My life

Valencia, Spain

I arrived to Valencia, Spain, in the middle of July 2000 and it was HOT. The factory closes in August, which suited me fine because I wanted to study Spanish as much as possible. I registered at the language institute Mangold to take individual classes I got Luis Garralda as teacher. He could speak English, but refused to communicate in any other language than Spanish. He made med go through a tough time, and I was prepared to give up on several occasions. But, I kept studying and to my surprise, I managed to sort out things.

A collage of pictures taken by me in Valencia

Only a few weeks after the vacation my laptop got stolen. As usual I had left it on my desk and during the night the police received a phone call from a neighbour claiming there was a suspicious person sneaking around. This was a very likely reason to call, since the factory was running the night shift, and soon the night guard was suspected. This was never proved, and it the stolen goods ever could be sold, then there is a poor person in Valencia having a laptop with a Swedish keyboard layout.

I had brought the motorcycle to Spain. In the beginning I used to drive around a lot and also got lost frequently, but that way I learned to find my way around. The traffic in Spain is much tougher than in Sweden, and soon I wished that I had a car. That wish came true when I learned that the car of the company nurse was for sale. This was a Fiat Cinquecento which I lived with for some year before I changed for some hundred horsepower more of the Peugeot 206 GTI.

I have a very nice apartment with a big terrace in a suburb to Valencia. It is very close to the nature and you really have to make up good excuses not to get out running or taking a ride on the bike. When I arrived to Valencia I still had to do the Lidingöloppet in the Swedish Classic, and one day in October I sat down in the plane home to be the best man of my brother at his wedding on the Saturday and get into a rental car at 5.00 in the morning the day after to get up to Stockholm and the competition. I survived and this will be a memory for life.

In the spare time I continued dedicating myself to the Internet and in spring 2001 I contracted an account on a web hotel with PHP and mySql, and shortly after I started the site Supertortuga. The site had a slow first year, but then I bought a new computer and installed Linux on the old one to use it as a web server.

On the job front there was a lot of administrative work. Among other things I collected production data from all the match factories and compiled it. There were also a lot of financial reports. During 2002 I participated in a number of projects and my air travel accelerated. I went to the USA a couple of times, to out mechanical workshop in Shanghai and then of course to our production units in Europe. By mid 1003 I have made 300.000 km in airplanes and I could without any doubt say that I was tired of travelling, and just seeing airports, offices and hotel rooms.

During my stay in Valencia I started building up the Intranet of the match division, MD.net. The intranet was a central resource for common information for the factories, the sales companies and the division management. I implemented a number of different applications, all connected to the SQL server. The intranet grew rapidly, both in terms of size and usage and by mid July 2003 there were some 60 users from eight countries connected via the company's WAN (Wide Area Network).

I was at this stage also quite involved in the machine producer of the match division, Arenco. In the middle of 2002 it was determined that Arenco should have a website. Considering my experience from the development of MD.net I got the technical responsibility. Due to that the people working at Arenco were very occupied with projects, the design of the contents took longer than expected and the site was not rolled out until the spring of 2003 (at www.arenco.com.

In the middle of 2003 I started to feel old. I had my 30th birthday and discovered that it was actually possible to keep living more ore less like before even after this magical limit. I was happy with life in Valencia, and when the company offered me another job back in Sweden, I turned it down with the explanation that I would like to stay in Spain for some more time. Shortly after I got the message that my contract in Spain would not be prolonged when it ran out, which meant that after 7 years within Swedish Match, my last working day would be the 31st of January 2004 and that I would have to start looking for another job.

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