Speed of Sound

One thing I will say about India is that there is a lot of noise here. A good way to picture this for yourself is to imagine yourself in New York City, right in Manhattan, say in a poorly insulated apartment that allows you to hear all of the yellow cabs which honk constantly and traffic outside. Then imagine maybe that there is a loud group of tourists yelling to each other oustide your window. Also, your upstairs neighbor likes to move furniture around a lot (for me, this is no different than my assinine neighbor in Chicago). Finally, that they are doing construction outside your apartment, and by construction, I mean dropping a lot of metal poles on the ground that make loud clanging noises and then hammering them several times with some kind of giant hammer that is extremely loud. Now you know what I wake up to every day in India!

Actually, the noise is fairly easy to overcome and doesn't bother me too much. The office is quite noisy too. Every hour or so the noise level increases immensely and it somehow seems that everyone is talking at once. We have open cubes, (like the old office on 37 at Pru II, for you Deloitters) so it can get pretty loud quickly. Also people do not use headphones and play music and also SING pretty clearly!! Usually at this point I put my headphones on. It is very different from the work environment at home, where I find people are mostly quiet and working (although Friday afternoons and Saturdays people tend to get a bit wild). The team in India is always working together and talking, and they really enjoy working as a team rather than always by themselves. I find this to be a nice change and also a good stress reliever!

I made it through my first full day of work yesterday!! It was great to be in for the whole day. Kathryn and I gave a presentation back to the office at home on how things are going here (great so far) with a lot of pictures and some working tips. The picture above is of our team here. For some reason, people do not like to smile in pictures here, but as soon as you are done taking the picture, everyone starts laughing and smiling. For as much as we are all working, so far everyone is in good spirits.

There goes the banging on the metal pipes again...