I will briefly explain how the system works for those who are unfamiliar with it. EU competitions are usually structured in two phases. The first consist of 4 tests: verbal, numerical, abstract reasoning and situational judgement.

Even EPSO says that “candidates are also reminded of the fact that admission tests are no longer knowledge based – but rather competency-based tests. Therefore, extensive preparation time is not necessary”. It does not mean that you don’t have to prepare the tests at all… but it does recognize that even if you live for the competition, the pass for the second phase is not at all guaranteed. In my case, I hope that extensive “divine support” will work better; my mother and aunt worked very hard to get it!

The numbers give by themselves an overview of the “lottery” touch of the competition. In the one I just took we were almost 30.000 candidates; the best 315 will make it to the second round to fight for 105 positions.

On my arrival at the test centre I could only remember the discouraging figures. The place was packed, it was too hot in the room and finding a place in the waiting room was already a first success. There was a queue to leave your things in the locker, a queue to register at the reception, a queue for the toilet. A few familiar faces, some friends, and many complete strangers. If we listen to probabilities, someone here will pass. Why not me? It is like getting a free trip for you and all your friends… and I got it twice, so why not the competition, too?

To be continued (I hope).

I remembered the technical discussions about mac users not being able to watch some debates, while struggling to see some of the commissioners hearings from my own mac. You do get much more passionate about a problem when you encounter it “face to face” than when you think of it in a meeting room, believe me!

I also had the strange experience of meeting “my baby” after it was already born and kicking. I am talking about the hearings website, a project in which I had long been working together with Florent. I had to leave it days before the birth and I only saw the final result when it was already online, and it looked great. Wow. 

Florent doing such a huge work alone and informing me about “our project” (another wow to him) brings me to something I am also looking at with my new eyes: my colleagues. I have always appreciated the team, I am not referring to that. But my first day in the office consisted on a planned 2 hours meeting that was finally prolonged for almost 60 more minutes. Why? Because the team being so enthusiastic. Nothing new, but the amount of questions and ideas caught my just-arrived attention. Passionate discussions during a work meeting, isn’t it unusual? It was interesting to follow them almost as an outsider!

I could go on and on, but let me just use the blog this time to thank the web team again; it is such a challenge and a privilege to work with people like you. If you, reading now this post, are not part of the team … I would like to know how you see us from the outside.

Thinking about this coincidence I remembered that a few months ago I also had an unexpected meeting: a girl with whom I used to play basketball in Madrid when I was 12, or maybe 13, at the swimming pool of my gym in Brussels. I have more and more the feeling that this is a small world.

A friend knows a friend…

It's a small world... (photo from Flickr by kosmonautica)

It is true that Brussels is a kind of a melting pot that reunites many different people from many different profiles; but even taking that into account I still think that if I could know where all the people I have met in my life are, I would have some surprises. Maybe one of them got married with someone I met in a totally different circle, or another one is working in the most original place in the world… who knows!

That brings me to the title of this post, which fortunately does not refer to the temperature now in Brussels, but to a theory, the six degrees of separation. I am sure most of you know what I am talking about: that every single person in the world is separated from, and connected to, everyone else by just six others.

This idea constitutes the core principle of one of our initiatives for the elections campaign: the YaBs, Yellow and Blue want-to-be secret agents that have already infliltrated the 27 member States searching for one particular celebrity each of them. This blog has already talked about them: departing from Brussels, with 27 different missions, they have to be given from one person to another until they reach their objective. I am sure many of them will succeed in their mission with the power ful weapon of  “a friend knows a friend that knows a friend…”

Making the theory a bit more complicated, that would also somehow connect Audrey Tatoo and Iker Casillas, as both of them will receive an agent that departed from Brussels on the 9th of May. And that would also connect me, and all my colleagues, to them, as we saw how the agents were born; in a way they are our little creatures.

Many of them will (I hope) reach their destination after meeting some other European citizens on the way, to whom we would also be connected, as well as Casillas and Tatoo and all the other celebrities YaBs are looking for… this is starting to be a bit complicated!

In any case, the success of the YaBs’ missions would be a nice way of proving that the degree of proximity between so many different people is really amazing. So I propose a change in the name of the theory… six degrees of separation?? Better say six degrees of proximity!

The latter happened to me last week. In an interesting coffee break with some hard working colleagues who are totally devoted to the communication campaign, I learnt that in some countries, like Spain, the chicken of the installation is bilingual. It means that its messages are delivered not only in Spanish, but also in Catalan, Basque and Galician.  

Maybe this ability with languages is one of the reasons why this motive has become one of the most popular among the citizens. Even if cat lover Thibault thought everyone would fall in love with the cat and the lion, the truth is that the “beauty queen” of the campaign is the chicken. By popular request. One of them even got a love letter in the form of graffiti: “Je t’aime, poulet” (I love you, chicken). A public love declaration many women and men would dream of. Well, the chicken got it in just a week: it was love at first sight.  

In other cities passion towards the giant chicken has reached a point I could have never imagined. Like a pop idol, one of them was “assaulted” by fans that took away the labels dressing it. As the campaign invites voters to do, someone in Madrid made a choice: they wanted a naked chicken.

The naked chicken in Madrid (photo from the EP Flickr account)

Some said it was vandalism (“the chicken was vandalised in Madrid”). I prefer to understand it as another love declaration. A passionate one: you know what they say about Mediterranean people and Latin Lovers.

I must confess that at the beginning I could not understand why so much noise for a chicken. But now I have to admit that a giant chicken that travels all around the European Union, doing stripteases if the fans so require, and speaking so many languages (more than 25!) to get closer to the citizens, has a kind of a charm.

I must confess that I am a bit confused today. It was my birthday not long ago and the messages I got from my friends were quite contradictory: some of them saying that I am so young, others that I have already left my youth behind. If I try to think of it from a professional perspective it is difficult to decide who is right.

“To became children in the adult’s world”

When I arrived to the Web Communication service of the European Parliament I was one of the youngest members of the team, I could even say one of the youngest of the directorate general. But time is very intense and productive here: I have already seen many colleagues –friends- leave, new working methods be developed, new babies being born (real and technological ones, like this blog). I have been working here since year “1 b.S.”, that is, before Steve, our head of unit. I am a prehistoric member of the team, one could say. Only in three years!

And the same applies to the whole team; now it is not the beginning anymore, the proof of fire is approaching and elections are just around the corner. We are still young, but we are also veterans in what we are doing. Constantly evolving, constantly thinking of new products and ideas: videos, blogs, going into the 2.0… We have written so many stories that sometimes it gets difficult to remember them!

This is making me remember the famous Blade runner quote: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams … glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those … moments will be lost … in time, like tears … in rain. Time … to die.”

I am much more positive. I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. A video spread like wildfire off Brussels´ corners. I have watched a tapas become mousakka… grow under the clouds near the Luxembourg square. All those… were just small moments that will guide us to the European Elections… in rain. Time… to go on working!!!

Oh, no!! I am doing it! I am talking like a veteran! Let me do it a bit longer and take this nostalgic opportunuty to remember Christine, Gaëlle, Marie, Andrea, Anna, Karim…

Forgive me for this weird post… I suppose I am still getting used to my new age.

Photo: (CC)  andrewjstevens on Flickr.

So, let’s be cool, let’s put a virus in our life. It is the trend of the moment. You just need a good and powerful one, it will spread all around and reach people you never though it would. Don’t think I am crazy. Even if the favourite season for our not-so-dear friend Influenza just started, I am talking about a very different kind of virus. A non seasonal one: a marketing virus.

Viral marketing is the advertising El Dorado: viruses are cheap, they spread easily, they normally get to you through a trusted source. There is only a problem: how to create a virus? Some examples have been surprising even to the ‘parents’ of the creature. Others are well thought products. In any case, it is clear that the favourite environment for these viruses to spread is the internet, and we know a bit about it, so why not create a virus?

Some of the most creative members of the team have already come with some ideas, some attempts that have not been able to become stronger than the institutional vaccination. But WebComm creative laboratory never sleeps; sooner or later we will manage to break the barrier. Until we do so, you can start tasting watching our Christmas greetings video “Friday I’m in love” that ended up being an unexpected Brussels virus.

But there are people that mean something to us personally, that can touch us with their story and whom we really want to take the opportunity of talking to: it can be now or never. I am sure each one of us has at least a name to say, someone they would really like to ask about an experience, an opinion, a fact. In my case one of those big names is Ingrid Betancourt.

Even before she was freed, I found her story fascinating. Not knowing very much the details, she had “the essentials”: compromised, touching, brave, she had become a symbol. The Parliament had many times asked for her release, she had even been nominated for the Sakharov prize. And there is a poster in front of the door of my office asking for “libertad para todos”, freedom for all, with a photo of a much youger looking Ingrid.

When she was released, my journalistic instinct made me jump from the sofa and run to write the news. It was difficult to convince myself of the fact that the news rythm in the EP is a different one: I am not longer at a news agency! But that instinct made me stay awake until very late, when I finally saw her getting out of the helicopter. It was true, she was free.

The day after, the President of the Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, invited her to come to the Chamber. She was the “most wanted” guest of the moment, but I knew the European Parliament was different, it had a meaning to her, as she would explain months later during her speech in the plenary chamber in Brussels. So I though the opportunity was there, I could interview Ingrid Betancourt. But then she came to the Parliament for two days and… I just saw her from the distance.

We wanted to do an interview together with EuroparlTV, it seemed like the perfect plan, but I did not think of what finally happened: she refused to do any interview, after having already fixed an appointment, saying that she was very tired. My first thought was that I could not understand. She had said she was tired, but speaking for five minutes sitting comfortably on a sofa wouldn’t be that tiring, would it? I looked for all sorts of ways of convincing myself that I would get it in the end. Finally a red light turned on in my head: maybe I had idealised her, maybe I had built an image of her that did not match with the idea of her refusing to attend any interview. Just a press conference. I thought all that until I saw her speaking in front of the plenary in the most moving speech I had seen since I work here.

Now I know: it is not sitting or standing, it is not lights or flashes. She is mentally and emotionally tired. I wish I could have written that interview, but I wish even more that she will have the opportunity of resting. In the Chamber she said she will not, until the ones who are still in the jungle are freed… I hope we will all see it. Maybe then I will have my interview and I will tell her about this post.

1) I am the Spanish language editor!
-Yes, it is true, but I am not the only Spanish speaker…)

2) I am one the editors in charge of External Affairs (we divide the topics between the group, I share this topic and Development with my German and Swedish colleagues).

-Yes, it is true, maybe this interview would not fall under the category External Affairs… at least not only…

3) I combine the fact of being the Spanish editor with following External Affairs
- Ok, I am not the only Spanish  speaker covering External Affairs…

4) I asked fot it the first!!
-…

(to be continued)