If you come to Insead from a country with an advanced "service-oriented" culture (e.g. UK/US/Canada), you will have to manage your expectations in some regards to avoid wandering through your year in continual state of dissatisfaction.
The example which caused me to write this: a 30-minute network outage at 7:10p. I can say with some authority that if the IT department at Harvard scheduled a network outage during a time when students or faculty would be inconvenienced, they would be fired. End of story, no discussion. In those cultures, IT staff arrange their schedules so that the system users are not inconvenienced; that the converse is the norm here is just something that I can't (and don't want to) get used to.
Bienvenue à Insead. Here, there is no such culture, and consequently, the interview I was conducting over IM was abruptly terminated, and the guy sitting next to me lost an hour's work because his computer froze.
I may take this as a challenge to see if I can get a policy changed.
Deep breath, back to work.
7:57:00 PM
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