Every morning we all come to the office, most of us before 9am, some a little later. Caffeine is the weapon of choice to stimulate the central nervous system of many. In Amsterdam there are a few nice coffee places, however waking up to a Grande extra-caramel-extra-whip caramel macchiato is not possible due to the lack of Starbucks, so most of us just utilize the trusted Senseo machine or move to the outside alternatives of Village Bagels or the Coffee Company (being in the center of Amsterdam has its advantages).

Sipping our coffee and reading the news we chatter about what this day brings, we fire up our trusted editors (Eclipse, Netbeans, Emacs or Photoshop) and write code, draw pictures, maintain machines and other interesting stuff. When it is time for lunch we all rush to our lunch table, this is necessary because the table is actually too small to hold all of us and being in the second shift makes you miss all the good stuff. Our lunch is quite typical dutch, we have fresh bread and toppings (a variety of meat, cheese and fruits/veggies) delivered to the office daily and we make our own sandwiches. The lunch favorite of many is the ‘Tosti’. Get in line!

Lunch is generally ended with a nice game of foosball where we have a couple of friendly (or less friendly) matches. When all the dishes are cleared and the goals have been scored, we go back to writing code and talking about our projects.

When we commute home largely depends on deadlines, but most of us finish up some things in the trains or in the evening hours, to start the entire cycle again the next day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 9:26 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.