when I was trainee in the corporate subsidiaries dept of Carl Zeiss one of my jobs was to collect data about newly bought companies in California - me and my US counterpart reached a point were asynchronous mails simply did not work anymore.
not so easy on my part, the articles of apprenticeship demanded that I had to be at the workplace before 8 am and Geman laws forbid a worktime of > 10 hours. the exceptional permission of the dept head was not sufficient, to make the phone call possible the training director had to chip in, too.
