Published on 12, July, 2020
This a thread for a people who are still awake at night and feeling lonely. You can chat here.
Hello Former Member, I would love to hear about your interest in Argentianan history - I'm based in Brazil myself but spent some time in Buenos Aires with work in the past - it is an interesting place.
Brazil must be an interesting place to live.
Yes Argentinian history is fascinating. Im particularly into the period of Juan and Eva Peron. Evita was a remarkable person
I covered all of Latim America for the bank - mostly Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Buenos Aires but had occasional trips to New York, Bogota and Santiago where there were a few staff.
I covered all the IT needs back then - mostly pre-internet when all intersite connections were dial up so painfully slow.
More than once I had an emergency happen in Mexico City and had to hop on an overnight flight (12 hours) to get stuck into the issue the next morning - not much chance of sleep as it was a turbulent route.
I did get paid a ridiculous amount of money to do this and worked to upgrade all sites to be remote supportable over the course of a year. It was a fun time - Russias debt default in 1999 caused my salary to double overnight in local terms. Not that I had much I wanted to buy there at the time - everything was on an expense account.
Wow that must have been some experience.
Is that Brazil or Argentina your talking about?
I was there in the late 90's so quite a different time, but during the default of their currency it was quite a turbulent time.
I worked for a Swiss bank at the time and the number of people they had coming into the private banking offices to talk about shady stuff was amazing - I was setting up some of their IT and security systems so often got to overhear what was being talked about - who had suitcases of US$ to deposit etc.
I remember being called in by the bank and told not to co-operate with the police if we were raided - that was my cue to leave as I had a good idea what latin American jails are like.