Don’t try and do any business in Amsterdam.

Lots of people enjoyed my email updates from our India when we went over for the weekend, so I thought I’d expand on that and do one for Holland. This weekend is the yearly IBC conference, where anyone who is anyone goes to. It’s the reason you have shit TV for a week, as all the people who make or run that TV you love are lying in a gutter somewhere in the red light district over here.

First a little bit of background. We have a mean team. They work very hard, and they play hard. You wouldn’t want to meet them over a negotiating table or down a dark alley. They are a wealthy and ruthless bunch that will tear you into bits and think nothing of it at all. I’m an utter bastard, but come off looking like a poodle in comparison to this lot. So it should come as no surprise that if you let them loose in the most liberal city in Europe, all hell will break loose. And it has.

Nothing says opportunity for chaos like a business trip to Amsterdam. For some reason the destination itself is a green light for open season on reasonable behaviour. In the last 24 hours, we’ve truly outdone ourselves. Last time it took days, this time it was a matter of hours. I somehow managed to escape and get back to my hotel this evening, albeit worse for wear. If they’d all had their way, I would be in canal boat somewhere, half-naked, baked off my tits and surrounded by women of ill repute. I should know better by now.

I touched down early Sunday evening and got a series of text messages from different people inviting me over for drinks, including a very beautiful married lady I work with quite often which was intriguing and very tempting. Naturally, I ignored all the flight crew’s instructions to turn off my Walkman so was already getting shit by the time I’d arrived in the country. Something just seemed astray, and I knew this year was going to be a good one.

I tend to avoid Amsterdam if I can. Underneath it all I’m actually pretty reserved and reticent, so a little culture is quite my style despite being such a philistine in most ways. Clubs, loud pubs and really hectic shitholes aren’t my thing and although I can get along in them, I prefer a more chilled and cosy environment with less people. Put me in a coffee bar, dinner party, jazz café, local pub or alfresco restaurant and I’m in my element. People are what are important to me, not the noise or place. Conversation, laughter and magical atmosphere are what make me sparkle and smile.

And the city is quite a dirty shitehole. Don’t come here looking for culture, as its full of drunken English football hooligans, drug dealers, weirdo European drug tourists and crazy fuckers who don’t appear to be speaking a discernable human language. So I stay up North in Alkmaar, which is a lot nicer. I have a 5* hotel at 2* prices, authentic Dutch town life and a peaceful environment that means I don’t have to suffer the madness of the main city and can commute in from easily in less than 30mins.

So the journey was easy and I checked into my hotel. The reception desk casually ended our conversation with “oh, and your guests have arrived”. Guests? What guests? Suddenly I was a little unsettled. I hadn’t organised any guests, and hardly anyone knew where I was staying. I put it to the back of my mind and assumed they had made a mistake. I popped my bags in the open glass elevator and slowly made my way up to my floor, looking forward to chilling for a few minutes and smoking a well-earned cigarette.

As I was walking to my room, I heard the sound of music and voices. As I got closer to my room, it got louder. The astute reading this will know what is coming next. Slowly it was dawning on me that the screaming and music was coming from my room. I was more than a little confused and stood outside for a few seconds to try and work out what the hell was going on.

Those seconds past, and I decided to bite the bullet and slide the card into the door slot, and just as I was doing it, the door opened to reveal a very beautiful blonde girl wearing just a long white t-shirt. Quite a movie moment, you could say.

“Hello. Who are you?” (huge smile)
“Err I’m Alex, and this is my room.”
“‘I’m Christina. This is the party room! So you are the Alex they talk about?”
“Yep. Hi Christina. When did it become the party room, and who is they?”
“We are having a party! We are going to party all night!”
“Right. What the fuck is going on in here?”

I walked in and put my bags in, and the full extent of the chaos came into view. There were 6 girls running around screaming and laughing, all with hardly any clothes on, all spilling drinks from the mini-bar everywhere. Beautiful girls. Incredibly beautiful. It was a man’s dream. A few of them were giggling and pointing at the bathroom. I was wondering exactly who was responsible and had a few ideas on likely suspects.

There was only one choice, and that was to look in the bathroom. God I wish I hadn’t now as what I saw can only be described as depraved. The CEO of a very well known networking brokerage we work with very closely was with 2 more girls, indulging in something I can only put as utterly perverse. I slid the door back closed, until he eventually made his way out a few minutes later, clearly trashed and dishevelled and with a huge grin on his face.

“Ah you made it then!”
“You could say that. I thought you lot were staying in the city?”
“Jon is, but we booked last minute and decided to stay with you.”
“So where is everyone else?”
“They’re all doing the phone-the-wife thing quickly, but we’ve ordered a taxi for half 9 to go into town. We’re going to get fucked up in a big way this evening.”
“Why didn’t I see this coming?”
“We have X grand to blow from a shareholder over-subscription, and we’re going to fucking blow it man.”
“Oh my fucking God.”

We only had a few minutes, so I frantically got my laptop running and logged on to MySpace to see if Emma had left me a message. She had. Huge smile. It’s funny how the smallest things can make the whole world seem brighter.

Thankfully, the people carrier / minibus taxi arrived quite quickly, and took the whole fucking lot of us to the Café Grande for a nice meal, which ended up with me playing “Hotel California” on a classical acoustic guitar for an entire alfresco diner audience of 30 or 40 drunk, tone-deaf Germans when the entertainer singer guy couldn’t quite master it for the obligatory singalong. You’ve couldn’t have written a better script if you tried.

Quote of the night was Jon’s, as usual. When we had got out of the taxi outside the restaurant, there were a load of drives touting for business:

“Taxi? You want taxi?”
“No we don’t want taxi. We just got out of one you useless tit.”

We got back to the hotel, and my room was the party room once again, as I had to talk to reception about my stay and didn’t have the time to have any say in whether I’d like it that way or not. There was no choice but to just get on with, despite the sheer onslaught of ridicule I got for switching on the PC to pick up emails (”We’re not here to fucking work Alex, get off that thing”, “We’ve got live porn right here, no need to look it up on the internet” etc).

Offline messages from Em. Kick ass. And there she was online and I just couldn’t help myself. She was the only person I wanted to speak to right then, and the whole madness just faded into the background. I’d only been away a few hours and I thought I’d speak to her in the week. But Em is not someone I can resist or be away from. The pull I feel to her is just too violent and intense. And she makes me laugh and makes me happy in a strange way. She’s everything I want really. She’s just so incredibly adorable that I can’t help wanting to crash into her at a million miles an hour all the time and tell her how fucking amazing I think she is.

All the fucking people in the room were beginning to drive me mad as all I wanted to do was talk to her. Every other guy probably would have been like a rabbit in the headlights, but I just wasn’t interested. Don’t get me wrong, I love my indulgences, but I’m a quiet guy and it’s not really my bag. It wasn’t fitting my mood. They got thrown out in the end so I could concentrate on my girl.

Its not really fair to go into what happened afterwards, other than to say I made a few trips next door to see what the hell was going on in my absence since I had to turn the TV and music up more than a few times to get away from the sound of the amor.

Somehow there were now twice the amount of people, including the female biz dev manager from a client of ours who was in the party spirit in a big way with one of our guys, horizontally. Suffice to say I won’t be looking at her in the same way again, as what the chaos descended into can’t be described in rational terms. Half orgy, half drunken brat-fest. I thought I’d seen it all up until that point, but I had to salute the sheer depravity and hedonism of it.

I didn’t get a whole load of sleep, as you can imagine, which didn’t help today.

I woke up, and there were people all over my room, including 2 on my bed. I have no idea how they got in there. All I knew was I somehow managed to get through it unscathed and with a clear conscience. It was time to get the conference centre and do something useful.

The coolest start to the day was a text from Em. That just kicked me into gear. Again, something so small, but so cool. I texted her back a million times but only realised too late that they weren’t getting through because the number I had stored didn’t include the UK dialling code.

It was then that fun really began.

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to top this year’s antics. We’re becoming legendary here, as everyone was talking about what happened in Alkmaar the night before, when a whole load of people went missing from their Amsterdam hotels for the night that their companies had paid for. I so desperately wanted to tell them, but that would have been one more PR disaster that our PR girls just don’t need right now as they have enough to deal with when it’s just me making the mess on my own.

1pm and our guys were drunk. Not just tipsy, but roaring drunk. And they brought girls to the conference. Yes, you read that correctly, they brought fucking girls to a business conference, steaming drunk. Un-fucking-believable.

“How did you get so drunk for fucks sake? The IBC pub isn’t even open yet.”
“Oh, MSA are sponsoring, so we said they could have an extra 2.5% of shares if they opened the doors for us a little early.”
“YOU FUCKING WHAT??????”

I walked off to calm down for a bit, and headed over the screen hall to dive into some technology to clear my head.

But it wasn’t to last. Paul had just got thrown out and banned from the conference centre for “vandalising” the stand of the company that make a model helicopter “Flying Cam”. The flying cam is a helicopter about 2 or 3 metres long that has a broadcast camera on the front of it that you can pilot remotely like a model to cover news events from the air. It’s a very cool thing.

Apparently dismayed that it wasn’t turned on and flying around, two of our guys walked round the back of the display, fired up the control system, nicked the remote control handset and somehow managed to get the blades swinging round at full speed. They were trying to get it to take off so they could pilot it around the arena.

Thankfully, it was strapped down, and by the time security had arrived, they’d managed to turn it off again and repair some of the damage. To give you an idea of the potential problem, each one of these things is worth $500k. But it didn’t stop there. More of our guys had heard about it and spent 20mins beforehand harassing the stand staff to sell them one, saying it would be useful for our company and that one of us would pay up. They wanted it delivered to the hotel.

The afternoon passed relatively peacefully, save for a small incident at the Dipcom booth where the small Korean guy manning the stand didn’t speak any English and had everyone in giggling fits when we spent half an hour asking him for directions to the zoo (”Zoo?”, “Yes, Zoo”, “You go to zoo?”, “yes, you know the way to zoo?” etc).

But before too long, the MySpace bug bit hard and I had to check my email and see if Em was back from work. I sent her a message as I was worried that she might think I was ignoring her. Nads messaged me to say hi and tell Em and me to get a room so we could stop messing up her profile. Job done, itch scratched and feeling better, I edged on with the business of the day. Namely, charming people into submission.

One of the funniest bits came at the end of the afternoon. Traditionally, the night before the conference closes is the most energetic one as the last day is reserved for cleaning up. It’s the night when all the parties happen and everyone is in full celebration swing. Being a network slut, I was being quite the social butterfly and putting myself around a bit to catch up with friends and colleagues at the respective shindigs.

Whilst I was at the stall of a French encryption company, I was asked to stand up and give a few closing remarks to the 40 or so people gathered round, as my reputation had got around and for some unknown reason people wanted to hear what I had to say about the industry that year. The fools. After I managed to get up onto a decidedly rickety old product stand, I was standing there like a twat making sarcastic remarks and buying time to work out what I was going to say. It was embarrassing but very flattering too, but my feet were hurting so much by that point that it was difficult to concentrate.

But what made it even more difficult to concentrate were the 2 fucking idiots at the back giggling like school kids, throwing things at me constantly and bending over in hysterics. Guess who? That’s right. The one that got banned, who had somehow made his way in again, and Mr Where Is The Zoo. They were shuffling around and laughing so much I thought we were going to get security again. What I found out later was they were trying to get their boxers off without anyone noticing, so they could throw them at me Tom Jones-style.

Yes, that is what it had come to. Our team trying to throw their panties at me in public whilst I was giving an ad-hoc street speech. We were past embarrassment by then.

The evening is just too much to go into. I’m still quite fucked up as it is, and I have no idea how we’re going to face half of the people we work with next week. Luckily I managed to escape in time again as it was just too much for me for one day, especially as I seem to be the only one intent on being remotely productive. There’s a part of me that’s angry, but another which is laughing hysterically as they are so fucking insane. Our stand next year is going to be beautiful. Playboy on TV, soft carpet, big-chested girls giving massages and a full-on rock band blasting the hall down. Rock on.

Two incidents this evening deserve special mention though, the first of which was when we were finding our way around the notorious red light district. Paul and Lucci are walking behind us as we go past a bunch of drug dealer scum on the canal side, when I hear:

“Dare you to call him a c**t”.
(Muffled sound of giggling, then the guy goes for Lucci to smack him)
(After a lull of a few seconds, in mock outrage and with a huge smile)
“Well that was a bit out of order of him to get that upset.”
“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT?????”

The second was a more exquisite encounter with the CEO of a Taiwanese manufacturing company who overhead us slagging off a lot of the companies who were exhibiting in Gauchos, one of the nicest restaurants in the city (”We don’t have a reservation, but we have lots of money. You have girls here?”). He was curious as to what we did, and wondered whether we could work together.

Bad move on his part. Very bad move.

“So what is your business model?”
“Make as much money as we can from as many people as we can find by doing as little work as we possibly can, and then spend it on ridiculous luxury items.”
“ha ha”
“Can we have your money please? Do you have lots of money that can have? Do you have girls?”

Childish, but fucking hilarious.

And so you have 24hrs in the life of our team when they have the weekend off to let off some steam. If they weren’t such a downright brilliant unit they would either be in prison or selling the Big Issue. Luckily for them, they are very good at what they do and can get away with it and even profit from it.

I’m slightly odd in the sense that I don’t really fit the mould, but they love me anyway as I just let them get on with it. I’m not into the same pleasures. I’m a one-woman man and I don’t cheat. Only ever done it once and it ruined me more than her. I don’t sleep with prostitutes, get so drunk I can’t stand up or fuck anything that moves. Sex for some people is about fulfilling natural urges with an object, but for me it’s about being with the one woman I love and sharing something spiritual. Maybe I’m weird that like, but it’s me. I can’t treat people like objects and I can’t understand how others can.

And what a way to end the day. A message from Em with one of the most incredible things anyone has ever said to me. She probably thinks nothing of it. Not sure how to tell her what it means to me, being the loved up puppy dog I am at the moment. Sad, but its true. It’s funny what stays in your mind when it’s supposed to be on something else.

Wheels up for the UK tomorrow lunchtime, which means I’ll be back for just after lunchtime. A flying visit as usual, so let’s just hope we don’t have to bail anyone out of jail or pick them up from the hospital. I’ll enjoy my 5 star room in the bliss of ignorance.