This place is indeed a “campus” – I don’t recall how many acres of land they have but it is like a big college campus. They’ve got some 8000 employees working there, if I recall the numbers. There are multiple buildings, multiple cafeterias, really nice facilities, areas dedicated to technologies and innovation, etc. If I was going to work in this city and work for SAP, that’s where I’d want to work, traffic/commute considerations aside.
On that note I found that SAP (and many other companies here) does a lot to provide transportation for its employees. For instance they run busses. 75 to be exact. Just for this campus, they have 75 busses and a fleet of “cabs” – of which I had one dedicated to me for the day. I jokingly said they needed to apply SAP’s technology teams to putting together some optimization software to track and plan routes for these busses and cabs. They non-jokingly told me “yes, we already do that.”
Oh.
I suppose the one thing I’ll call out relevant to this account is lunch. We went to one of their roof-top cafeterias. Really nice setup. It is open air but covered so you get a lot of fresh air without having to worry about too much sun or rain. The range of available food is pretty good – for Indian cuisine – and I decided to try and impress my Indian colleagues by not going for the “burger table.”
Fortunately one of the folks there with me was happy to translate and describe the contents of various foods. I took a small sampling of a few different things and then he decided to take me to a booth dishing out chicken and rice. That sounded just fine to the likes of me. Rice? Good. Chicken? Good.
What this stuff was? Umm…. It would have been good except the chicken chunks, of which they guy dishing out the food started hunting through his rice to pile on more of them for me after a Hindi conversation between he and the guy guiding me through all this, is not chicken meat, but chunks of chicken, as best as I can tell. It might be like if you flash-froze a chicken by dipping it in liquid nitrogen, then shattered it with a ball-peen hammer, then cooked the pieces, then put it in rice with a bunch of Indian spices. So these chicken chunks have bone, cartilage, gristle, etc.
I had to have a lengthy discussion with several of my Indian colleagues at the lunch table as to how I was really fine, and not still hungry, and didn’t need to try other things.
On that note I found that SAP (and many other companies here) does a lot to provide transportation for its employees. For instance they run busses. 75 to be exact. Just for this campus, they have 75 busses and a fleet of “cabs” – of which I had one dedicated to me for the day. I jokingly said they needed to apply SAP’s technology teams to putting together some optimization software to track and plan routes for these busses and cabs. They non-jokingly told me “yes, we already do that.”
Oh.
I suppose the one thing I’ll call out relevant to this account is lunch. We went to one of their roof-top cafeterias. Really nice setup. It is open air but covered so you get a lot of fresh air without having to worry about too much sun or rain. The range of available food is pretty good – for Indian cuisine – and I decided to try and impress my Indian colleagues by not going for the “burger table.”
Fortunately one of the folks there with me was happy to translate and describe the contents of various foods. I took a small sampling of a few different things and then he decided to take me to a booth dishing out chicken and rice. That sounded just fine to the likes of me. Rice? Good. Chicken? Good.
What this stuff was? Umm…. It would have been good except the chicken chunks, of which they guy dishing out the food started hunting through his rice to pile on more of them for me after a Hindi conversation between he and the guy guiding me through all this, is not chicken meat, but chunks of chicken, as best as I can tell. It might be like if you flash-froze a chicken by dipping it in liquid nitrogen, then shattered it with a ball-peen hammer, then cooked the pieces, then put it in rice with a bunch of Indian spices. So these chicken chunks have bone, cartilage, gristle, etc.
I had to have a lengthy discussion with several of my Indian colleagues at the lunch table as to how I was really fine, and not still hungry, and didn’t need to try other things.
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