Back To Work (In Helsinki)

travel 2 Minutes

Resuming my work at Valo coworking space didn’t go smoothly. The app kept saying there were no rooms with extra displays available, and even a room without an extra display was not available until 9 a.m. I made a reservation, but the room number didn’t show up in the morning, so I decided to go to Valo and figure out everything while I was onsite.

I arrived five minutes before 7 AM, and nobody at reception could tell me why the rooms with displays were unavailable. I knew I couldn’t officially claim my room until nine, but I also knew it should have been assigned by that moment. The next thing I realized was that since the room was not assigned, my magic button did not work for anything, so I couldn’t go to the gym or close the locker. The morning reception shift came, but they still couldn’t tell me what was going on “until Jarkko comes.” I knew from the last time that Jarkko could fix anything in the system, but he is not a morning person, so I couldn’t expect him to be around at 7:15.

Suddenly, a room with an extra display popped up as available on the app, and I grabbed it, but nobody at reception could help me to cancel the previous reservation: “You need to wait for Jarkko!” But at least I had a room, and my button started to work, so I hurried up to drop my things, change, and go to the gym.

One more change since last time was that the breakfast price went up; however, it remained the same for the tenants, so I could still enjoy “all-you-can-eat” for 10 euros. Also, it turned out that they had several conferences going on, so many rooms were converted back to hotel rooms, and all the staff was busy servicing the conferences.

On my third trip upstairs, I finally found Jarkko at his desk, and everything started magically working: my canceled reservation was credited back to my account, I was able to book the rooms with an extra monitor for the remainder of the week (“Try now, I added five rooms!”)

I remembered how to make the magic button work on the elevators and realized I could pour cappuccino into a ceramic cup and take it back to my room. I found a fruit bowl in the cafeteria and grabbed a couple of pieces for later. Life is beautiful again 🙂

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Published by Hettie D.

My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996. I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future. I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life. As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.

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2 thoughts on “Back To Work (In Helsinki)”

    1. I think co-working spaces changed significantly since two years ago – in every part of the world. I started using thi one in Helsinki in October, because I need an isolated office, and that’s the best value for the price I could imagine. I posted tons of pictures back in October, and now I just expect everything to work like a charm, and find myself upset when something doesn’t exacly go right.

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