/// A Venezuelan and a Frenchman

To inaugurate this blog I could follow the good old sailor tradition and slam a bottle of Champagne against our blog server, but if I want to preserve my job, I thought it would be safer to tell the story how I met Illitch.

It was July 2008 and I was interviewing at Ugam’s London office, doing my first shift as an interviewer. I am a born and raised Venezuelan and baseball is a passion that runs through our veins as strong as football through the veins of an Englishman.

I was wearing my team’s baseball cap while interviewing, it’s called the glorious “Leones del Caracas” (yes, oddly the headset was over the cap). A couple of hours into the shift I hear a french voice standing behind me saying, “so… Leones del Caracas?”. As I turn around I say “yes, who asks”. “Hi, my name is Illitch” he said.

This is more or less how the conversation went afterwards:

Illitch: Where from Venezuela?
Felix: I am from Caracas the capital city.
Illitch: Where from Caracas?

I answered very vaguely, “From the south east of the capital”, (I thought I didn’t have to go into much detail… It’s not that this guy could possibly know this little city in that South American Country).

Illitch: Where in the south east, Los Pomelos?
Felix: Actually yes!!!… how do you know “Los Pomelos”?

Los Pomelos is the name of the neighbourhood where I used to live, no other neighbourhood in Caracas has the same name, so it was pretty impressive that Ilitch nailed the name on his first guess…

Illitch: My wife is Venezuelan, and her family live in Los Pomelos…

What are the odds that this Venezuelan came to London to work in a company where the (back then)  supervisor was married to a girl that lived literally 3 blocks away from where I grew up and lived for 27 years… This is only comparable to interviewing twice the same dentist in a nationwide study in China without regional quotas…

A few years, and many, many phone interviews later, I am now Ugam’s London Research Center, Data Collection Manager and my fellow co-worker Illitch, a  London based Account Manager.

We will be in charge of this space and will be sharing with you our views and thoughts about the industry, trends, news, technology and more. Hope you stick around, we want to hear from you and engage with you. Maybe at some point, when I experience any bloggers archenemy, writer’s block, I’ll take the risk and share my delicious Paella recipe (pronounced pah- ay- yah) or maybe Illitch can share his awesome Beef Bourguignon? (I’ll leave this to him)

See you the next time.

PS: In case you thought the picture of the spinning top to open the post is pointless, it is taken from the movie inception. According to google, the definition of inception is: The establishment or starting point of something; the beginning.

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