Thursday 10 April 2014

9 Till 5


It's the Jewish Pesach, or Passover holiday from tomorrow, so they had a little toast at HQ yesterday:

Our CEO makes a speech.



Our man in France, Gerard.


Our Russian contingent.

Darren, our man in Singapore.

I hear Roman Abramovich has booked an entire hotel in some Israeli resort for Passover. A tad ostentatious, if you ask me.

I find it perverse that Israel does the majority of its business with the parts of the world that have a working week of Monday to Friday, but keeps a Sunday to Thursday working week itself - the same as most of the Arab countries around it, with which it does hardly any business at all.

The standard working week here is 43 hours, but most (at least in my company) work far in excess of that. It's common for me to be getting emails from Israeli colleagues still behind their desks beyond 6pm UK time, which is 8pm Israeli time.

They do, however, have a disproportionally large number of religious holidays when the whole country just shuts down for a week or so - and that's despite only some 25% of Israelis actually being religious in any way, shape or form.

If you don't hear from me tomorrow (I'll probably be in a steam pigeon on the way back to Blighty), Shalom Shabbat.


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