Tuesday, October 24, 2006

My First Visit to London

Last week we were launching a deal, so I went to the printers in London with a colleague where we get together in a big conference room with all the parties to the deal and negotiate and scrape and claw and edit a document into presentable format. Once we have the final product, we collectively approve it, and it gets printed in a professional format for distribution to potential investors.

It is actually a very gruelling process, especially when then document has not reached a point where the format is presentable and some of the content is inaccurate. The point of the document is to make a sales pitch to potential investors about buying into the shares of the company. Therefore it needs to have certain disclosures, not all of which the company is comfortable in making, and the information needs to be verified as accurate, and sometimes the company wants to cut corners on some of the information. In this case, it seemed the company was particularly unwilling to make concessions and develop the content into something we thought was presentable.

As a result, when we arrived at the printers at 10:00 Thursday morning (after having flown into London at 3:00 a.m.), it was a constant struggle to modify the drafting. That first day, we worked until about 2:00 a.m. Friday we went from 10:00 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning (yes, I worked the whole day straight), and then Saturday, we worked from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Midnight was our final deadline to get the document printed on time, and we made it, kind of. We were only a few minutes late. So after a few hours sleep Sunday morning, I caught a 9:30 flight back to Madrid, so I could spend Sunday afternoon with the family.

So if you think I didn't get to see any of London, you're wrong. My colleague who went with me lived there for a few years while going to school. So when we came in on the taxi, he pointed out Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Chering Cross Station, and more. On the taxi ride to the printers in the morning, he described the local area and indicated points of interest. On the taxi ride to the airport when we left, we passed by Parliament, Big Ben, and the massive ferris wheel they call the London Eye. So I saw London, just not the same way most tourists see London.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear you're working like a dog drew. London is fabulous. I'm sure you'll take the fam sometime and actually see London from outside of the cab :)

drew said...

haha, very funny Corinne. Actually, I may be going back to the printers within the next month. I'm going to try to bring the family along and they can explore London like normal tourists while I will get to work like a dog once again.

Anonymous said...

I am jealous. I love London and you should definitely do some exploring.

Anonymous said...

Wish I could have seen some of those places when I went over to England. I did fly into Heathrow but would have been fun to see the places you seen even if by cab. Course January wasn't the best month to visit over there but that was when Lyndzee was due so had no choice.

Grandma
Hope Eryka got her drivers license okay that I sent.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a really great vacation you are having in Germany. Your pictures are really appreciated. Be nice when you do get email.

Love Grandma & Grandpa Heard