First days in office

Well, these weren't exactly my first days in the office here, I spent 2 weeks here in March. Anyway, we've gots lots of nationalities here. People from Thales we have Germans, French, Indians, Portuguese and Dutch (that would be me). Also, from Stesa, a local partner of Thales, we have Saudi's, Egyptians, Philipines, Somalis, Bangladeshi and Palestinians (so far I counted only one). Not everybody has arrived yet, but in total we'll be around 40 people in this office working on this project.

For those who don't know, this project is about the implementation of all the signalling and telecommunications of 2400km of new railway in Saudi.

There are multiple sub-systems and I'm coordinating a team of 5 other guys and we are responsible for the SDH network, the core network over which all other sub-systems are running. Our job is to work out the network architecture, prepare all the technical and project documentation for the customer, prepare the installation plans for the guys in the field who are doing the physical installation, do the logical configuration of the whole network (this is all done remotely) and finally run the acceptance tests.

We'll stay most of the time at the office in Riyadh, except for some surveys we might have to carry out and during the acceptance test phase.

That's it for today, champions league final is about to begin...I'll have to watch it on an arabic channel...