IPS Germany

In January 1995, Ann and I left Belgium in the night to drive with our Ascona full of paper, paint and Knauf to Senftenberg - former eastern Germany, where we arrived in the morning and immediately started to prepare the walls and the ceiling of a small stand alone office within an old industrial area (Size 25 m2). The pack of Knauf my dad gave me seemed to be not sufficient and we had to drive out to Praktiker to purchase another 20 kg of the stuff to fill the cracks in the ceiling and the walls. We had prepared curtains and everything and by the end of the week, the office was ready and an office desk installed. Coffee machine was also there as well as a seat convirtible to bed as I intended to sleep there. In the mean time, some people took the radiators away so that we had to purchase an electric heater. We had to sleep in the office the last night as we had no hotel booked and the last painting works still had to be performed. Anyway, we came back on Saturday, had a stop in Liège to eat (there you can eat anytime) and got a week of bad cold as a result of the missing heating. Funny is that not one IPS staff ever worked one hour in this office ! The move consisted to send a lorry to Senftenberg in 2000 to pick up the stuff and bring it to Eisenhuttenstadt where we had our offices since beginning of 1996.

First IPS shared an office in the blast furnace building (which has been demolished since then) and in 1997 we rented a nice 3 room office in the quality center of EKO Stahl, while having another working office integrated in the VZA2 team building. It is from the Quality Center office that we've coordinated the construction of the main building of the IPS Technological Center into which we moved in August 2002 (first private party with a small radio-cassette took already place in May of course). These were nice times as the building was completely finalized at that time, including the grand piano. In 2004 we've built the extension and today we have a nice and highly professional conference center in our hands. Those who already followed some courses overthere know what it's worth.

We're certainly never are going to move from there as the building gives so much energy to the inhabitants, whether permanent or occasional. On the other hand it might well be that we will organize subsidiaries in other parts of Germany.

LTA

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