Episode 19: November 2006

This was our first full month as residents of the U.S.A. (well, for Deb it was)! The highlights of the month include:
- Deb’s trip to Zurich
- Thanksgiving in Stillwater, Oklahoma
- Neal’s trips to Houston, Edmonton, and Calgary

November was a crazy month, as far as work was concerned. For Deb, the month marked a heavy time for campus recruiting. In the U.S., campus recruiting for college graduates happens over a condensed period of time, namely October-November. Dow, like most big companies, sends teams of volunteers to each selected university (a total of about 40 universities) across the country. The recruiters’ primary job is to shortlist the candidates that Dow will fly to one of its locations for a face-to-face interview. That’s where Deb’s team steps in. The team coordinates (and pays for) all the logistics of the students coming to one of the Dow sites for interviews. The student visits normally involve a tour of the town/community, a series of 4-6 interviews per student, and a hospitality suite. Once the students are interviewed, Deb’s team is responsible for coordinating the offer letters, scheduling background checks and medical screens, finalizing start dates, and dealing with any negotiations initiated by the students. From the last week of October to the second week of November, Deb’s team of 17 people in North America met with 370 students and prepared all the logistics associated with 280 job offers. To say the least, it was a crazy time! The students who accept Dow’s job offer will begin with the company after they graduate in mid-2007. The good news for Deb is that the season is over for the year – back to hiring as normal and a more “regular” kind of crazy.

We were invited for our first Midland house party by Deb’s friends, Ken and Lynn. (This would prove to be the first of many house parties we attended for the festive season.) Ken is from New Zealand and a real hoot. Lynn is from Missouri, which is a state located in the middle of the U.S. Deb was slightly apprehensive about going, only because it was bound to be attended by people from work, and neither of us wanted to talk about work at a social event. We were both pleasantly surprised to find that, while there were people there that we knew from work, we had a great time, met lots of new people, and did not find ourselves discussing work at all. I must admit, though, that there was one weird moment when Deb’s boss turned up at the party. (Who would have known that he was also a friend of Lynn and Ken’s?!)

During the month, Deb took a trip back to Switzerland for a week of work meetings. As part of the handover of her old job, Deb went back to Zurich to host a people-review for one of the businesses she used to look after. Of course, she was happy to have the opportunity to see Dad and Julie and our friends again so soon after we moved. She spent a long week working, with every evening booked for catching up with friends. She was also able to attach a weekend onto the stay so as to make the most of my time there. When she was not at work, she was hitting some of our favorite eating and drinking spots each evening, and she found it easy to slip back into life there. Among the many people she saw, she had the opportunity to meet the newest, and most adorable, member of our gang: Joost Van de Wijs, who was born to our friends, Eveline and Peter Paul, three weeks prior. During her weekend in Zurich, Deb also drove out to Bern to meet up with Dad and Julie for a long lunch. She arrived back around 10 pm on Sunday night, just in time for another week of work.

While Deb was away, I spent the week in Houston, Texas, where my business has a large presence and where my boss is located. While I was there, I took the opportunity to satisfy the engineering geek inside of me and toured one of Dow’s largest and most impressive plants, which happens to be the darling plant of my business, at our located in Freeport, Texas. I also met several of my teammates in business finance and had several discussions with my boss. I even managed to catch up for dinner with some friends of ours, Gina and Walter, who live close to Houston.

Among the many “firsts” that the month offered, Deb experienced her first Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, for all the non-U.S. readers, is a public holiday that has its roots in the original relationship between the American Indians and the first European settlers of the U.S. The point of Thanksgiving is to, literally, give thanks for what and who we have. It’s also a great reason for a four-day weekend! Thanksgiving is a popular time for families to get together and spend time, usually over one or more big meals. That being the case, the people who might be the most thankful for this holiday are the airlines, as this is a peak traveling weekend!

We spent Thanksgiving with my parents in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Stillwater is a small town in central Oklahoma (Oklahoma being located in the middle of the U.S., just above Texas), centred around Oklahoma State University, a mid-sized state university with about 20,000 students. Apart from spending some time in Oklahoma City, where we chose our outfits for our coming Indian wedding reception in January, the rest of the time was spent eating, relaxing, and catching up with my parents and grandparents, who recently moved from New Delhi, India to Stillwater. It was great to spend some time with my grandparents – for Deb, it was her first time meeting them. Deb’s first Thanksgiving dinner was not a traditional turkey roast dinner but rather a feast of Indian food, which she said was far better than any turkey would have been!

The following week, I took a work trip to Edmonton and Calgary, both located in the western part of Canada. One of my new job responsibilities is to be the finance analyst for all of my business’ activities in Canada. You can imagine how delighted I was when I got off the plane in Edmonton to temperatures of -37 degrees Celsius! The terrible weather – something that the Canadians are used to it, but I am not – made driving a challenge, but I managed to soldier thru all of it. Unfortunately, after all my sacrifices, the main attraction of my trip – seeing our plant site – did not go as planned because the plant had an unexpected maintenance issue to tend to and could not host me for a tour! Later in the week, I continued on to Calgary, where the temperature was a balmy -27 degrees Celsius. I spent a couple of days in Calgary, attending some business meetings and introducing myself to the team there. I also managed to catch up with a cousin of mine, Maya, who recently moved to Calgary from Toronto. This was my first time meeting Maya, and I will be sure to look her up the next time I am there.

The few evenings we had at home this month were spent over dinners with work colleagues and friends who were visiting town. We managed to catch a play at the Midland Centre of the Arts – Steel Magnolias (not one for the boys, but Neal braved it and came with me) – which was great. We made a number of visits to the gym and got the most from our library memberships.

The streets are starting to light up, literally. The Americans love to decorate their houses and their bodies to reflect the winter holiday season. As soon as the Halloween pumpkins have been thrown away, the Christmas lights are up and lawns seem to be growing blow-up snowmen and Christmas trees. It is enough to make the Griswalds look like amateurs.

I will leave you this month with some interesting -- and accurate, I believe -- observations from Deb: “Although the U.S. is similar to Australia (much more similar than Switzerland was), I am constantly in awe as I look around. I must sound like a curious little kid to Neal, who has to explain to me all the nuances of his home country. It is lovely to be back in an English-speaking country where the shopping is open seven days a week and the term “convenience” has shaped the nation. It still surprises me that a country as progressive as the U.S. still has some antiquated methods, particularly when it comes to finances. There are still many bills that cannot be paid without writing a cheque and transferring money overseas is quite the production – which I must admit seems odd. That aside, I am enjoying living in a country where the supermarkets are as big as three Swiss cantons, where the produce looks like it could feed a family of giants, where you can shop at midnight if your mood so takes you, and where there are at least four channels simultaneously playing different episodes of Law and Order or CSI at any given time. God Bless America!”