Turning European...
... yes I'm turning European, yes I'm turning European, yes I think so.
I just had a meeting in three languages, 2 of which I know more or less fluently. I wasn't really noticing until I noticed... then I thought it was wild.
Normally it's just English and Spanish but today we had some consultants come in from Akamai to explain their cacheing solution to us. They're from France. So they first had a meeting with my American boss in English, and then with us Senior techs to go over the technical details in Spanish. My boss was in the second meeting too, so when it was important that he understand something, we or the consultants would switch to English. When the consultants were conferring, they'd sometimes switch to French - which a couple of my coworkers know and would comment on in Spanish. Which I knew and would respond in English for my boss or in Spanish for my coworkers... The consultants would respond in whatever language was being used at that moment. It sounds like chaos, but it was actually a very informative meeting!
Like I said, I wasn't noticing, then I noticed and I thought it was funny how I hadn't noticed at first. Okay, now it's chaos, I'll stop.
Wait, no, I'll talk about Akamai. At first us techies were a bit dubious because the training site we're working on is mostly dynamic and we couldn't figure out how they were going to help us. But my boss pointed out the bandwidth costs of the site and how they are increasing... And also latency from countries on the other side of the world from Lyon, France where the servers are. Akamai helps on both of those issues A LOT. They're relatively cheap, super reliable and almost completely transparent. They cache the static stuff and let the dynamic pass through with minimal set up. Poof. Done. Cut the bandwidth costs by 50% or more... yowza. I'm sold.
Of course, this was the sales meeting. I'll tell you all how it ends up working out in real life later. ;-)
-Russ