Thank you, volcano: Scott Logic office in the US
23 April 2010 by Gergely Orosz
Last week I travelled to New York to attend the Kairos Global Summit. The event took part 16-18 April and I was planning on flying back 19 April. Due to the volcano eruption though, this departure never happened and my 4 day stay in the US suddenly grew to 11 days. After a mini New England tour this resulted in the opening of a temporary Scott Logic office in New Hampshire.
Hello, Wall Street
On the Kairos summit 500 selected students from top universities within the US, China, India, UK, Spain and Hungary had the chance to exhibit their projects and network with each others and of the many invited CEOs. The event itself was really good, the most unforgettable part being entering the New York Stock Exchange trading floor on Saturday where many of the projects were exhibited. It was nice to see some of our clients’ trading seats as I walked around. The trading floor itself was really impressive even with the stock market being closed with screens, phones and indexes everywhere.
On the NYSE trading floor (on the right)
Hello, volcano
I was lucky enough to make it to the summit as London Heathrow was closed down just a few hours later than I flew off to New York. Needless to say that my flight on 19 April was cancelled. At JFK they told me that I could choose to either move my ticket to the next available seat or they could give me a refund on my ticket. The next available seat for New York was 8 days later – that is quite a lot! I found out though that it’s possible to change departure location and for some other cities like Boston and Washington DC the waiting line was a day shorter.
The problem with being in the US and travelling to the UK is that getting back in a reasonable time can only be done by either flying over the Atlantic ocean or sailing across it. Since it seemed that I couldn’t get a flight back in a week I was wondering if I could perhaps sail back under a week. The fastest ship I’ve found to do this crossing was the Queen Mary 2 which crosses the ocean in 8 days for about $2000. Waiting a week for the flight still seemed a better alternative so I re-scheduled my departure to fly from Boston.
Hello, Newbury Street
I had some luck in my situation: I spent a semester at the University of New Hampshire and a lot of my friends back then were now scattered on the East coast, especially in the Boston area. What better excuse for catching up than the flight ban! So I went to Boston, re-visited some famous places (like the Prudential Tower, Newbury Street and the TD Banknorth Garden) and re-connected with old mates.
I got slightly pissed at the volcano though when I realized that I’ve just missed Jesse Liberty’s Silverlight talk. And if that wasn’t enough I couldn’t even find a .NET or ALT.NET group in Boston to stop by and say hi either – maybe next time!
Boston, view from the river
Hello, Main Street
Had it not been for the eruption I would have been working all week. Developing software however can be done from any part of the world with a laptop and a decent internet connection. Well… I didn’t have a laptop with me, only a tiny netbook which was great on battery and awful on anything else. However I was actually planning to get a laptop in a few months so I though I might bring this purchase forward. Looking at notebook prices in the US I decided I was shocked to see how lower prices here are compared to the UK so quickly decided to invest in a new laptop.
The thing about prices in the US is that the ones advertised don’t contain state tax, which is usually between 5-10%. There are a few states however where there’s no state tax, the closest one being New Hampshire. To my luck I had a good friend living off Main Street in Concord, New Hampshire, who offered to put me up for a few nights. If you haven’t heard of Concord, it’s the capital of New Hampshire, north of Machester and south of Lebanon and Berlin. I mean, north of Manchester, NH and south of Lebanon, NH and Berlin, NH which have nothing to do with the more famous cities apart from having the same name!
After my laptop had arrived here (thank you, express delivery!) and having a room to myself with broadband I basically had the fourth Scott Logic (for now temporary) office set up after London, Newcastle and Edinburgh :). So should you get an email from me the next few days around 10pm it’s not because I’m working terribly late but because I’m still on Boston time!
When’s the office warming party?