Icelandic Volcano: Nul Points; French Train Strikes: Douze Points!

For those of you who have known me for a while, you’ll know that I’ve always said that if you’re going to own a volcano, then you really need to control it. Iceland obviously failed to heed my advice and decided to bring Europe to a halt on Thursday. Since then I’ve received a number of mails from friends stranded in Bangalore and Johannesburg amongst other places, but thankfully young O’Brien was one step ahead of the game and managed to circumvent a host of different challenges….

Step 1 – British airports closing on Thursday after the eruption. O’Brien quickly decides that his ticket to fly on the Friday from London to Biarritz is as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

Step 2 – O’Brien sells the family silver in order to bribe someone to get him a ticket for the Eurostar on Thursday afternoon. Once that transaction has been completed he then proceeds to charm a young lady from Air France into giving him a free flight from Paris to Biarritz on the Friday morning (true). O’Brien’s liver lets out a huge sigh of relief because this means the night out in London has to be cancelled at the last minute. The rest of him is bitterly disappointed not to be seeing a host of old friends.

Step 3 – Things are going ok until France decides to shut its airports 45 minutes after O’Brien arrives in Paris on the Thursday evening. Undeterred, and still feeling supremely confident that he will get to the south of France before the weekend despite there being no train tickets from Paris to Biarritz as a result of a reduced service due to national strikes, O’Brien strolls off to hire a car. Pulses rise slightly when it appears that there is not a single hire car left anywhere in the whole of Paris.

Step 4 – At about 9PM on the Thursday evening O’Brien manages to get help in finding an alternative train ticket to Bayonne which is about a 10 minute drive from Biarritz. Seeing that the train is not until 7.40 the next morning, O’Brien decides to organise an impromptu dinner and drinks session in Paris. A sharp intake of breath from his liver is heard all around Paris.

Step 5 – The train races down to Bordeaux in record time on the Friday morning despite the national strikes. What a wonderful country – they can’t even be bothered to strike properly! The only fly in the ointment was the need to take a clapped out 1980s bus from Dax to Bayonne for the last 2.5 hours of the journey. To be honest I was quite happy when we took the bus – it wouldn’t have felt enough of a challenge if we hadn’t, plus I needed the additional 1.5 hours to make it a nice round 24 hours of travel.

So did I manage to do any useful thinking during this mammoth final journey at the end of my Accenture career?

Overall I think it was not as sad as I expected to be – the cockles of my heart were warmed throughout the week with the kind messages I received. Maybe things will only hit me next week when everything goes quiet again.

They also say that the end is always very impersonal – exit interview with HR and hand over your laptop to a faceless technology services representative. Maybe it’s just me, but I actually know my HR rep quite well so it was nice to have a candid conversation with an old friend, and even more surprisingly I also know the technology services guy (the only benefit from having broken 5 laptops during the course of 2009), so it was nice to shake his hand and say thanks in person….Plus my hasty exit meant that I actually kept my laptop and that I will courier it back to Accenture next week so the umbilical chord is not yet completely severed.

The final thing that struck me towards the end of the week was the feeling that I should no longer define myself by the company I work for. I am beginning to realise that my personality and some of the qualities I have are not exclusively linked to Accenture, and that they will go with me wherever I work in the future. Leaving Accenture has only strengthened my awareness of my own “personal brand” and also the fact that I need to protect that brand because I like it.