“If you’d like to get out of the aircraft quickly, and we’re not around to help you, grab this red handle on the door and pull it up.” Our friendly pilot (from what I later dubbed Decadence Airlines) just gave us his friendly security instructions at take-off from Dublin airport, on the way to Bromma in Stockholm. Dave Douglas, Julie Ross and myself are heading on the first leg of our trip to meet MySQL personnel across Europe.

I’ve been frequently teased about using “Sun’s Corporate Jet”. Flying around on that one is certainly perceived as glamorous, and perhaps not compatible with the humble roots of MySQL. Well, glamorous or not, here we are, three people, three empty seats and two pilots up in the sky. However, it’s not exactly “Sun’s” jet. It’s Netjets, more like a taxi than a company car. We’re going to have a different pilot tomorrow, and a different plane. That said, I do enjoy it and I took my favourite gadget, my 8mm fisheye lens, with me to commemorate the moment.

The purpose of the trip is quite a bit closer to the humble roots of MySQL, though. As opposed to asking everyone to come to one place to listen to centrally dispersed top-down communication, our ambition is to go where the MySQLers are, and listen to what their questions, concerns and joys are. The on-boarding process is just getting underway, and we were addressing questions related to terms and conditions of employment, how territories change, or how to interface with the Sun Visors (the existing Sun employees who can give all the inside tips on whom at Sun to get introduced to, which intranet URLs to visit, and which mailing lists to subscribe to).

And, as before, Sun’s attitude is respectful, positive, helpful. It’s about “we’ll make it work”, without at the same time extending promises that cannot be held later on.

So, now on from the Inside Sales teams of Dublin to the very heterogeneous group of MySQLers from the mother county of Sweden!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 17:21 and is filed under MySQL, Sun, Sun visits, Virtual company. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.