Jenny Craig vacations in Paris?

Dude, Jenny Craig totally came to the shop today. She totally kicked ass too. We we're eating our vegetables, doing sit-ups, jumping jacks, the whole deal. She cranked up punk music on the stereo and made us do ab crunches for 6 hours, god damn it hurt. But that shit works.

Take a look at the first picture, that's the base of the Totemobile at 7:30am. The second picture shows what happens after 6 hours with a sawz-all, a couple disk-cutters, and a few buckets full of sweat, blood, and minthe intense chocolate. Somehow or other, we found 374 kilograms of extra weight floating around in the bloated belly and derriere regions of that thing. It was awesome.

This whole experience, it feels like the "mission impossible" theme song is playing in the background the whole time. I fly to Paris, I meet these guys at the airport, we go to work. We all have our specialties, we all have our quirks. But we show up, we shake hands, we tell dumb jokes, and we kick ass.

There's:
Me: (code name: Jean-Beeel) specialty: cutting steel, weighing things, eating minthe intense chocolate.
Chico: (code name: Jean-Francisco) specialty: never gives up, stinky farts when it get serious, often mistaken for a homeless person.
Dan: (code name: Jean-Dan, aka the Six Million Dollar Jean-Dan) specialty: mustache, mullet, 13-year's old sense of humor, sees 374kg where nobody else does.
France: (code name: The PitBull) specialty: swearing at vice-presidents of major car companies, getting lost, doesn't take no for an answer.
Jean-Pierre (code name: Jean-JP) specialty: can't pronounce the sound "th", badass programming skills, still can't pronounce the sound "th" - even when you make fun of him for it.

We also worked today with Jean-Claude, Jean-Etienne, Jean-Francois, and about six other Jean-somethings. I’m not kidding. Dude, everyone in France is named Jean-…..

We kicked ass from 7:30-1:30 today, removing more than 700 lbs of weight. Then the weighing crew showed up to take the weight of our machine again. It took them about 4 hours, because, well, that's a very French thing to do.

Sooooo, is that is? Is that, that? We move in to the new building Monday? Ohhhhhh, wait, not so fast.

You have to understand something that I don't even understand. There are a couple of key players to know here:

There's this guy named Mr. Satine. He WAS the CEO of Citroen. He loves the arts. He loves (bad) architecture. He decided to have a new showroom built and have a super cool transforming robotic sculpture put in this building. You know what he didn't love? Accounting. That's probably why he was fired last March for loosing loads of money and spending money on frivolous things. The new boss wants to save money and cut costs.

There's this woman named Mmme Gautrand. She's an architect. She won the design competition to design the new Citroen showroom for this guy named Satine. Her new building is amazingly ugly. She thinks it's just amazing. She really doesn't want some robot stealing the show and taking the glory from her ugly building.

There's this guy named Round-Square. That's not really his name, but his name isn't important. He wears glasses. One lens is round, the other is square. It's so ridiculous it's hard not to laugh in his face. He works for the architect Gautrand. He clearly drew the short-straw and got stuck with us. Somehow, he ended up semi in-charge of this endeavor. And it's clear that his prime directive is make sure our piece of art never gets into Gautrand's new building. Did I mention his glasses?

The Amorphic team and our 9,300 lb robot are very caught in a political war. We just won that weight battle by the skin of our teeth with about 30 seconds to spare, but the war ain't won so easy. As soon as we reported our new weight, 3 new issues popped up that we aren't in compliance with. That fast. 6pm on a Friday night in France. Almost nothing happens that fast in this country. That's ok, we've performed no less that 4 miracles so far with this project. What's a few more?