Yea team

Our boss was on the Bulgarian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and we put together a team of Netagers to help him out in the competition.

We practiced for a while last night. He would call and pretend to be the show hosts and then pretend to be himself under pressure and then ask us questions and then we would try to find the answer online. We split up in groups. At each computer station we positioned two people: one to do the actual searching and one to help them browse through search results. We pushed the desks together and cranked up the volume on the speaker phone and appointed a timer. We came up with search strategies, which I am not giving away. We then agreed to meet up at 9AM and be ready to take calls from the show.

At around 10 AM this morning we got the call. We were asked a 100,000 leva question: Which actor collaborated with Oasis on their Be There Now video? We found the correct answer in just under 10 seconds. It was Johnny Depp. Everyone was screaming with excitement and I thought the roof was going to fall in on us. Too bad that Boss had already made a mistake on the question and they were only calling to see if our “brain-trust” would work. Of course it would.

...

Who cares about winning massive amounts of money on a silly TV show when you can have so much fun losing it with the full support of your own firm?! Yea team.

Professional Experience

A couple of co-workers and I were just talking about jobs and professional dress-codes and the kinds of things that one should keep in mind when applying/looking for a job. The general agreement was that one needs to do quite a bit of soul-searching before ever bothering to even send in a resume. One of the guys said that he could never work at a place where he would be required to wear a suit every day. I know it sounds superficial, he said, but I know myself. I would not feel comfortable, I would fidget all day, and would not be able to get anything done.

The conversation reminded me of my old friend Bill, who had a line in the PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE section of his resume, which said he used to be a Gravedigger (an actual job he held for one summer while still in college). He said that interviewers always asked him about that. And if they didn’t or if they didn’t find that hilarious, he just knew he was not interested in working for them. See, a sense of humor was something that he really appreciated in a potential employer and he knew that he would never be able to work for someone who took themselves too seriously.

It is that very same thing that I appreciate in my job. People here work, argue, bang on tables…but they are also very laid-back and love to have fun.



I don’t think I could work for an employer if they:

- Discouraged people from having Moonwalking contests in the office
- Frowned upon impromptu fashion shoots
- Demanded that everyone should keep their shoes on at all times
- And the list goes on.

I bet you already see where this is going but I will ask anyway: What are your personal (weird) employer requirements? What would make you not take a job?

***

All photos by Dragon, aka Official Department Photographer. Keep clicking.

A day in the life of...

My first week at Netage was extremely confusing for a whole range of reasons but mostly because every other guy seemed to be named one of 5 names. There were two Krassi's (Little Krassi and Big Krassi), two Tsetso's (Little Tsetso and Big Tsetso), two Joro's (Joro Ivanov and Joro Var) and two Momchil's (Bulgarian Momchil and American Momchil).

This week I am realizing that I am not the only one who's being confused by this rather humorous name situation:

Little Krassi: I received an email from a client that was meant for Big Krassi.
Petya: What did you do?
Little Krassi: I emailed the client back and told them: You sent me an email that was meant for Big Krassi.
Petya: What did the client say?
Little Krassi: The client said, Oh! I thought that Big Krassi left Netage.
Petya: What did you say to that?
Little Krassi: I said, No! Big Krassi is still here. Little Tsetso left Bulgaria.
Petya: What did the client say?
Little Krassi: He said, I am happy that at least I sent the email to the correct company.

Make up and make out.

Var got a new toy: a little LEGO truck with a little LEGO man.
Somebody gave him a Bionicle too.
I had a miniature Eiffel Tower on my desk.

At first, the Bionicle kicked little LEGO-man's ass.


But then, they made up.

And made out.


The end.

Good things recently

I've been meaning to do this for quite a while now:

1: I now blog for Bulgarian Amica. It's a cosy little space. By women, for women.

2: I have been 100% successful in staying away from my Bloglines account before noon. It really is amazing how much one can get done in just a couple of hours.

3: I have almost completely stopped checking my traffic reports. I learn interesting/funny things about my readers when I do check, but I realized that I had actually started to fall into the whole popularity trap...Was almost starting to confuse traffic with quality, which, let's be honest...is pretty pathetic.

4: My workplace and I...we've fallen in love all over again.

5: When I start to feel a little tired, I spritz a little bit of kiehl's rosewater on my face. It wakes me up immediately and smells SOOO nice!!!

What have you been up to? Give us all an update!!!

Netage teambuilding 2007

In case you've wondered why I've been MIA for so long...I was all the way south to Katarino for our annual Teambuilding weekend. There will be more pictures to come but for now I will leave you with this one little thing, created by Plasmo:



And now, halas, it's Monday...

***

Click on the image for a larger view!

My massage therapist loves my husband

Our company got us a massage therapist! She comes to the office twice a week and gives people full-body massages. She uses mandarin orange oil and works magic on our tired backs. As she was doing her thing last night:

Therapist: Do you exercise?
Me: Aha. My husband and I run in the park.
Therapist: See, I could tell. Your back is not stiff at all. What about your diet?
Me: Well, my husband's vegetarian and I am almost a vegetarian. I like кренвирши с кашкавал way too much to give up meat completely.
Therapist: I could tell you take care of your body. Do you like to cook?
Me: Actually, no. My husband is an excellent cook.
Therapist: You tell your husband I send him my greetings. He seems to be every woman's dream, takes great care of you.

She could tell I got a good man simply by looking at my back... Isn't it interesting how our mental health contributes to our physical well-being?

Searching for the Best

I was going to start this entry by making some general statement about how great it is to work for Netage. I was going to talk about my great colleagues, my awesome boss, about being able to learn and grow both professionally and as a person every day. I was probably going to mention something about the various perks of working here, the most recent of which is our company massage therapist.

But then I realized that actually I HAVE written about it all. Many times over!!!

So, instead, I will just cut right to chase and announce that we are looking for an experienced Graphic Designer for our Sofia Office. And if you ARE one or happen to know such a person, you should definitely check out the job posting on our careers website and follow the instructions.

If you have questions about the position or the company, I would be more than happy to talk to you about it. But you MUST know that I am one of the happiest Netage employees and I LOVE-LOVE-LOVE to talk about it. So, if you can't stand job-related enthusiasm you should probably talk to Var who will tell you pretty much the same.

He'll only use much fewer words.

Netage gossip

С две думи: търсим си Interaction Designer. Бързонгцев е описал изискванията (горе-долу) и по принцип може да отговаря на допълните въпроси свързани с конкретните задължения на позицията.

Аз не знам какво друго бих могла да добавя, освен да кажа, че Netage е много готино работно място и човек тук по принцип се чувства спокоен и значим. Хората (служители и management) са подбирани изключително внимателно и аз лично (все пак не е добре да говоря от името на всички колеги) ходя с удоволствие на работа. HR политиката на компанията е доста агресивна и предполагам много от вас са чували разните слухове...заплати, бонуси, мазди, поршета и али-бали. Питайте, ако се интересувате от подробности. Според мен обаче детайлите не са чак толкова важни. Важното е, че от години компанията води целенасочена политика с цел служителите да се кефят, че работят тук.

Любовта към ракията и високите скорости не са задължителни изисквания към позицията, НО, разбира се, са предимство. Айде, по конете.

Strictly business

Weekend update: Netage Solutions Company Retreat 2007.

Venera: aka Boss. Perfect manicure, see!

Krassi: demonstrating his great t-shirt collection.

Var and I: post-rakia and pre-"хоро".


Rally: being super-serious about her salad!

Qrasio: not taking me seriously. Wonder what he'll say when he sees this picture here. Oops.

All these people are talking about our business plan, strategic goals and investment activities, can you tell?

Office humor

Wrapping up so many projects here at work and getting ready for MAJOR new ones leaves me no time for blogging. All those little sneaky monents of laughter, however, make it all easier to process.



Coming to Netage has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. My Christmas wish is that everybody could work at a place like ours.

Blog notes

Here are some thoughts provoked by the latest BlogShop that I announced but did not really talk about last week.

First, like I already mentioned, Varzonovtsev, Peio and also Ivo have already shared their thoughts on the use of corporate and personal blogs. Their entries summarize their presentations: Var's about corporate and Peio's about personal weblogs, respectively. Unfortunately, there is no written record of Elenko and Bobby Kandov's presentation on media weblogs. The only written record of it, are my notes (spelling mistakes and coffee stains included). All three presentations and the Q&A session were pretty good, I thought. If I had to do it again, I would have picked only one type of blogs to talk about as there was simply no time to cover all three we'd chosen. Also, the forum was largely attended by IT-people representing their companies...so perhaps we should have left personal blogs out of the panel. But that's ok. Peio is always fun to listen to, so, yeah.


As the seminar is long gone and most conversations on the topic have already died out, I would like to draw some attention to three points that all of the authors implicitly agreed upon but have not really mentioned explicitly in the presentations I just referenced.

1] It is generally a good idea to know WHY you have a blog. What is its purpose? What is its goal? When I say goal, I really don't mean anything too specific. Your goal depends on your blog (corporate, media, personal). Your goal could be to hike up your sales, attract new clients, lower your client communication costs, gather an audience, stroke your ego, find your future husband, whatever.

2] It is difficult to define whether a particular blog is "successful". Traditionally, a blog's success is measured by the number of unique visitors it attracts and the number of links that lead to it. Those metrics, however, albeit not completely meaningless, are not always relevant. To measure whether a blog is successful is really an exercise in evaluating how completely it is achieving its predefined goals. 'Evaluating how completely it is achieving its predefined goals' does not relate to a straighforward technique of evaluation. However, the larger point remains that one needs to first and foremost know why a blog was created to begin with before beginning to judge how successful it is.

3] Time and timing are important factors to the development of a blog. It takes time to start it up. It takes time to keep it up. It takes time for your blog to get noticed. It takes time before you figure out what the fuck you've gotten yourself into. At the same time, you are expected to move fast, deliver stories pretty frequently, respond to reader feedback as soon as you can.

I realize that these three points are pretty obvious. However, I think it is important to keep them to the forefront for many reasons. As we go through our personal blogging routines, I think we all tend to compare ourselves to the best and brightest out there. That, sometimes, works as a motivating factor. We push ourselves to create unique content that others can relate to and that gives an amazing sense of personal fulfillment that's difficult to describe. Other times, however, it makes us give up and feel like total blogosphere failures (oh! the horror!).

As a clinically certified blog-addict, I tend to get all kinds of people excited about starting to blog. They write for a couple of weeks, enthusiastically at first, but the number of entries inevitably starts to decrease. Before you know it, what had started as this new exciting thing, turns into an awful disappointment. And that's clearly not something anyone would like experience. For that reason, I think those three little things I mentioned above are helpful to remember.

Ползата от блоговете

На 14 ноември от 10:00 часа в залата на хотел “Форум” (София, бул Цар Борис III №41) ще поговорим за ползата от това да имаш блог.

Поканили сме (ние==Netage.bg) следните хора, които ще споделят своя опит, свързан с поддържането на:

Георги Варзоновцев: корпоративни блогове
Еленко Еленков и Боби Кандов (a.k.a. My Personal Jesus...е, айде, преувеличих малко) от в-к Капитал: медийни блогове.
Пейо Попов, който няма нужда от представяне точно тук: лични блогове

Формата на събитието е panel discussion, т.е. участниците ще разкажат накратко (10-15 минути всеки) своя опит и мнението си относно ползата от блоговете. След това модераторът на дискусията (a.k.a. аз) и публиката ще могат да задават допълнително въпроси на панелистите.

Вероятно ще е интересно за уеб продуценти, журналисти, маркетинг хората, които търсят нови канали за промоция в интернет. Както и за всички онези от вас, които могат да си позволят лукса да ходят на някакви подобни неща посред бял работен ден.

Цялото събитие е част от уеб семинара на конкурса БГсайт (14-16 ноември, пак там).

Ако имате въпроси, питайте. Ако имате желание, анонсирайте и при вас. Колкото повече хора се появят на дискусията, толкова по-весело. Пейо ще бъде провокативен, а аз ще бъда мила и ще се опитам да държа феминистките си наблюдения под контрол. Освен това обещавам да направя всичко възможно да няма никакви PowerPoint презентации, защото ги мразя точно толкова колкото предполагам и вие.

***

Като първа крадла свих горния текст от блога на Варзоновцев. Направих така че да звучи все едно аз съм го писала (разни вметвания в скобите и пр.). В цивилизования свят на това нещо му се вика нагло плагиатсво и се наказва. По някои други земи, няма нужда от конкретизация, това е нормална журналистическа практика. Аз си измивам ръцете с това, че споменавам източника на първоначалния текст, а утре цял ден ще мисля как да му се подмажа, за да бъда извинена.

Strictly business

Some of my friends worry that the company I work for is ‘too corporate’. To prove them wrong, I’m including a short list of things I learned from colleagues today:

- To avoid under-wire pain, buy bras with small frames and big cups. Not only does this take care of the constant poking but also creates a favorable optical illusion. Ahem. Yeah.
- Playing the clarinet or the saxophone for a relatively short period of time leads to strange alterations in your vocal organs. As a result, if you open your mouth and tap the side of your neck, you produce the coolest sounds which resemble the sounds of opening champagne bottles.
- It is NOT ok to tell a client that they have no idea what the hell they are talking about.
- You’re not supposed to play ping-pong with your hand in your pocket. That, however, does not mean that you can’t do it.
- There is no such thing as too much sushi.


You see, it’s corporate alright.

How to build a team, Bulgarian style

Each summer our company does a short team-building trip to…help us get to know each other a little better, relax a bit...you know, build a team. Apparently, it works, because people here work their butts off but appear happier than many people I know.

So…

Here how it’s done.

Friday night:



Saturday:



Saturday night:



Sunday:



We travelled, ate, drank, rowed, hiked, biked, danced and took pictures. Somewhere in between we realized that many of us have already become good friends. I can't wait for the next time we get to do something fun like that.

Where have YOU been recently? Email me photographs and I will post them here!

***

Photographs by Nicky Trifonov and Kally Nikiforova. THANK YOU!

To blog or not to blog

I've been hesitant to write about work for several reasons:

1. I started a couple of weeks ago and it's probably not a good idea to draw conclusions just yet.
2. People get dooced.
3. Many of my co-workers know about my site…which means that anything I say…they’ll read.

I thought, I’d maybe just mention the basics:

1. Just started working for the web division of an IT company, called Netage Solutions.
2. My positions: Project Manager.
3. The office is на майната си, i.e. very far. ;)

Less than two weeks into it, however, I am far from nervous to say that I got an awesome job, work with smart and friendly people, and even though my office is на майната си, I couldn’t care less because my days are challenging yet exciting and I have so much fun doing what I do that I can’t help blogging about it.

You know how sometimes you go home and have nothing to say…well, right now my life is the EXACT opposite of that.

Kisses to all!

Space-benders

Three days into my new job, I am already made aware of services that bend time and space. I am not talking about the stuff that I do here. It will be a loooong time before my personal doings start having such an impact (if ever). But I can’t wait to tell you about this super cool thing that Orbitel has just recently launched and I have already tested and loved.

The service is BGnomer (BG = Bulgarian; nomer = number, for the uninitiated). It targets Bulgarians living abroad (or other interested individuals) and looking for cheap and simple ways to talk to people within Bulgaria over the phone. The operative word here being CHEAP. What Orbitel has done is so simple and sweet, that you won’t even believe it. A Bulgarian living abroad creates an account and gets assigned a Bulgarian line phone number. Incoming calls to that number get automatically transferred to a foreign-based telephone but the person making the call only gets charged the cost of one local phone call. Ta-daaaa! And that’s it.

There are some country differences. For example, you can transfer your BGnomer to a cell-phone only in some countries like the United States and Canada. Even still, the service is remarkably convenient. I got to experience it in person last night and must admit that the first 5 minutes of the conversation were composed of mostly gasps and exclamations about how unbelievably awesome the whole thing is. On top of that, because the service is still brand new, it’s completely free to sign up. They start charging people in September but the monthly fee is only 20 bucks. So…like I said…it’s still very affordable.

Many of you might not be able to understand my excitement. But all of you who live abroad are probably pretty psyched about this. Being away from the ones you love is hard enough and not being able to talk with them often because of ridiculously expensive international calls makes it even worse. For the very same reason, however, nifty little things such as BGnomer, for example, can make all the difference in the world. Nothing can beat a call from your mom who just wants to tell you that your high-school friend just had a baby. Oh, and that she loves you, too!