A Strange Game of Croquet

It was the strangest game of croquet I had ever played. Not that I often play croquet, but I still find playing croquet with the queen a little strange, especially as she constantly orders the solitaire soldiers or just anyone to be beheaded, not to mention the flamingo mallets and the hedgehog balls. In the middle of this chaos, the telephone suddenly rang. It might be the White Rabbit, the Hatter or even the Cheshire Cat I thought, before I picked up the speaker. Surprisingly it wasn’t any of them. Instead it was one of my fellow trainees wondering about why I wasn’t already in the hotel lobby. I cast a quick glance at the room surrounding me wondering where I was, before I looked out the window realizing the day was fully lit and that the time probably was a little more than the time we had all agreed upon. I grabbed a shirt, my trousers and my shoes, still mid-air, as I fled the room. The Englishman in the elevator remarked that I had a rather interesting way of getting dressed.

Trainee Gathering
I had overslept by more than an hour that Monday morning and this was only the first day of our four-day trainee gathering in Kuala Lumpur. Down in the lobby it appeared that my eleven fellow trainees and our trainee manager were ready to get on the bus that would take us on a day’s visit to DiGi - the Malaysian company in which Telenor is the largest shareholder. I was relieved that I had caught them before leaving or perhaps for not holding them back for too long a time, so I soon started breathing again.

Mobile Trouble
Usually I wake up by the sound of the alarm on my mobile phone. For some reason I have never lost a mobile phone – until I started to work for Telenor. Now I have lost two in two months.  The phone that was going to wake me up must have dropped out of my pocket while I was still in the taxi taking us to the hotel downtown KL. My bad luck must have accumulated in the beginning of that week, because for the remainder of the week I only had good luck. Not that I won a lottery or anything, it just happened to be one of the most interesting and jolliest times I have ever had.

Revealing the Outplacements
During our gathering in KL, we also got to know who would go to which local company in the outplacements and I think everybody were fairly happy with the distribution. I was however, one of the few for whom the outplacement hadn’t been sorted yet. Anyway I got the possibilities scoped down; if there were to be any suitable tasks for a trainee in Grameenphone, Bangladesh, I would spend the summer half of 2008 in Dhaka. If not, Pannon was ready to take one more trainee, meaning that I would go to Budapest, Hungary. Although neither Grameenphone nor Pannon were at the top of my wish list, they still were high up, so I was very pleased with the plan for my outplacement. The trainee gathering was wrapped up Thursday evening and the twelve of us went out to celebrate our intense, but yet enjoyable trainee gathering. The next morning István woke me up at seven o’ clock. It was a little too early it had become quite a late Thursday night. Anyway we left the ten other trainees sleeping, heading for Taman Negara which in Malay translates into national park. Nicole joined us the next day and we spent the weekend staying at a paradise-like resort in the jungle, far up the Tembeling river.

Sleeping Across Asia
István Nicole and I returned to KL on Sunday, I was about to catch my flight back home together with Mariann and Einar who had stayed in KL for the weekend. The mighty 747 named “Karachi” climbed out of Kuala Lumpur International a little before midnight. I fell asleep just as we flew across the border to Thailand and I slept in my seat passing Bangladesh and Pakistan. I woke up as we were about to enter Europe coming up from south east crossing the Caspian Sea before flying in over Russia and Ukraine and a little north of Hungary. I have always loved airplanes and flying, such a pity it was to be night all the way to Schipool where we had a short hour to connect, only for the sun to catch up on us.

“Call Me”
As this eventful week had come to its end and Norwegian soil soon was to be under my feet, my luck returned to normal mode, meaning that the keys to my apartment were in my bag and my bag didn’t make the connection at Schipool. This gave me no other option than going directly to work and rather have my bag delivered there. The first thing I do when I arrive at work is to check my email, obviously. As I opened my inbox, I was expecting something like an email avalanche coming towards me. Luckily there weren’t too many emails. Rather than reading the oldest emails first, I began with the newest, it had just popped into my mailbox in the same moment I came in the door. The email was from our trainee manager; call me, that’s all it said. And so I did, already with a feeling it would concern Dhaka or Buda. After the phone call I pinched my arm, like in a dream everything changes and with almost no hint of logic, Pakistan – here I come.