25th October 2012 while working on a project I get a Skype pop Up “Blog about First on-site visit” which took place from 22nd September 2012 till 29th September 2012. That was a week filled with excitement, enjoyment, work and whole lot more in short a week that I can never forget.
22nd September 2012, I and sir reach Goa Airport to leave for Netherland for meeting with our clients. This was my first time travelling with sir, initially I was very cautious about the fact that I was travelling with Sir and had to remember that at all times but also aware that we had to spend a lot of time together on the trip and just being formal would spoil the whole trip, but now that the trip is over I can say for sure and with lots of happiness that it was THE BEST company. The trip was full of excitement, work and fun, right from landing at Mumbai Airport: S (sweat) to tasting the dishes that Dutch had to offer me:S and yes to the conference room of client (talk).
So we boarded the flight to Mumbai from Goa Airport and its all set to land at Mumbai Airport captain announces that it will be landing in another 10 minute but it has already been more than 20 minutes and the plane has still not touched down, I start hearing murmurs regarding something going wrong and now finally the plane starts it descend to touchdown and while at it the plane start shaking very badly and I was very frightened whether it was normal for a plane to shake that much or not (sweat) (wasntme). So next day we are on board the flight to Amsterdam and this time I did not feel a thing while landing (whew) ;).
We met our clients at Amsterdam who had come to pick us up at the Schipol Airport. Now we had to travel to Arnhem where we were supposed to stay for a whole week, we collected our luggage and moved towards the Airport exit, and with the first 2-3 steps that I take outside the Airport I feel the 9 °C temperature
Now we finally reach Arnhem and are suppose to leave for our lunch at the we take the bus and get down at the city central and our food for a surprise there was nobody in the lanes they were just empty even when it was noon, so our first day lunch was at McDonalds did a bit of sightseeing and returned back to our Hotel rooms.
In the evening we had a Dinner with client and his family, they were very kind and just too sweet:).
Next morning, our first working day in Arnhem, so we reach our client’s office I saw two guys very busy in their work , As I was visiting for the first time I was given an introduction to the staff and told about the company how they started the company, its history. We had a meeting where the tasks for the whole week were defined. After lunch we started with the first of the series of meetings that were scheduled for the whole week. While working with the client the mood in the room was always light, two of the clients’ staff present for the meeting really had a great understanding between them.
The day at work was over and we left office at 5:00PM started looking for restaurant as it was Monday we went to an Indonesian restaurant and ordered vegetarian food and to our surprise egg was considered as vegetarian in NETHERLANDS so sir asked to replace it with some beans.
Second day: we again had two meetings at the clients office one in the morning and one in the evening, long discussions but fruitful ones. At the Hotel we had pre scheduled a Skype meeting with another of our clients. But it was around 7:00 when we were at the Centrum in the evening and the bus frequency had really dropped.We couldn’t wait for the bus to arrive any more so we started walking towards our hotel. It was really nice to see the city even though it was a small part of the city. When we reached hotel we got a mail from client that the meeting was postponed to the next day so we decide to go to dinner.
Sir asked me to order Fettuccini Gamba (A dish with prawns
and noodles in it) sadly again I couldn’t finish it either but I did
manage to eat all the Prawns that were given in it (After all I am Goan 😉 ).so with that in mind our dinner for next two days was at a Indian Restaurant (Ya!! there were Indian Restaurant).
On Wednesday , sir had to go out with the client and I was supposed to take the meetings. After discussing the points for first half of the meeting, I went to my desk to check the software on which i was suppose to give a Demo the next day. To my surprise it had a bug because of which one of the functionality was not working on Windows XP. I reported it to the client and sir.We were working hard and trying to find out the reason for the bug because the same functionality was was working fine on Windows vista. After a lot of investigation, the client side programmer checked the application log and said “its because there is vista component that is present on the form that is why it doesn’t work on XP”. So once that was fixed we completed our meeting and at left for the day to have food in India Restaurant 😀 .
Thursday we went on an Industrial visit to our client’s client where we demonstrated the new feature in the software and understood how the software is put to use by the client in their company. On returning back we had discussion with our client about the software developments in the next phase. Evening we went for shopping. While roaming in the city I wanted to capture how the night are in Arnhem so I just clicked a snap while walking past one of the restaurants but unfortunately there were some people walking around that time who assumed that I was intentionally clicking their pic 😀 and started swearing :D. By the way I have to mention this, people seem to be scared of finding their face on Internet ;).
On Friday we had a final meeting were we finalized the points for the next phase of software development. We also completed our scheduled meetings for the week.In the evening we had dinner with the client in Indian Restaurant. We had a nice dinner with our client and returned back to our rooms.
Next day we were supposed to leave for our Home and I could hardly get any sleep that night. Clients family had come to drop us at the Schipol Ariport . We got lots of chocolates for Family and friends back in India and returned back:).