Sweden again

Been away to Sweden again this weekend, I had to go on Thursday evening, ready for a board meeting on Friday. Basically each country manager had to present to the board the QTR 1 results. My country manager had a holiday scheduled, and the sales director also had a holiday scheduled, which left only me. I had a lot of work todo because I have only been there just under 2 weeks and had very little help to gather the information I needed, which of course was mainly past detail on how and why the budget was missed or achieved. So for a few days my work was quite intense. It all went quite well on Friday morning with the board, and in the afternoon the company owner had a grand opening and press conference about the new strategy which is taking the form of a new business form in Sweden. To outline it, one of the clubs has been remodelled and includes offices for medical staff within the facility, which will work with companies, insurance companies and the clubs on the health of clients. You can imagine that the individual goes to see the medical practitioner and ends up coming out of the room with a gym membership. This is the idea. Although, you mustn’t be sceptical because it really has been set up with all the right intensions of promoting healthy lifestyles to all, and providing a platform to make it easy for all, with all the right care and attention in one place.

I stayed Saturday night and wasted time until my flight on Saturday afternoon, I took my taxi to the airport and when I got to the check in desk had quite a surprise. I was one day early for my flight! I should have checked more carefully but my boss who booked the flights had made a mistake and booked my return flight for Sunday afternoon. This was quite disappointing as you can imagine, but to solve it without too much fuss I just bought another ticket to return on the flight I had originally arrived for. Airlines are such bastards though, to change my flight they wanted to charge me 18,000 Kc, the girl on the desk tried her best to help me, she searched for other flights and got down to 9,000 Kc, this was still way too much and I was trying to decide if I should just go back to the hotel and book in for another night, meanwhile the girl did another search and found something at about 5,000 Kc, so I took it because another night in the hotel and the taxis etc would have come out at more.

This is why I think that the airlines are bastards, the flight I went home on was only half full, it made absolutely no difference to them that I was on it, or if I had been on the flight the next day but it still cost me £125 to change.

We had a little bit of rain today and yesterday, it’s the first for 7 weeks, I guess we need it but I would rather have sunshine, we are going for lunch today with Jana and Radek, Petra has just told me to hurry up because we have to leave, to goodbye.