And for the hours I spend doing this, I wonder how much of life I’m missing out on considering the weather is finally turning up, and there is a forest complete with deer, boars, and foxes, *in my backyard*.
I got my new car on Tuesday. And I *love* it! If you ever thought it would be empowering to drive your own car across the European highways, well, it absolutely is. However, France is a police state with respect to motor traffic. Identifying whether it’s legal to park in a given space for a given amount of time is unbelievably stressful in a crowded downtown district. And they make use of automated speeding cameras, one of which caught me last night. It was a 90 kmh zone, and my heavy foot late at night in the deserted rode put me at 105 kmh. To put that in perspective, that’s going 65mph in a 56mph zone. That’s ticket worthy. Not looking forward to sorting out how to find my 140euro ticket (going exchange rate: 1.4 dollars to the euro!) since the car owner address on record is still the previous owner’s. My roommate had the same experience in roughly the same location that same evening.
Doesn’t change the fact that I love my car. It is a stick, 1999 Renault Clio, blue, petite, and absolutely responsive. Last night I took my roommate to Paris, and door to door from my forested hamlet to the cabaret smack in the middle of the Champs-Elysees it was 1 hour. Definitely feeling the empowerment after 2 weeks of bumming rides of people.
So speaking of the car, and deer, turns out we have to be very careful driving on the forest roads. Last night as we were returning after a long but disappointing night in the City of Lights, a fully matured buck carrying a beautiful set of antlers bolted across the road about 20 meters ahead of my car, itself going about 100kph. Not a lot of math tells us that I was less than a second away from becoming an accomplished if perhaps personally maimed deer hunter. By the way there’s a lot of awareness on campus for drunk driving. One of the principal ways in which students have been injured in the past is drunk driving in the forest in their tiny cars - they say that in an accident, the deer and boars running around will usually win. Years ago the Dean had to make an unfortunate phone call to the parents of two students because of that.
Between the student body and the administration, everyone puts in a lot of effort to ensure a lot of camaraderie on campus. How to accomplish this? Lots and lots of socializing! That’s part of what you are accepting in an MBA, not just net present value valuations, double entry bookkeeping, and monopsony buyer theory, but the connections you have with your fellow students after you graduate. After a year, if there’s a great esprit de corps (I always felt a lot of this at my undergrad institution), then that can serve everyone in the future. If instead there was a lot of acrimony over the year, then that damages the network going forward. This opens up a discussion on self selecting groups and elitism, to which my response is, “If I know you and I trust you, I’m going to help you when you need it”, no matter whether you’re associated with a brand of any organization or not. And I wish, but don’t expect, others to treat me the same way. And if I don’t know you? Well I can only hope to have a positive influence anyways through the minute macro effects of the career I will choose.
In the meantime, I’m going to speed on European autoroutes:
Also I wanted to finally post the forest video I owed from last week...
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