Birthday parties & my 2nd assignment

Birthdays of Shoshannah & my dad & lots of BBQs

A week ago both my dad and Shoshannah celebrated their birthday (together 80 years young). That weekend we celebrated Shosh her birthday three times: On Friday in Maastricht, on Saturday in Weert with friends and on Sunday at home with family. Great weather, good people and an awesome BBQ completed the party.
Shosh her university friends in Maastricht

Family BBQ on Sunday

The next weekend we had to re-celebrate her birthday in Utrecht with our friends over there. Since my place isn't very big, we decided to take the gamble and organize a BBQ in the Griftpark. Keeping an eye on the weather forecasts every day paid off since we had awesome weather on Saturday.


Later that night we ended up on the Neude for a small taste of the big "Festival aan de Werf" here in Utrecht.

At ING I am still enjoying my time. About a month ago I started at the Managed Services department within Operations & IT Banking which delivers workplace services to all employees within ING (desktops & laptops, mobile and fixed phones, user authorizations and so on). Basically everything technical you need when doing your job). Heavy cost cutting is going on everywhere throughout the organization and my job is to check out how we as a (workplace) service provider can cut back on costs without having a deteriorating service performance. This creates a challenging playing field since I have to deal with both suppliers and (end-)customers.

This department has nothing to do with banking really but when we deliver high quality it will contribute to the emplyees' feeling of satisfaction at work and hopefully improve productivity. Unfortunately almost everyone takes for granted that their email works 24/7 and that a broken mobile phone gets replaced within a matter of hours, so we don't get any compliments when this actually occurs. But oh my... when email traffic is down for just ten minutes or they can't have their cell phone for a day.......... ;-)

Like I said, an interesting and challenging place to work.

Talk to you soon!
Ruud