ICIS Chemicals Confidential

Here we are again at the AFPM (aka NPRA) IPC conference in San Antonio, Texas. For more photos, click here for the AFPM interactive supplement: http://fmgstatic.ceros.com/icb/afpm/page/1

 

 

The Blog has selected a few photos from the official Picture Gallery on the EPCA website, taken at the EPCA Annual Conference in Budapest in October 2012.

Flying out of London Heathrow to any petchem industry event is like a works outing. It is the same 15 of us on the flight: ICIS, Shell, Noah's Ark, Gantrade, INEOS, Tecnon, Clarksons, IHS. Probably there are others I don't recognise.

The ICIS suite for EPCA is in the Sofitel, one of the main conference hotels, right next to the landmark Chain Bridge. From the plans, the suite looks spacious with a good view out over the Danube and up to Buda.

ICIS old Budapest hands have been regretting that we are not staying again at the Mafiosi-style hotel we used in 2010, with its bullet-proof glass, mirrored ceilings, helipad and "Pearl of the Danube" beauty pageant.

However, this time we have our own Hungarian member of staff on board, and are hopeful that this will lead to all sorts of benefits, as yet unknown.

Only 11 days to go, and the EPCA Annual Meeting 2012 looks like being easily as big as last year's event, with 2,486 delegates already signed up.

 

The official number, which the Blog has taken from the EPCA website today, will probably exceed the 2011 total of around 2,500.

 

The conference takes place in Budapest on 6-10 October, and the weather forecast for the second week of October is between 9 and 18 degrees C.

Term is starting for Mandarin evening classes and I had better dust off last year's work and see if any of it is still lodged in my long-term memory. Of the class of eight, only two of us decided to sit, and happily pass, the GCSE exam at the end of last term.

My two speeches on "My holiday in California" and "My favourite sports" (this latter a tissue of lies), which I rehearsed diligently for weeks and thought would be stuck in my brain till my dying day, are now but a distant memory. My insights into why Wayne Rooney is a top footballer are sadly lost to posterity.

Watching the table tennis team of the People's Republic of China at the London 2012 Olympics, the Blog's daughter asked if ping pong started in China. I'm not sure if it did, I told her, but I certainly said it did in my GCSE speech for the oral exam. It was a great eye-opener to learn from the teacher that, "it doesn't have to be true." It is so much easier to give a presentation if the facts don't have to be true.

Since I now have half a GCSE in Mandarin, I change my LinkedIn profile to "Mandarin - Limited Proficiency."

From time to time, my ICIS Asian colleagues ask how the Mandarin is coming along. I tell them about my holidays and they look at me blankly. I think it will be a long time till we can talk about petrochemical markets.

 

Messaging via Yahoo Messenger (YM) is such an established part of petrochemical life, particularly trading and reporting, that it is already old hat to be messaging with someone on a desktop, laptop or mobile phone. The Blog can still be impressed, however, by innovation on a theme, and it was definitely impressive to get a message the other day from a trader on a plane. The chat connection was as good as normal, and the conversation only came to a halt when the plane was coming in to land.

I don't think I'll be following suit any time soon. With the cost of onboard internet still quite steep, it would have to be a very important item of information, or I'd have to be very bored, to want to go online mid-flight.

I am on a transatlantic flight the day after the London 2012 Paralympics closing ceremony. I pass athletes from Brazil in the departures lounge, and a wheelchair athlete for Team USA is boarding my flight just ahead of me. It has been a wonderful summer of watching the Olympics and Paralympics, and no-one wants it to be over.

On the plane I am going to watch "The Hunger Games" which I have just read, and "Game of Thrones" which I can resist no longer because now it is not just my family but all my colleagues who are raving about it.

For the first time ever I am flying long haul with just carry-on luggage. It has demanded great discipline in the packing. This is not at all the usual ICIS way, which requires an extensive wardrobe and a variety of shoes, a heavy laptop plus accoutrements, for ICIS training a projector, and for conferences a batch of ICB magazines which otherwise might get stuck at customs and miss the conference.

 

Friendly or informative comments on the Blog have always been welcome, so it is a matter of some disappointment that the commenting function on the ICIS blogs has been switched off. It seems that the servers were being swamped with spam.

If you would like to post a comment on a posting, you can take the alternative route and do it via Twitter (@barbaraortner) or LinkedIn.

"You'll hate the commute," my ICIS suburban colleagues warned me when I told them I was moving to work in central London. My new office is on the corner of Trafalgar Square (site of today's Olympic Victory Parade), and it takes a fair bit longer to travel there each day.

And it's on public transport, so I will be catching colds and moaning about delays and the expense and over-crowding...

Still, one week in, and I'm enjoying the time on the train to read. I like the ten minute walk over the new Golden Jubilee Bridge in the early morning. The view from the bridge in the blazing sunshine every day in the last week has been uplifting and energising.

Once the winter comes, I will treat the morning journey as if it is a day's walking in the Highlands of Scotland: sensible shoes, waterproof clothing with a hood, gloves. Between entering my office building and getting in the shiny lift in the atrium, I will undergo a Cinderella-like transformation, emerging unrecognisable.

(Photo: view from the bridge, walking to work last week.)

It turns out that one of my colleagues is a trained flight attendant. She knows how to deliver a baby, deal with drunks and passengers with flight-phobia, as well as smile all day and put her hair up neatly.

I was on the same flight with her only once, when we flew into Berlin together for EPCA, and her luggage was lost somewhere between connecting flights. I was unaware of her relevant background then, or I'd have been watching her reactions more closely.

As I remember, she did not seem very concerned about attending a conference without her luggage. She borrowed a jacket and away she went.

Not like another conference attendee (let's call him D) who found himself at APIC in KL this year without luggage, and managed within three hours of landing to get out and buy himself a suit, two shirts, tie, shoes and full accessories - all later reclaimed on travel insurance.

(photo: Rex)