Annual company summer party was held traditionally on the wednesday before midsummer.
Actually, this was a doubleheader party, as both Nokia and the brand-spanking new Nokia Siemens Networks had a joint shindig.
On account of the usual location being a humongous crater, the party had been moved – to Kaisaniemi, closer to downtown you cannot easily get a playing field for thousands and thousands of attendees, that’s for sure.
Yeah, the location. Not bad at all, featuring such components as non-level ground, grass and trees. Almost enough to shield the participants from the goings on on stage.
You see, this year’s occasion continued the cluelessly cruel selection of artists. And in 2007, the headliner was the finnish tango king emeritus: Jari Sillanpää. Who, thankfully, did play other stuff than his zillion-selling schlagers. Katri Ylander (runner-up in finnish idols some years ago) was missing in action, and replaced by Nina Autio, another artist who took the “I’ll sing harmless classics”-option out of a potentially hard situation.
But music has never been the main idea in these parties. And neither has the freely flowing beer, though this year’s crop did service as a useful social lubricant for the thousands of variably repressed engineers. Nope – it’s the meeting of friends – those whom work has tossed into other niches in the company, schoolmates, and just people with whom occasional encounters do not regularly turn into flaming agony. Lots of friends sighted, though a couple of conspicuous omissions happened.
Nachspiel took a turn for the weird – visited Lux not once, but twice. First shot was a “quick” in-n-out trick (using the word quick in the loosest and most inappropriate sense, since merely queuing in took almost half an hour), but on the second ended up in the private section, away from the hoi polloi, music pumped out too loud, glass shards on the floor and just plain the things why I purposefully avoid Sedu Koskinen’s oeuvre in general.