Now into the flow at work I don't have too much to report from this week (Mon 15th - Fri 19th April!), so hopefully this should be a shortish post, although apologies for the lack of photos...
Instead of going home after work on Monday, I went straight to another Zurich office as I had been asked to help with my first Marketing event here in Spain. Zurich was sponsoring a book launch and was expecting near 50 people and so I helped to set up the room, welcome the guests, make a note of who had arrived, and make sure that the VIPs went to their reserved seating. The book was about positive thinking, it was aimed a little more at the older, working audience, but the author was really animated and interesting to listen to. Plus, the presentation and Q & As after were all in Spanish, which was a nice way of getting a good Spanish fix. I stayed to help tidy away after and so it was already 10pm by the time I got home. I was too tired to start cooking dinner so just bought a bocadillo (sandwich) from the shop on the corner in the end.
On Tuesday one of the younger people I'd had a chat to whenever we bumped into each other around the office invited me to come to lunch with him and his friends. They were in a different deparment, and a much younger group, so I was keen to get involved. We went to a place called 'Nostrum' to eat, which is quite a strange concept. You basically buy microwave meals, but then microwave and eat them while sitting down in the restaurant. A different take on fast-food, but nice and cheap so I'll take it!
On Wednesday I started writing a manual about the process I was doing for underwriting. Just to explain quickly what it actually is I'm doing for underwriting: whenever Zurich receives an e-mail asking them to cover a risk, there are a series of things they need to do before they can't start analyzing properly to weigh the risks up and come up with a price etc. These include looking through various systems to find out if Zurich has ever covered them before, researching the company's financial status, and finding out what they do and how they do it, uploading all of the relevant documents to the local systems etc. Although no-one had been doing what I was doing before, it had become clear in the last week that would need to 'outsource' this admin task to give the underwriters more time to concentrate on just 'underwriting, and so would need to find an intern to take over after me, so I felt incredibly useful taking charge of that.
As I'd already made a lunch for Wednesday, I stuck to going with my group of oldies, but on Thursday had been pre-invited to lunch with Customer Services, the younger group and so went with them. A girl came along that wasn't there the first time, and spoke SO fast that I genuinely don't know how she could breathe and talk at the same time. They were lovely again, but as the pace of conversation was that much quicker, I found it harder to join in. They didn't seem to mind and invited me to go to lunch everyday with them from now on, so I was chuffed to have some new lunch friends (thumbs up) that were more my age.
On Thursday evening I had an absolute mare. I was piling up some things in my room to carry into the living room and in the confusion ended up dropping my laptop on the floor. The screen completely cracked and it wouldn't turn on so Raul said that he would take it to the repair shop the next day for a quote, while I got on with checking if my insurance would cover it or if this would be a very pricey accident. I didn't have long to dwell on this tragedy, however, as it was already time to pack my suitcase and head to MADRID for the weekend to meet up with Tim, one of my best friends from Austria.
I'll write about that in the next post, so hopefully it will be a little more exciting than the ins and outs of a working week, plus, of course, there will be picturesss!!!
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