harlekins spirit

Anarchist summer delights with charcoal

My barbecuing experiences in the Netherlands

In previous posts I have dealt several times with the culinary differences between Germany and the Netherlands – and they also exist in the case of the greatest of all summer pleasures, barbecuing. However, the differences are not so much culinary, but rather ideological. The Dutch are a people of flat hierarchies, they can’t stand it when one person has a greater say than anyone else. This is true in politics as well as in daily life, and I suspect that the royal family is also so popular because their representatives de facto have quite little to say.

Leadership? – How can I help you?

A young man walks purposefully towards a shop. The shop is hardly recognisable as such because there is no shop window. A simple sign hangs above the entrance door. It says “Pharmacy” and in slightly smaller letters underneath it “for Leadership”. The man enters and opening the door triggers a shrill ringing. He barely has time to look around the small salesroom before an older gentleman with white hair and a dishevelled full beard appears from behind the counter.

Scenes of an forced partnership

She was already there when I occupied my allocated hospital bed. She had already been there for some time, for five days. And she was in a bad way. She quickly found in me a compliant victim for her protracted medical history. I was a good listener after all.

Rowling’s got it wrong!

I have already dealt with the topic of “decisions” once before, in September 2020. Two reasons motivate me to take up this topic again: Firstly, the new book by Daniel Kahnemann et al., which deals with this very topic and secondly, a quote from Joanne K. Rowling, who may be a good writer but apparently has not read anything by Kahnemann and – what is much worse – not even our blog.

Even more lost for words

Living in a multilingual environment

Harlequin Beate wrote a while ago of her trials and tribulations with language attrition. I am sure many of our readers will recognize the struggle we have maintaining our command of our first language when spending long periods abroad. And the longer we stay, the Wurst it gets!

Magic Numbers…

Actually, I had reserved this particular Friday especially for an OpenShift4 Bare-Metal installation, but you know Murphy: Firstly, anything that can go wrong will go wrong and secondly, Murphy was an optimist. So I will report on my experiences with RedHat another time.

On the morning of the Friday in question, a colleague called with the usual phrase that technicians have learned to dread: “Please take a look.” The dreaded “5 minutes”. But unfortunately, it was important, because a critical application on the production system was at a standstill and nothing worked. So I went looking for the problem and tried to find the cause. Since the error occurred from one day to the next without any changes to the program, I suspected a data constellation that was problematic for the program as the reason for the crash.

Project management in internal Projects – a Survival Guide

I was pleased a while ago when I read Oliver F. Lehmann’s proposed project typology. He included a number of characteristics of internal projects that I recognised. As an external consultant I regularly experience that companies behave quite differently when their own employees are allocated to internal projects, particularly in business departments. “Just do it,“ seems to describe it nicely.

Election campaign in children’s news

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as a little boy

A while ago, elections were held in the Netherlands – and as in Germany, this fact had a great impact on all the news programmes and political talk shows in the weeks beforehand, where viewers were confronted with rather contrived and tiring battles of words. The situation in the Netherlands is somewhat confusing simply because it takes four or five parties to form a government (out of a total of 18 (!) parties represented in parliament) rather than two or three as in Germany.

A breath of fresh air came from the Dutch “Jeugdjournaal” – the daily children’s news programme I became a fan of when I started learning Dutch years ago. The top candidates of the six largest parties were guests there three days before election day, along with children, of course (this time only a dozen, due to Corona).

Do we really live in a knowledge society?

There are countless terms for our present: the digital age, the Information Society, the Post-industrial Era, the Anthropocene. That’s not even all of them. One of them is the Knowledge Society. And according to various sources, that’s exactly what we’re living in now. Do you feel you live in a knowledge society? I once asked myself this question and these thoughts ran through my head.

It’s alive!

Is it because I’ve just had my first vaccination? It wasn’t AstraZeneca, but I swear our robot vacuum cleaner is alive. It’s a brand-name model. Great thing, especially if you have a dog and not many carpets. Works really well, it’s just a bit noisy. But it’s alive. I checked, the software is not from Microsoft – which eliminates the only alternative explanation. The dear thing drives around the whole flat and picks up dog hair, dog toys, dog food, dog biscuits and dog biscuits and nothing else really – except dog chews.