Make it too tough for the enemy to get in, and you won’t be able to get out.
Finally — residence and flight sorted, winter skiing in Davos coming up. Every morning, I face an intense competition between the freezing cold, the lack of sleep and the occasional hangover as to which will best prevent me from leaving my warm bed. Unfortunately, despite my finance, accounting and operations lectures’ best efforts to drive me to cultivate the latter (I all-too-frequently find myself wanting a drink or seven after a night’s yelling back and forth with my group mates, frantically trying to avoid banging our heads against an assignment at 3 in the morning before it’s due), it’s still all too rare that I get an opportunity to go out and get therapeutically wrecked.
Which leads me to the observation that, I’m sorry to say, the vast majority of my fellow students here do not know how to drink. I came to this conclusion at the end of the (otherwise brilliant) Russian party last Friday night; the welcome shots of vodka were a nice touch to take peoples’ minds off the amazing cold outside l’orangerie at chateau Vaux-le-Penil while waiting for the fireworks to start. However, the aggressive front-loading of champagne and vodka probably caused many of the guests to forget that it’s been too long since university for them to really properly tie one on. We can handily blame today’s alcohol-sensitive work culture for that, I suppose.
On the topic of group work, this week, while eagerly anticipated as a change from last week’s bruising pace, held more projects and assignments, in addition to the regularly scheduled readings and common attitude of impending doom about period 2 exams. The high degree of background noise around the Southwest wing cubicles drove me to find a nice, quiet little lecture hall with air conditioning and classical music…nice and good, until my groupmates came stomping in, carrying the catapult for our operations assignment, and tried to kick me out because “we need the space.” Naturally, I had little choice but to join them for the next 2 hours, launching ping pong balls with the thing. I have yet to divine what this had to do with process & operations, but usiness school would be more fun if it involved more siege weaponry.