GV is 10
on August 31, 2006
in gv
Has anybody noticed?
GV is 10 this autumn!
It’s hard to believe but a joy to admit, and we’ll surely celebrate it throughout the entire year. Ten years ago this month things seemed so much simpler, we were naturally younger, riding high on enthusiasm and adrenaline. Not that we are now short of that spirit; the quality of it was different then. The summer of 1997 was probably the busiest in our lives. Yet we miraculously managed to combine the challenges of starting a business with pleasures of holiday time. How? There were three of us – three as one, and one in three different pieces of the GV puzzle.
Very few people actually knew that in August 97 there was a real threat of us failing to make it. A month before we were due to move to our present premises, the building was still in pieces, with piles of rubble inside. Lazy builders put little effort during their working day and the developer was reluctant to stop them from a habit they called `poziomka’. They would get sufficiently drunk before noon only to lie comfortably all around the site during a prolonged lunch break. There was almost no hope to get the office ready for mid-Agust. We had to act fast. A short summer visit to Britain brought a solution – our London-based friend offered to use her brand new, empty flat as a temporary office. That’s why all our first-year adds had two addresses on them – the still uncertain Nowy Świat 17, and the address of a makeshift office in a leafy street in the city centre.
All in all, the trick proved a success. Soon there was a string of potential students in front of the building. The doorbell seldom stopped ringing.
