This week was my probably the most tedious but also most enjoyable of all the work that I did for Tree Logistics. I continued the new assignment my boss had assigned to me, focusing on damage reports and tracking damages. I spent Monday – Wednesday indexing damages, and incident reports by the driver. This was primarily done on an excel spreadsheet and through sorting the documents into various google drive folder, considering that we have close to eighty different drivers it was slow process.
The highlight of my week was Tuesday. It was my birthday. Since I was remote Monday – Wednesday my fellow intern and I took a train to Amsterdam to meet up with some of his university friends. It was nice to get out of Berlin and take a short trip. Unlike in Berlin where the weather has been fairly cold and according to locals unusual for the summer. The temperature has hovered between sixty and seventy degrees, and it has been cloudy and rained off and on every day. The clouds are not to bad considering that I am used to Pittsburgh’s weather. The rai though is different, it rains for maybe twenty minutes at a time but fairly heavy. Honestly, I prefer Pittsburgh’s weather. It is a lot more pleasant, and I was disappointed that it was not warmer. Based on Junes and early mays forecast as well as Berlins typical weather in July I had not packed many warm clothes.
On my trip to Amsterdam on Monday I took two trains. The first was about three hours and second lasted about five. My train departed around nine am. Thankfully there was Wi-Fi so I spent my entire trip working. Both train rides flew by because of this. I arrived in Amsterdam around six in the evening. Tuesday even though it was my birthday I woke up early and headed to look for a place to sit down and work for a few hours. I found a Dunkin about a ten-minute walk from my hostel. My fellow intern and I sat there and worked from about nine in the morning until two in the afternoon. The Dunkin was unlike any Dunkin in the United States. It was more of a café style. The coffee was a lot better and they a variety of sandwiches and almost a completely different selection of donuts. Although the coffee was extremely good the donuts were awful. They cost approximately four dollars apiece even for a classic glazed donut.
By this point I had breezed through most of the work and only had about twenty percent of my task left to do on Wednesday. I went a nice ramen place and had pretty good birthday overall. Wednesday, we woke up and walked around Amsterdam before takin a noon train directly to Berlin. The train ride took about seven hours. I managed to complete my work and by hour four and spent the rest of the train ride catching up on sleep.
Thursday, I returned to the office. The day was pretty slow since the colleague I was working with was in meetings for most of the morning. We were able to go through my work in the afternoon. He had begun to design an excel program to track and rank drivers with the most damages, and track and rank vehicles with the most damages as well scheduling maintenance etc. My task for the rest of my internship was to compile all of this together and modify the program as needed so that my colleague would be able to present it to our boss on my last day. There were a lot of difficulties in the program due to some lack of data that I had to track down but by the end of the day Friday the project was looking to be in good shape.
German culture values work differently then the United States. This can be broken down into one sentence. Germans work to live while Americans live to work. Honestly, this was a little difficult to get used to but once you adapt the work culture is very relaxed and enjoyable. The focus is on deliverables and completing your tasks. As long as these are completed you are viewed as a success. In my industry a lot of what we do is dependent on our drivers, so as long as we are running all our routes assigned to us by amazon and that our drivers complete all their assigned deliveries then we are successful. This is the most basic expectation. Like any business we look to minimize costs and maximize profit, since there is always ways to improve this it is viewed as a bonus and another successful task in our company.