Thursday 20 August 2015

Outbox Day 11 (Wednesday): Bloomberg

We had to get up horribly early yesterday (six thirty!) to be out of the house by 7.15 and take the train and Underground to Bloomberg. Shoutout to the lovely Ciara for making sure Room 7 got up. 



At Bloomberg, we got passes with wifi codes and were brought up into the pantry, where there's a ton of food. I had yoghurt, rice cakes (an employee saw me looking and said they're great, take loads of them so I took three packets), Fanta, croissant, jam pastry and more stuff I can't remember. We could take photos of anything except emergency exits.



We were then brought into the Ludlow suite to do a challenge where we were given an ambiguous object and had to come up with a one-minute pitch for it within fifteen minutes. Gabi, Edel, Ciara, Amy, Chloe and I had an amazing Communism-themed one going, it was hilarious, but then with four minutes to go they came over and said that wasn't appropriate. Which sucks.



So then we just used Amy's freaky skin (dermatographia) to say the red tube diagnosed disease. It's a great party trick. The team pitching a fortune-telling (if only you knew how amazing that pun is) yellow notebook won. In fairness, it's a great notebook and I was chuffed to get it later as part of my free merch. 



We then had a Q & A session with four software devs from the company. That was very interesting, but it was pretty chilling to see that the point of them is to make rich people/companies richer, and they're aware of this. I can see enjoying the technical challenge, but they sell their package for an exorbitant amount. Corporates are so weird.



Apparently Bloomberg has the most office fish in the world, or Britain. A lot of fish, anyway. It's because the founder's wife once insisted every employee have a fishbowl on their desk but that became unsustainable, so now they just have multiple fish tanks on the floors. They also have these "waste not want not" recycled sculptures ... which they throw out every six months.

Several trains later (my ticket actually worked this time!), we arrived back at the house at exactly one in the afternoon. We just wanted to sleep, but Dame Wendy Hall was there giving a talk about something she calls Web Science. Wendy is obviously a very busy lady, finding it hard to stay put in one place at a time. We have to thank her for spending time with us when she could be on holiday, her answers to our questions really saved time and were consistent in quality (shoutout to Jo). I found it really funny that Amy sitting beside me was also buds with Tim Berners-Lee. 



We went out to the garden for lunch and I played some ukulele, then we were called back in for a Q & A session with Wendy, in which she talked again about how she was supposed to be on holiday and being the busiest person in the world. She also talked about how she'd be talking to the government the next day - "when you're at my level and are talking to Prime Ministers and Queens". Honestly, we had a lot of fun during that session.

After that, we had a talk from two bankers from Deutschbank and some of the girls asked really tricky questions, it was very entertaining. People don't seem to like bankers much. 



We then went up to our room and had a ukulele jam (Gabi, Chloe, Edel, Ciara and I) for a while before going down to the main room where Amy's friend was teaching us how to do mechanical origami folding. I went back up to my room during that because I didn't feel great, and missed a feminism talk that was apparently amazing. Which sucks. I did get to talk to one of the women who'd given it though.

After that, we did some abstract painting which was a great stress reliever.



I was really, really tired yesterday so we went up to bed pretty early and I was ready to go asleep around half twelve (or whenever I said goodnight to Cian). But then, at 00:37, the window in our room began to crack until it looked like this:

We got the Stemettes and they papered over it and we moved into different rooms. The glass never actually fell out. It was kind of hilarious. Gabi and I slept with Amy and Ciara, and Chloe slept in Room 11, so all was well.

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