Caught

Normal late morning dash to work in Gauting, a suburb in the south west of Munich but just in the county of Starnberg, one of the richest in terms of inhabitants incomes in Germany. Has the most registered number of cabriolets and is the home to countless German "personalities".

Gauting is a very quiet, dormitory town, more a large village but home to my boss who formed a company about 20 years ago. He's a physics freak, was working with a well known research institute in matters connected with transmission electron miscroscopy (TEM) when specimens were photographed on traditional film and he had the idea of how to digitalise this. Need to know that simply preparing a sample whether human tissue or metal takes days and in the case of  cells gets destroyed. Thus film based photography could be a long process.

So he started building such cameras which are incredibly heavy being largely constructed out of tungsten (heavier than gold) and lead with the addition of having to be water cooled. One of my first jobs when I joined in 2003 was to write an invoice for 500,000€ for one single camera!

I was the only non technical person in a team of about 12, doing all the admin and logistics work.

Well today there was a massive jam in the High Street due to roadworks, so I tried a back streets route. The council was prepared and set up a camera on a short 30km/h stretch (50km/h is normal built up area limit)

Oh well 15€ is humane and so long as you pay up, there is no further action. However my attempt to save time failed miserably. I didn't know the area and it cost me more time than waiting in the queue.