My routine is just starting to feel like a routine, and I have exactly one week left here. I’m starting to stress about the little things I want to do before I leave. One is that I need to find some nice gifts for people here who have been key to me getting situated – in particular, my flatmate, Florian, and the crew at Feedback Fruits who offered me a desk in their office and a seat at their picnic lunch every day and asked for nothing in return other than the occasional bit of advice on structuring their team. Another is that I need to sell the commuter bike and the road bike that I bought here. Before I sell them though, I need to make some repairs that involve replacement parts. I am living in the future, as I often do, and I am starting to miss this routine and the people in it already, so now is the perfect time to write about it with nostalgia.

Volunteer Work

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I volunteer at this non-profit called Stunt. I have been developing a product for them all-along – it’s an iPhone charging dock carved out of wood. I had seen them made out of driftwood, and I blatantly stole the idea from examples I had seen at craft fairs in Providence. It’s Robin Hood stealing though since I am donating it to a cause. I think they are usually made using vertical milling machines. However, this wood shop has no such machines, and the product has been turning out differently since it requires more flat surfaces. It will be out of a slice of wood cut like a piece of pizza.

Hein, the director, makes a point to keep tabs on everyone, so he can usually be found bouncing all over the place checking in with people. Otherwise, he may be at an outdoor market selling the goods made in the shops. Despite the fact that he is usually rushed, he has a way of being very present and not making it seem as though he is rushed when he talks with you.

Tom runs the bike shop. I usually see him speedwalking through the hallways while greeting passers-by with a grin, and I rarely see him standing still.

The wood shop constantly has Star Radio playing cheesy American pop music. I have some of it stuck in my head. I don’t think there have been any new songs introduced during my tenure, so I have become quite familiar with “Dancing With Another Man”, “Tonight, Tonight (party on the rooftop, top of the world)” and other terrible hits. Rene interjects a sarcastic falsetto at key moments. One time the station played a Dutch song, and Rene asked me to sing along. Ed, the unemployed architectural draftsman, has been working on a miniature Greek temple that contains a jewelry box in the center.

I don’t remember the name of this guy in the blue shirt (which may be the only shirt I’ve seen him in), but I talk to him almost every day – he is a program participant, and he has to work some hours in order to receive his social security money. He used to work in a toy store, and he hates kids. I learned both of these tidbits when a school group of approximately 7-year-old kids came on a field trip and he had to do a project with some of them. He constantly complains about having to be at the place in a quite humorous way. Also, when I am concentrating on a measurement, he will walk by and yell “wrong!”.

Every hour on the hour, there is a coffee / tea / cigarette break in which everyone participates. Someone comes through to announce that it’s break time. Sometimes I will refuse in order to get more work done. But it’s an interesting approach which reminds me somewhat of the Pomodoro technique.

A cast of characters run the kitchen and serve lunch every day at 12:00. Said cast of characeters includes but is not limited to: a rather extroverted woman with a bellowing voice (which stands out since many of the others are fairly reserved), a tall and skinny woman with straight blond hair and lipstick that is the same value as her skin tone, a couple of thuggish-looking but very friendly dudes: one with calligraphic tattoos on his arm, and another with meter-long dreadlocks that he has to contain inside a sheet of some sort that looks like a windsock. Lunch costs 1 Euro. On Fridays, sometimes there is a variety of dishes (perhaps they’re trying to use up all the ingredients before the weekend), but otherwise there is only one dish. Usually it contains superfluous meat (superfluous as in pieces of hot dogs in beet salad), so I often don’t partake in it. Someone informed me that the meat was halal in the hopes that such knowledge would relieve my concerns. Once we had cherry tomatoes that were from Ed’s garden in a delicious pasta dish.

At lunch, there are no cliques. People from various corners of the organization intermix, and there is much talking and laughing across tables. The tables were built in the wood shop. There are amateurish paintings on the wall of people eating messily and getting much food on their faces. Said paintings are framed with plastic utensils.

The Office

My borrowed office is in a startup accelerator called YES!Delft. Their logo features a guy who looks as though he is jumping off of a building. This reminds me of a startup called Jump Off Campus. I think they were Betaspring participants. Anyhow, YES!Delft is the swankiest startup accelerator I have ever seen. It reminds me quite a bit of Entertainment 720.

There’s a foosball table, and a foosball tournament which was supposed to be happening. I asked around to see if I could find someone with which to form a team. No one at Feedback Fruits wanted to do it, and the three random people I asked all said no. Anyhow, I showed up to the foosball table on what was supposed to be the day of the first game, and I asked the people there who was organizing the tournament. They said there was no central government. I’m not sure if it ever happened.

YES!Delft is located in a mostly empty field at the southern edge of Delft. They are closely associated with TU Delft, and they’re close to the campus. Anyhow, there is literally nothing around aside from a few other office buildings and an empty field, so rather than going to nearby restaurants (of which there are none), all of the teams have picnic lunches every day. This is sometimes my second lunch and sometimes my first lunch, depending on whether the meal at Stunt that day contains meat. The food usually consists of sandwiches with cheese (and some folks add ham, but mostly cheese) and avocado being the main ingredients. Sometimes they make the sandwiches into “tostis” which is basically grilled cheese. They’re also quite fond of “raisin spheres” (round raisin buns) and hagel slag, which is basically sprinkles or nonpareils (usually chocolate, but sometimes licorice). I found that some of the team thought that I probably had no idea what licorice was, so they were struggling to explain it to me. Clearing the table is very much a group effort. The team stacks all the plates, collects the garbage in a bag, places the food back I’m the milk crate, and someone returns the milk crate to the office while a few people take care of the dishes.

There is a full semi-industrial kitchen with a steam dishwasher that uses no soap. The “clean” dishes and silverware often contain a fair amount of chunks because people often don’t rinse off their dishes before loading them in. There’s a good system in place in theory. Take the plastic crate out of the dishwasher, unload the plastic crate full of dishes and put the clean ones on the shelf, rinse and place your dirty dishes in the next plastic crate full of dirty dishes, if that crate is full, then start the dishwasher.

Only a couple of people in Feedback Fruits have assigned seats – the rest float around to whatever desk is available. There’s a sound that a computer plays when they gain a customer and another for when they lose a customer. Everyone is very serious about the British tea custom in which when one gets a cup of tea or coffee – that means getting a round for the entire office. They tend to work late into the evening (some of the employees are students, and they start in the afternoon). At the end of the day, everyone gives a round of high-fives to everyone else in the office.