Oh Canada!

So here’s a weird thing. I’m on Facebook and a number of classmates from high school have contacted me after searching for our high school. It seems as if all of them live in Western Canada and live lives that feature water, snow, horses or cattle, and nature. Always nature. Don runs an inn on Vancouver Island and gives lessons in white water kayaking (here is his website - stay in the yurt!); another teaches yoga in Vancouver; yet another has a ranch in Alberta. They lead lives that humble me, that I cannot imagine living myself because I would fail miserably, and because the hugeness of the nature would swallow me.

But the best is Charlie, who runs a ranch in Alberta. He says, “I run a business hauling water to oil rigs as well I run an animal health service for a 20,000 hd feedlot as well as training and buying & selling horses.” Okay, that’s a lot of information, so I had him translate for me. That’s 20,000 head of cattle he is talking about. On 160 acres of land. He goes on to say that it is his wife who hauls most of the water to the oil rigs: “We have a 2 ton dodge truck with a tank on it we only haul the potable water to the trailers that the rig workers live in while they are on the rig site.” I have a lot of respect for Charlie’s operation but could never imagine doing his job, or living  as remotely as he does.

One day not too long ago after a particularly long and hard week at work, when I came home on Friday evening with a head like cement, I called my sister. She and her family live in the town where most of these folks grew up. Her husband answered the phone. He was sitting in the upstairs sunroom in a rocking chair watching the ducks on the pond and enjoying the view of his rather expansive property. It was 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. He wasn’t sure what he would do for the rest of the day. (“You must at least be drinking a cup of tea!” I croaked). We had a long and lovely chat, which ended with him quoting Voltaire’s Candide: “Everyone has to tend their own garden.” And it seemed to me that if there is one thing these friends I have mentioned here in common, it is that they tend their gardens.

Germany’s Next Top Job

I had the right skill set to land my first job in Germany: I knew how to sew. In two languages. The job was advertised in the weekly national paper Die Zeit. The publishing company Verlag Aenne Burda in Offenburg was looking for a translator. I bought a new black skirt and sweater for the interview, studied my sewing terminology (“yoke” and “darts”) with the help of my PONS German-English dictionary, and took a train to Offenburg for my interview. I worked in a team of young women, one or two each from countries all over Europe: Italy, France, Sweden, and Holland. We were the “Auslandsredaktion” and were housed in an old building, separate from the company headquarters. We didn’t have any contact with the editors of the magazine, which, when I think about it, was crazy. We were an all-female team with a male supervisor who spoke no foreign languages and had no apparent editorial, fashion, or home-sewing skills. I’m just saying, he might have been a good manager despite these shortcomings. It was 1991. The team translated all the editorial copy for company’s portfolio of magazines including the monthly Burda Moden and quarterly and now defunct Burda International. When I worked there Burda Moden featured a homemaker’s mixture of home-sewing, fashion, food, and domestic pleasantries.  The centerpiece of the magazine always has been the built-in sewing patterns. Everything from Bavarian dirndls to First Communion dresses to golf skirts.  Just last month, the magazine was relaunched with a fresh new look and feel, and a new editor-in-chief. I even started buying it again! Check out their website.

It was the perfect job for me at that time.  I wanted to work for a known name. Wanted to enter the workforce quickly. After all, it was only a year after I had settled in Heidelberg and my German was not very good at the time.

Later I would commute from Heidelberg to Offenburg, a train trip of some 90 minutes one way. As soon as my Probezeit was up, I asked what other opportunities there were in the company for someone like myself. Unfortunately there were none, I was told. Fortunately, I was soon pregnant with my first child.

When I tried to get a job at SAP two years later – they too were advertising for native speaking translators – I couldn’t convince them that the skills I had acquired would serve me well as a technical translator. That was my first missed attempt at getting hired at SAP. Another would follow before they finally took me.

Home Economics

I was listening to SWR2 on a Sunday morning recently and was delighted to discover that their subject was one that the media often ignores but which i adore: sewing. It is one outcome of the economic crisis: consumers are tired of same old same old Kleenex clothes that are disposed of after a couple of washings.  In the U.K. sales of sewing machine are up. In Germany homesewing courses are booked solid and at the ethnic markets in Berlin people are snapping up fabrics for 50 cents a meter.

My mother would smile. No, laugh. Even when she travels, she is never without needle and thread. She spent the month of March in Victoria, British Columbia and before she left she told me that she had packed a large board to use as a work surface for her quilting projects (“I just lay it on the luggage rack.”)  My mother was always economical. She made diapers for her many babies from the cotton sacks in which 50 pound bags of flour were delivered. We wore “Pure Canadian Wheat”  on our bottoms. She also made most of our outer clothing as well. Some of the best items that I remember were the birdcage bathing suit that she made for me and the “paper” dresses that she made for my younger sister and me. Not Kleenex dresses, these were made from a brightly printed papery cotton. We didn’t go to pre-school or kindergarten or daycare – we were homeschooled in making dolls clothes.  

Mom sewed on a heavy, but rather dainty black Singer sewing machine that she got when she married in 1945. My sisters and I all learned to sew by hand, and then on this machine. I had it with me at university in Montréal, by which time Mom had bought a new one for herself. I sewed long, narrow, six panel skirts from a Vogue pattern, one in black velvet with pin prick dots, godets flaring at the hem. Or another in fine Italian wool with kick pleats. My favorite fabric store was a tiny boutique called Au Long Metrage in Outremont. But sometimes my girlfriend Robin, another sewing fanatic, and I would enter the bargain basement of Fabricland in search of two-for-one offers on patterns.

My sister and I spent entire summers competing for the use of the Singer, she whipping up Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, or stuffed toys. She once even cut up a vintage beaver skin coat to make a jacket. We made pinafore tops, wrap skirts, and apron dresses. It was the 70’s. The nearest fabric store was in the next village, 11 miles away. Sometimes we biked the distance just to buy fabric for new skirts or dresses with our babysitting money.

When my sisters and I graduated from university, we each received not a car or a trip to Europe, but a sewing machine. Actually, not quite. I got a loan to travel to China where a teaching job awaited me. I bought my first sewing machine there, a treadle machine. That was all that Beijing’s finest markets had in the late 1980’s. I laid out and cut my Chinese silks on the long tables in the reading room of the university library after hours. And when we came to Germany, I got the machine I have now – a Pfaff brand. It was important to me then that my new machine have a buttonhole function. Until then, I had been making them by hand.

When it came time to learn German, I found easy ways – by reading sewing instructions. But that is a topic for the next post!

Not a Family Feud

My sister M. writes to say that she wants to read more personal stories in this blog. About the family. I gather she was bored by my last post and wants to hear more about us. And my eldest brother suggests that I blog on the fact that ours was an unusual family because we never fought. A friend of his, also a member of a big family, says that harmonious, non-fighting families are “really weird”. In her family, fights were the norm.

So we were weird. We did not have arguments or fist fights or brawls. At university I had a feminist friend whose rhetorical skills she had honed at her family’s dinner table, where political debate was the evening fare. We never had any of that. My father’s opinions and beliefs and proclivities ruled. We voted Liberal but were conservative in our values, attended separate schools, participated in community life, volunteered, were PTA and hospital board and church council presidents, went to church every Sunday morning, and (almost) never got into trouble with the law. There was never any alcohol in our house, which might have played a role. My mother still buys a single bottle of wine for a Christmas dinner. For 14 adults. Instead, we showed our aggression in small, mean ways. By turning the cold shoulder. By tugging the blanket off my sister on a cold night in a double bed.

This was the kind of household where bathroom reading included Dominic Savio, Teenage Saint and Jude the Obscure. My father subscribed to The Catholic Register and Writer’s Digest. It was because Dad dominated the dinner conversation that we didn’t have much to say. We were not encouraged to challenge his viewpoints. “Crazy notion,” was one of his favorite expressions. “Keep a Christian tongue in your head,” he would say if we spoke meanly about others. I want to say that he did not hold forth with monologues or lectures, but maybe my memory is unclear. What I do remember was how he tested what we were learning at school by conducting impromptu Latin and vocabulary quizzes.

Mom ran the household like a military camp. With 12 children, there was no other way. She did not countenance any backtalk. So essentially we were disciplined and were taught respect. Does that explain our non-confrontational attitudes? Do disciplined families bottle up their anger, rather than taking it out on each other? I am curious to hear responses from my siblings.

Photographers I Know, Love, and Recommend

I was delighted to see David Braun comment on my last post, which sparked a discussion between us about the use of visuals in our newly relaunched employee magazine at SAP. David is a photographer based in Las Vegas who has worked frequently for SAP, tirelessly capturing events like the annual customer event (SAPPHIRE), often held in David’s hometown. He also shot the cover photo for the second issue of our relaunched mag, which features an American colleague. (We aspire to portray employees from all over the world; our next covergirl is from Argentina).

When I first began working on the SAP employee magazine four years ago, we had one photographer whom we called whenever we needed photos to illustrate a story or an interview. He always asked, “What do you want, a portrait?” At that point, I honestly didn’t know what the choices were. He cultivated a war correpondent look, military style vest with lots of pockets, and his heavy equipment over his shoulder. But gradually we phased out his involvement. The art director at our agency grumbled that he submitted a DVD with 200 washed out shots, including all the ones that were out of focus, or where people had their eyes closed.  And I had calls from executive assistants and secretaries, gently indicating that his behavior was not always top drawer.

So we cast our net a little wider. We knew we needed better photographs, fewer headshots, and more dramaturgy to the layout. “More drama, baby,” as a local American TV celebrity says. We cast our net as far as Bangalore and Beijing, and discovered a number of wonderful photographers, all of whom I can highly recommend. To be fair, I only want to recommend one per region, or one in the regions where we most often need a photo shoot. Here is my final cut:

David Braun has covers the Las Vegas – Bay Area for us. SAP has a development lab in Palo Alto, and David has done a lot of work for us there. He is very professional, delivers on time, even under hectic circumstances, and best of all – has a great sense of humor!

 Carina Kircher, is based in the Heidelberg area and covers a lot of the local work we have – executive interviews, team pictures etc. She took the photo in my previous post of our relaunch cover. Her first assignment for SAP World was to cover the company football (soccer) tournament. I was delighted with the results. 

 Finally, while in India, I had the pleasure of working closely with Mallik of ideogram, whose business in Bangalore caters primarily to customers who want visuals for advertising campaigns. Mallik has a fine arts background that informs his work with a refined aesthetic. The quality of his work was exceptional. Look for his corporate work – including shots of SAP folks – on his website.

In advertising and publishing, the mantra is that design follow copy. Copy comes first. I would love to hear the thoughts of others on this age-old, thorny topic.

Relaunched: A New Employee Magazine

Last year began as an exciting year for us folks in the Corporate Publishing team at SAP. Our goal: to relaunch our media, including the employee magazine that I am responsible for, SAP World. I had spoken to a number of  independent consultants and solicited their opinions of SAP World and one remark stuck like a burr. The magazine was Teutonic and square, said that expert. SAP World was full of amateur photos and head shots. The features and interviews were long and turgid. 

But there was much that we did well and that we wanted to retain: profiles of people who work at SAP and have had interesting careers, executive interviews, features on software strategies, new products, work-life balance. We had even done a series of country specials on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), allowing two or even three editors (including myself) to travel from Bangalore to Beijing to witness firsthand SAP’s investment and involvement in the emerging markets.

Yet we were after better storytelling, better visuals, more digestible content. We identified agencies with credentials in the corporate publishing business, prepared a detailed brief, and opened the field to the pitch. The battle began. Our incumbent agency was among the companies invited to take part in the pitch, an agency that SAP had had on contract for its customer and employee magazines for 10 years. We saw brilliant work from these agencies, concepts for print publications and online platforms. In the end, our decision was based as much on these concepts as it was on a gut feeling, a feeling that we could imagine spending long periods of time with the agency’s team and could develop not only brilliant publications, but enjoy a close working relationship. We chose a small, Munich-based agency with a strong background in advertising, which almost spoiled their chances for some of the corporate publishing purists on the selection committee. Even their name is original: grasundsterne is a compound formed by joining syllables taken from the founders’ surnames. They gave me something I always wanted for SAP World: a cover concept that puts an individual SAP employee (or two or three) front and center. We had tried this before (see our India edition below) but their cover idea is repeatable, and never looks anything but simple, fresh, and startling. It captures the SAP demographic and expresses what we wanted the magazine to stand for: a youngish culture, techy but trendy.  This was our first cover after the relaunch:

 

 

 

This is SAP World before it got a makeover.  Our photographer in Bangalore captured the spirit of this young lady, a quality manager in the Enterprise Resource Planning team who also happens to sing classical Indian music in her spare time. I loved her on the cover, but when I see the old against the new, I can’t help but being mighty proud of our new magazine.