the friendliest people I've ever met. Always ready for a chat, and not a sign of aggression or confrontation anywhere. We were out rather late on a couple of nights and I never once felt like there was any kind of security issue. Mind you, I'm the only one who ever looks out for such things. Bless those all trusting little Swedes. The architecture isn't breathtaking. It's a little special, but only special if you understand the history of architecture in the region. Otherwise it would be a bit lost on you, as it was on most of my Swedish travelling companions. So, if the people had been horrible, it wouldn't be a place you would go out of your way to visit. But they are not, and it is. Having a taste of the place, I'm already thinking of a more indepth return visit. Another European destination on an increasingly expanding list.