My New Job--the dirty deets

Guys, I hate when people do what I'm about to do. But I can'stop myself.

I work at Qualtrics now. If you don't know what Qualtrics is, you should find out. I used Qualtrics for various graduate products, and I really liked my experience with the product. I also remember really liking my experience with their support staff. Apart from offering an awesome product that is changing how both business and academic research are done, they are a great employer. Just a few of the things I love about working at Qualtrics after only 5 work days: 

Swag. 

The company gives its employees swag like crazy. And people don't turn their Qualtrics shirts into night shirts or work out shirts. They actually wear them. 

Yesterday the CEO told us that if we meet our annual goals (which we will), every single employee gets an iPhone 6 or an iPad. Qualtrics has around 550 employees. That's money the CEO and other executive staff could pocket or re-invest in the company. But they understand that investing in their employees is investing in their company. Happy employees do good work.

Did I mention that all of Brandon's and my health insurance premiums are paid by the company?

Food. 

Guys, I love food. And it's already a problem. There are kitchens all over our building. There's a sweets kitchen with cotton candy, drums of BYU Creamery ice cream, bulk candy, candy bars, fruit snacks...basically anything your body never wanted you to put into it. Brandon is excited that he never has to buy me chocolate again.

There's a salty kitchen with chip bags, goldfish, cheese nips, wheat thins, trail mix, and drawers I haven't even discovered yet. There's a fridge of apples, peaches, bananas, strawberries, string cheese, and celery. 

There's a breakfast (-ish) kitchen with 20 types of cereal, milk, pop tarts, hot pockets, corn dogs, and drawers I plan to explore in the days to come.

Soda/water machines on every floor. 

And to make my life even happier and more stress free, my team gets catered lunch every. single. day. of October and March--our busiest times of year. This week we had Zupas, Honey Baked Ham, Maglebys, and Which Wich. On Thursday mornings we have catered breakfast during our weekly company meeting. This week it was Waffle Love. 

Fun. 

Shuffleboard. Arcade basketball. Massage chairs. An entire band of instruments. A gym. Golf carts. Bikes. Nerf darts (constantly flying over my head and around me). A pogo stick. Foos ball. Billiards. Ping Pong. 

People can also bring their dogs to work. The company dog Barnaby even drinks from the water fountains (hence our soda machines).  

Incentive to work hard. 

Qualtrics is a meritocracy. And a transparent one. Literally. All the conference rooms are all glass. 

They're all named after the Seven Dwarves, other Disney characters, and Ancient Greek philosophers. 

Noone--not ANYONE in the company--has a closed office.

All of our weekly and quarterly goals are posted to our internal system. At any time, we can look up the goals and progress of our colleagues. That means I can look up the CEO's goals as well. 

This quarter, whoever gets the most points on my team goes to Hawaii for 6 days with their +1. And we all know what we have to do to get there. Any day a member of my team hits a certain threshold, he/she gets an extra $20. And it happens all the time.  Today they went around handing out dozens of checks. 

Money and prizes aren't the only incentives to be a hard worker, but I know the transparency of my performance will help me to push myself. 

This is the first time I've been genuinely excited to work for a company and to work my hardest in both their interest and my own interest. 

Do I sound like I'm bragging? I don't even feel bad. Because, for anyone who has an interest in working in an environment like this (doesn't everybody?), Qualtrics is hiring like crazy, and I can refer you. Holler.

Paris Day 4: Macarons, Museums, and Sparkling Towers

I have some really great memories of the Paris Saint Merri Ward from my internship in Paris and from surprising my brother in the church courtyard with a huge bear hug in 2010. So, when Brandon and I headed toward the church building, we were looking forward to meeting some of the members and getting a spiritual uplift. True to form, we rode our Velibs to the church. I had wisely chosen to bring a pencil skirt for my Sunday outfit, so biking around in that was a real joy.
Church was lovely. The Saint Merri Ward is full of locals, study abroad students, interns, and tourists. I love how they involve the visiting students in the sacrament program. Some attempt to give their talks in French, broken though it may be, but they had a translator for the English-speaking student who gave a talk on this particular Sunday.
After church, I was anxious to shed my pencil skirt for something more bike-friendly, so we returned home and ate some lunch. Our quick trip home turned into quite the awkward hour. Our Japanese host Azusa was with her friend Shimizu. Azusa introduced us to Shimizu and told us that the apartment owner would be coming by to do some quick maintenance. She asked us to pretend we were close friends of Shimizu, even though Shimizu didn't speak English...What we pieced together over the next strange hour was that Shimizu was renting the apartment from a Japanese-speaking Frenchman. She was then subletting it to Azusa who was sub subletting it by allowing renters through airbnb.com. Clearly the owner was unaware of any of this. Awkward.

Next stop: my favorite free museum in Paris--Musée Carnavalet in the Marais. I love this building architecturally, and I love that the inside is such a mishmash of objects. It's a Parisian history museum, and I always notice something else strange and new when I go. The gardens are beautiful, too!

Once we left the museum, the weather was insane! It would rain cats and dogs for half and hour, then switch to bright, sunny skies for a half hour. It switched between these opposites ten times before finally deciding to stay sunny. It was our last chance for Brandon to experience Paris, so I took him to one of my favorite Parisian churches (Saint Germain l'Auxerrois) and then made him bike all the way to Opera Garnier so that we could frequent the Pierre Hermé shop and eat macarons on the Opera steps.

Saint Germain l'Auxerrois

I don't know if Brandon will ever forgive me for making us spend $10 on four strangely-flavored, small macarons. But we had a great time listening to the street performer who was singing pop songs in about five different languages. We enjoyed hearing him sing made-up, jibberish "English" lyrics of American songs.
Even though we didn't take a tour of the opera house, I made Brandon come inside and admire the splendor of the opera's entrance as well as the statues of musicians like Handel and Bach.

After that, we biked our way back to the 1st arrondissement and then to the Champs-Elysées. For those of us unwilling to spend $500 on a shirt, the Champs-Elysées does lose a bit of its classic lure. But there are always great street performers there, and Brandon loved watching them bring in audience members for a dance competition. We walked our way up to the Arc de Triomphe and admired the memorial.

 

We then picked up some bikes and rode the downhill streets toward the Eiffel Tower. We'd visited on our first day, but Brandon hadn't yet seen it in all its glory--sparkling. We didn't ascend the tower--our opportunities to do that were on cloudy days where we would have missed the spectacular view. More importantly, though, Brandon is not a fan of heights, and I forever ruined the possibility of him wanting to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower when I told him that the top of the tower moves in the wind. It's only five inches, but still enough to kill any desire he had to walk up 19 stories of stairs.
We got to spend quite awhile at the Trocadéro, admiring the view, people watching, and avoiding salespeople like the plague. We were also asked to be in a video being made as a surprise for someone. So, SURPRISE, whoever you are!

After watching the sparkling tower (I never get tired of that view), we biked the four miles back home. The bike path that follows the Rive Droite is so great. You pass wonderful bridges, the Tuileries, and  the Louvre. Paris is magical at night.
On our bike ride home, we had to switch bikes and make a pitstop (at McDonald's of course). We accidentally left our tripod next to the bike stand, and when we came back not five minutes later, it was gone. Someone in Paris is now the proud owner of the tripod we bought specifically for that trip. In the morning, we had to prepare for our departure. We said our goodbyes to Azusa and lugged our suitcases through the metro and on the bus to Orly Airport. We happened to depart Paris when the Orly Airport was doing a social media project called #iamtheguest (whatever that means). They took our picture which was later put on the airport facade as part of a huge collage. Pretty cool beans!

Paris Day 3: Sacré Coeur, Chaos, and Dessert!!

Our third day in Paris, I woke up with quads on FIRE. Two days of riding bikes all over the city was taking its toll on my non-biker legs. They were screaming at me. I could feel the microtears in my muscles with every step. Did I mention that I was sick for the duration of our time in Europe? 'Cause I was. I felt so guilty, staying in people's homes and coughing/sneezing/sniffing all over their hospitality. Our plan for the day was to head to northern Paris to the flea market at Saint Ouen and then to Montmartre area. The combination of my quads, my sickness, the distance to our destinations, and the fact that it was raining outside, decided us on a metro travel day.

We headed out for Saint Ouen where Brandon got to be accosted by sellers of faux-everything. Most of my experiences at Saint Ouen were solo (once solo at night--awful and scary idea), and having a black male at my side definitely decreased the amount of sketchy people trying to force interaction on us. With the history of my Saint Ouen experiences, I insisted we leave our camera equipment safe at our flat. Saint Ouen is enormous, and, since we had no plans of carting large antiques with us for the duration of our trip, we walked a relatively small part of the market. Hunger and rain drove us away from Saint Ouen and on toward Sacré Coeur and Montmartre.

The view of Paris from Sacré Coeur is pretty amazing, not to mention to the basilica itself. The walk up is a workout (for those of us too cheap to pay for the funicular). Thankfully, I had warned Brandon of the aggressive bracelet men who lurk on the steps (so many steps), start tying a friendship bracelet around your wrist, and force you to pay them afterwards, even though it's unsolicited. These guys don't take "no" for an answer. Thanks to my experience in the city, I have developed what I call my "metro face." It's basically a facial expression that would translate roughly to "Touch me and I'll kill you." It's worked wonders for me in throwing off the American stereotype of loud, fat, smileyness, and in deterring the aggressive males that plague Paris.
Don't be fooled by the smiles in the below pictures. I can throw off a happy face faster than you can say "stranger danger."

 

As many times as I've visited Sacré Coeur, this was my first time going inside, and thus, I was unaware of the stricter rules governing behavior inside the basilica. In tourist-ridden places like Notre Dame, cameras are flashing, people are talking, and actual worshippers are in the minority. If you're Parisian, going to worship in silence at Notre Dame would be somewhat like partaking of the sacrament in the nursery. However, this phone shot earned me quite a lecture from the caretaker of the basilica. He also raised his voice to indignantly chastise everyone else in the nave, saying that this was a sacred place of worship, and to put away our phones.

Chastised for an extremely unflattering shot

 Even though I felt chastised, I was actually very happy to encounter such such respect and reverence for a place deemed sacred. It was refreshing to experience that in such a secular-minded country.

Speaking of the secular and material, our next stop was to a mall outside the city. Why would we go to such lengths to shop when there is shopping all over Paris, you ask? Only one response makes sense:
PRIMARK.
Never heard of Primark? That's probably because you live in America. Primark is a clothing store based in Ireland that I became acquainted with during my study abroad in Wales. I don't care to say how much Primark merchandise I came home with from that study abroad, but suffice it to say, I needed an extra bag. This store in Villeneuve la Garenne (Saint Denis area) had opened a month prior to our arrival in Paris, but when we arrived at the mall, there was a line hundreds and hundreds of feet long--looping around, down the stairs, looping around again. I've never seen anything like it. Especially when the store had already been open a whole month.
There was a line for the line. They were only letting a couple people into the store at a time, and the sight inside the store was no less chaotic.

 I wasn't feeling well that day, and our claustrophia-inducing shopping expedition did nothing but aggravate that. Even though I was excited to return to Primark after a wish to do so for the past five years, it made me slightly sick to see the craze inspired by nothing more than fabric. It was like Black Friday times 20.
Once we got back into Paris with our wares, we stopped by the supermarket (my favorite thing to do in foreign countries!). Among other things, I happened upon this:

Banoffee!!!!

 Once again, if you don't know what banoffee is, it's likely because we live in America. Banoffee is my dessert of choice, thanks, once again, to Wales. It's pie made of banana, toffee, and moist graham cracker crust. To help you grasp my love for banoffee, perhaps this picture will help, since it shows how I finished off my own piece as well as three other people's pieces in Edinburgh.

It is a powerful demonstration of my love for Brandon that I let him have one of the two banoffees when I could have easily eaten 4 or 5 alone. We ate them at home while stunning our fellow Argentine housemates with the knowledge that we're married, and Brandon is only 22.
Mormons, amirite?