Americans are in the minority where I work, so it’s kind of amusing that the guys who arranged the viewing area are Americans. It’s very casual, just someone streaming the broadcast and projecting it on a big whiteboard in one of the designated gathering rooms. Everyone who’s interested wanders over with their laptops and phones and works/watches the match. Someone brought cookies and snacks the other day too.
After the first USA match there was a group of football hooligans triumphantly marching through the building chanting USA! USA! USA! which I may or may not have been a part of.
Among regular staff hardly any effect. Among the male international student workers, it creates the usual problems. We have a much higher number of stomach flu, migraine headaches, etc., at World Cup time.
Today’s (US) match was conveniently scheduled to occur around lunchtime, so we had pretty good crowds watching it around the workplace TV’s. (The TV’s are normally tuned to a financial channel, but not during the Cup.) Best news for soccer fans, the highest interest seemed to be among the kids in their 20’s.
Maxing out bandwidth!
I was trying to watch a short video on another site during lunch & it was like watching on an old dial-up; starting, stopping, & stuttering along.
A good chunk of my group went out for lunch today to watch the USA-GER match. Ate and watched for two hours. Good fun. Come to think of it, I was only 1 of 2 Americans out of the 9 of us. Mostly Chinese for the rest, with a Scot and an Indonesian (I think) to boot.
I’ve noticed that on days when Mexico plays, my office is awfully quiet. I work with a lot of Mexican-Americans. Also, my dad has a business in a heavily Latino neighborhood, so he had a bit of trouble getting home on Monday because of the Mexicans crowding the streets celebrating the win against Croatia. I don’t know how many people skipped work today to watch the US-Germany match, since I called in sick - I actually did have a migraine and never even turned on the TV.
The place I work is a small subsidiary of one of the sponsors of the games (you’ve seen our parent company’s logo plastered all over the walls of the fields) and we have a bunch of international employees.
We are all welcome to watch as often and and vocally as we want to, and at our desks or elsewhere, so long as work is getting done. Today the humongous monitor in the main meeting area was streaming US vs Germany, an email was sent around inviting all who wished to to come on by, and at the start of the game about half the company was gathered around watching and doing some token work on laptops.
I got a call yesterday from my boss. He wanted me to check the wan link because he was seeing performence issues. To do so I would have to allow some monitoring tools access into our ASA (Cisco firewall). So I started building the access list ,etc so I can wireshark it to figure out what was going on.
Aboutt twenty minutes later the C.I.O . told everyone that, if they had to watch the game, to do so in the break room. Suddenly everything started running fine again .
I didn’t even think about the games. Should have, but didn’t.
