Office Update

Since this blog seems to now be dealing with everything but international business, here is a quick update on what is going on at the office. I spend most of last week setting up a gold key or one-on-one meeting between an American defense materials manufacturer and various Romanian distributors. My tasks included making the schedule and calling various Romanian CEOs to confirm the meetings. Having me do this is a sneaky way of gauging their English skills. I have also been doing a lot of copy editing. These assignments make me feel like I’m back in a newsroom, and I am actually more comfortable doing this than most of the business-related assignments. I thought was supposed to research the supply side of the Romanian market for Energy generating infrastructure, for the SCO. However, when I talked to Maria Notiu the Commercial Specialist for the energy industry, I found that, in reality, this means “get the list of American companies that attended the recent webinar and put it on the boss’s desk.” Apparently this is my project for the internship. This week the defense contractor has been in town, so there really hasn’t been much for me to do. On Monday the highlight of my day was a fascinating discussion about geopolitical differences between Romania and Bulgaria with Maria… in Spanish. She is attempting to get her certificate as a speaker of Spanish, and was apparently very impressed by my skills with the language. Today there was really nothing to do except a bit of copy editing. Monica, my supervisor, is now back from her honeymoon. She saw how bored I was and told me “It’s a slow day, go explore Bucharest” at about 1:00 pm. The lack of work is apparently normal for the whole office, as this is when most of Europe takes its vacation. Monica is now the fifth person to express surprise that I have not done MORE traveling, including the boss, Mr. Kirkham. When I asked for a couple days off to go to Moldova he said “ I’d have been concerned if you had not asked for any days off. I’m mean you’re in Europe for Christ’s sake!”