Alecto's Ophelia

Fluffy the lap bus

When you have two enormous projects coming to a head at one time and your day looks like this:

I had to put it on an Excel schedule grid to make it look right because Outlook can't really do that. It gets all scrunched plus it doesn't show what really happens during the day, just what is meant to happen at the beginning of the day which was really only booked from 9 - 3:30 on this day and only mostly double booked to start. I book myself from 7 - 9 because that's SUPPOSED to be triage. More and more people are finding me. 

If a color is white it means I didn't get there or it didn't get done in that time slot. If a color is blue, it is the only thing I am doing. If a color is red, well, you can read them; it's a humanity thing and my days hardly ever look quite this extreme.

If a color is the color of bondo it means I was doing two things at one time. I can't call this multi-tasking because it isn't the truth. 

You know, if you are in one meeting and a speaker is saying something but someone else might be part of the presentation, you are not multi-tasking just because you are watching them both. You are only multi-tasking if you have tuned one out maybe 95% and are just listening for your name. Or something. I do miss a lot though. This is what I tell myself. It sort of helps. 

If a cell is yellow then I am actively engaged in three things and that's some bad shit. 

Look at the 4 PM slot. That was the height of ugliness. Plus I was so hungry I thought I was going to pass out. The need to pee had passed hours ago and I'm pretty sure my ass was numb. 

By the way, doing multiple things at one time is not bad. The bad part is this: Look at those gigantic conflicting time slots for ECR and Collibra. ECR UAT really just goes in the morning because it's supposed to be going live at the end of the month but then there was the director's meeting where we actually finally ADMITTED THAT THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL we're going live before the end of March and the entire end of project time line and resource requirements had to be rewritten and submitted to multiple people sorta ASAPish because I no longer own the resources and the little bastards have already started taking them out from under my nose. 

Collibra is imploding. Not the product, the project. They've been an isolated team since, forever? I don't know. I've been ignoring them because I took everything else but then they failed to produce anything of value and suddenly I owned them and they still failed to produce anything of value and I started to have heart failure and I put my boss in a box and he may never forgive me but if I can't save his life I can, at the very least, save the project, which is going nowhere.

The thing about these two projects regardless of where they are in their respective timelines is that both require my full attention right this second. I walk out of the room, virtual or otherwise for one second and shit blows up. In ECR UAT the only reason my head is still on my shoulders is BECAUSE we are not going to make it to Prod on time (not us) and because somehow Jalpa missed the part about migration schedules and migration requirements she didn't realize you couldn't just raise your hands and say, hey! we're ready to go now and none of the rest of us thought we had to tell her. Jalpa owns the project timeline, we, I can never really tell how many we are, own the pieces parts.

Um. Hmm. OK, It's changed, So, me, I build and maintain the hierarchies (OK, my team does). IT (who exactly is IT these days) takes my hierarchies, feeds them to the Fact tables, does shit to them and maps the leaf level members to, I guess it's the nSAP feed, and the Business provides the data and the hierarchy definition and properties to us and the mapping to them and.... ah, those are the guys that build the Essbase cube from which OBIEE reporting spits forth. We all have to work very carefully together so that nothing gets fouled up. 

Somehow in there somebody is supposed to know that UAT has to be thoroughly documented (with 8x10 color glossies with charts and arrows on the back) and paperwork with a gazillion signatures submitted to the migration team at IT (who exactly is IT these days) on the Tuesday before the NEXT Thursday that you want to migrate. And also, you cannot migrate during the first Thursday of any month because of where that Thursday falls in the close. And also the business will need at least three weeks to complete UAT when ALL of the data is loaded before you can even begin putting the migration submission package together WHICH will be torn apart with an icepick followed by several toothpicks. And a pie fork. 

As of LAST Thursday which was February 8 we did not have all of the data which means that UAT had not officially started. The date for migration to Production on the calendar was February 15. I was waiting for someone to say it. I had already alerted N. (it's not us, don't worry and thank you for the heads up) To get to a Feb 15 migration we would have had to submit our paperwork on February 6. Jalpa still wanted to make the end of the month. So we migrate on Feb 22. That means we sign off fully documented on Tuesday, Feb 13 and they have one day to do three weeks of testing and one day to put the paperwork together. Yes. No. Yes. No. YES!!! OK, talk to me when you have data and in the mean time I will have Brian fix his error.

Which brings me to the error. While I was not looking at ECR UAT, Uday said, I don't like that the properties in DRM don't match the properties in the FRD. He sent the email to me, Brian and Aparna. I made a REALLY FUCKING POOR DECISION.

Uday USED TO report to IT (who exactly is IT these days) but since this massive reorg happened he no longer reports to IT and is intrinsically an orphan who is on loan to ME because my team no longer belongs to me either, they have been reorged to the same place Uday has been placed and instead of swapping out the project manager they've left in the same horse. Uday now reports to me in this context. I THOUGHT Uday raised the issue with his project manager but he did not. WTH, Uday? So for two days no one but me and my now grown by 1/3 size team knew that Brian was not working on the Intake tool because Uday as upset about the properties EVEN THOUGH WE HAD A SIGN OFF FROM THE BUSINESS. 

When I brought it up on Thursday, the first time I'd been back to a UAT session I thought Jalpa was going to take several pounds of flesh. If Jalpa wasn't my friend I probably would have been beaten senseless in the parking garage and I would have had it coming. 

Brian - You have two days to complete five days of work. Do it now.

Jalpa - This thing is not going live. Please. Can't we just let him off the hook?

Alecto - Do you really want to be the one this project hangs on?

Jalpa - I do not. He will get it done.

Brian - get it done. I will buy you a case of, um, something. Don't fuck this up.

Later - Elizabeth, I totally fucked this up and now I'm killing Brian.

Alecto, I know you are. I can see him over there. You really screwed the pooch on this one.

Alecto.

What?

Thanks for not throwing your team under the bus. I would have had to kill you for that. 

So you see why I had to leave the Collibra sessions. You can see, right? You can see there was no way I could leave Brian,  and Uday, and Aparna alone in there. It's too much to ask of them even if they can ping me. It's not fair, especially this close to the end. And it's good that I didn't because I got to be there while Jalpa twisted and turned on the rope of denial while IT, OK, I think that's Nancy and Dan walked her through the dates over and over again and she finally came to the conclusion that the migration date was going to be on March 15 even though John put his face in his hands and said if Kanwar could march his guys through that fast, he'd be, well he'd just be WRONG. I didn't care. Brian could finish the first week of March which was the next open window. 

In the director's meeting one of the directors asked Jalpa if she wanted to ask for an extension one time or two times. 

Once, I thought, I only want you to ask once and I want you to get it right and please oh please oh please

And there was silence and N said

Alecto.

OH FUCK MY LIFE

Yes, N, I'm here. 

Alecto is my release manager and I expect she's got her arms fairly well around this. Alecto, based on the release schedule for these migration windows and the close schedule, when will this project go to production? 

OH FUCK MY LIFE

pause

N, I believe this project will migrate to production on March 29 assuming we can have complete sign off from all parties wrapped up and turned over to IT on March 20 and I don't see a problem with that.

Alecto, how much of a buffer does that leave you? 

N, that leaves us with a buffer of one week to accommodate the close and any issues we might encounter in the initial data tie which isn't complete yet and the system migration.

Alecto, are you comfortable with this?

N, I'm never comfortable but we can do this.

Alecto, I guess I meant are you willing to commit the team to this?

Yes, I will commit the team to this.

Meanwhile my IM is WAY TOO QUIET.

Crickets from everyone except for the Colibra working session, something horribly wrong has started up over there and I can't quite work out what but I have SOS messages from two of my newly minted senior developers and finally this.

I don't want to work here anymore.

He did not just send me that. He doesn't say things like that. What the hell just happened?

It is now 11 AM and I have been in my seat for four hours. I would give quite a bit to have two of those hours back. Not as a do over, I just need two more hours in that particular space. 

I want to ask N, N, please, did you just make me responsible for the outcome of ECR? You cannot possibly have meant that. I only own the DRM part of it and even now, I don't own DRM anymore and the DRM people are being sneaky and assigning my resources to other projects which means they're too stretched to do this job much longer and now I have to go tell them they aren't getting Aparna back quite as soon as expected. I think I'll not think about it but I do think I'll have to grab that timeline and pretend I'm the release manager at least in my head. 

FUCK MY LIFE I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT

And I now have hard proof that my boss has lost his mind. We have a new resource starting on Monday. No one else interviewed this guy. No one has seen his resume. We have heard conflicting stories about his skill set and they don't exactly make sense.

• IF you are a solution lead then you MUST have data governance knowledge. Solid data governance knowledge.
• IF you are a Collibra Solution Lead you must also have working knowledge of the product. Better working knowledge then I have which means you had better be a developer (I'm getting there).
• IF you are an SL, then your skill sets MUST contain the front end because that's the part the user uses.
• IF you tell me the SL only knows the backend I am going to be mighty suspicious because the one backend developer we do have, and he's quite good, doesn't know jack about data governance in context. He's tremendously good at creating the custom workflows you want using groovy script and whatever else he's got in his toolbox but he couldn't tell you why the happy path has to go this way and that way and why this Master Data Change Request needs three approvals in a blackout period and that doesn't need much at all and he can do amazing things with that library over there but an asset is an asset, whatever, just tell me where you want it.

So you're going to tell me that Ravi is a Solution Lead, can talk to the customer, figure out what they need, design the solution, feed it to the team in chunks but he doesn't do any front end work?

I don't think you know what the fuck you just hired. Thank god it's a consultant. The last one had to be sent back on day three. Wonder how long this one will last?

I'm scared. I asked Robin to invite me to a meeting because I saw the meeting on my boss's calendar. It's really bad when I find out about a project when it lands in my lap. So I came to the meeting and I listened to my boss agree to insanity. I didn't say a word. Surely there must be some mistake. Robin kept saying, don't worry about those dates so I did not. Mike kept assigning velocity points that also didn't make sense. How the hell was that much work going to get done by him and a new, untried resource in two weeks? I just shut up. At the end of the meeting he told me to get together with Robin and rewrite the stories (small chunks of project) so that they made sense.

The dates were mostly accurate and the dependencies stretch right into April. Holy shit. I had to fix some of it because the stories in the first two weeks didn't work. I dropped the velocity points and questioned her final deliverable for the sprint on the 28th. Yes, that is cast in stone. Are you telling me he can't deliver this? I can't tell you that. If he says he's going to do it then that's on him. I'll just have to make sure nothing else falls on his plate. 

I published the stories, sent him an IM and asked if he was completely clear about this.

Yes.

OK, I'm going to email this to you. I want you to be really sure you're ok with his because if you aren't, you need to tell Robin.

I'm fine. Ravi will hit the ground running.

OK, email on it's way.

OK.

And then what I have come to refer to as goo (because I cannot keep saying shit, it has simply lost all meaning at this point) hit the fan. The Collibra experts told them what they were trying to build was insane. This thing we just told the Decomm team we would deliver before June after months of screwing around and missing deadlines on the original project. After setting up the infrastructure to work with five business units for the next four months, we collapsed that project and rebuilt it to be just the two pieces required to satisfy Decomm.

Decomm is the decommissioning of a freaking god awful enormous system because the replacement they stood up last year can do 80% of the work - the trick is to find the 20% in all it's bits and pieces and rebuild it into the replacement and I have to tell you, that's a terrifying dance - there is no such thing as a lift and shift in this game. Best I can tell, there are over 200 moving parts of this system left over AFTER the analysis part where we took a very large sword and started hacking off limbs before we took the scalpel and carved out what was needed. Mike's Collibra team was already working on a project (that was apparently going nowhere) which was inserted into Decomm with the promise that he'd get to the Decomm part before June 12 but with zero project plan because he was a pilot Agile project. 

I was sent in when it fell down.

fuck my life on a smaller scale until I realized he didn't know how to build it and then everything became measured in increments of goo. How deep is the goo today? Nose level? Well that's not so bad. What can you tell me about the splatter pattern of the goo from that last meeting? Really? A straight arc to the back wall? Sounds like someone's throat was cut with a very sharp instrument. 

So. Much. Goo. The Collibra experts told the team this was a very, very bad idea and I wasn't there to hear it. During the debrief Mike ran away and when they got tired of waiting for him and wanted to end the call I suggested they just start without them. They let me know exactly what they heard. I wrote it all down. When he finally came back I repeated it to him. He denied it. That's when the IMs started flying back and forth.

OMG! What is wrong with that man?!

I can't take this anymore. Everyone is so negative. They haven't learned anything in all these months, they're useless.

I feel like I'm dying. Everything is falling apart and we have no leadership. I don't know what to do. Alecto, please! You've never let anything like this happen before.

And then the bombshell.

Don't worry, Ravi starts on Monday and then you'll have an extra set of hands full time.

Mike! No they won't! Both you and Ravi are allocated 100% to Robin's project the minute he walks in the door.

THAT'S NOT TRUE!

It is!

I sent it to you! I was in the meeting with you. Look in your email.

WHO WROTE THESE STORIES?!!!

Robin wrote them, you approved them, you put the points on them and at your request Robin and I cleaned them up. I actually dropped the points and spread the dates out so that you could do them. The February 28 date is a hard date and the plan waterfalls off that and right into April. It isn't negotiable. You'll need to get on the client's schedule very quickly to make this work.

I never agreed to this. Ravi is only 50% outside projects. 

Well, he has 35 points next sprint and the max for anyone ever is 26 and that's a high velocity performer like Jason and even those roll forward. Those 35 points were originally higher. If that isn't 100% I don't know what you think he's going to do over here but we can't say that the Collibra team has help in the next two weeks because they don't. Also, I can send you the whole plan, I think your name and Ravi's are all over it.

I have the plan.

OK. 

The IMs had stopped so I sent one out to the two of them but they bounced back. They'd actually gone offline at 4:30 and 3:30 respectively. One of them came back later but he lives in CST so I'm guessing he didn't think it was fair to run for the door just yet.

I called Elizabeth and we talked for an hour. 

I named the project Fluffy. Fluffy is a two ton bus with a great deal of very dirty, greasy fur. Fluffy slobbers and thinks it's a lap bus. It likes to have its belly rubbed and it needs to be walked about once an hour. It has a hot pink rhinestone collar and a matching leash. It's a very SHORT leash; we need to get Fluffy under control, whatever that looks like. 

There will be a risk review this week. Somehow I'm supposed to have gotten past the fact that I think I'm betraying Mike and Mike is absolutely going to feel betrayed but I'm beyond trying to save anyone at this point.

I have to deal with Fluffy. Mike is holding Fluffy securely in his lap and rubbing Fluffy's greasy belly. I'm not sure Mike has realized the bulk of Fluffy cut off his oxygen supply a couple of weeks ago. Also, Fluffy is now sitting on Mike's team. Fluffy is trying to roll its butt over on me the same way my cat does on the couch but I'm not having any of it. If Fluffy rolls over on me I'll be less than useless.

I have a short triage list for tomorrow morning (in case you were wondering, this is generally, but not always what I mean by triage). I'm just not sure how to order it. If I'd managed to meet with the team at the beginning of the day things might go differently but I'm going to be meeting with the team at the end of the day. Right in the middle of Mike's review with N.

• Get Fluffy's hair balls out of decomm, swab the deck
• Put ECR in a box and prepare to pack her up - automate Brian's bug report
• Write every single story for Sprint 32 with full velocity and prepare to submit on Tuesday
• Start sprint 8 for Collibra - Fluffy proof it
• Backlog the Collibra project plan out through June - Fluffy proof it
• Backlog Robin's project plan out through April - identify possible signs of Fluffy egress
• Check Mike's calendar for any signs of meetings I should attend
• Get template from Elizabeth and prepare the risk assessment on all three projects

That's not a very short list is it? Maybe some hair clippers?

The 8th Floor

This is $404 per night room and they aren't kidding. It's not like when you look at the back of the door and the hotel disclosure tells  you, along with the emergency exit information, that the maximum rate that can be charged for this 'motel' room (yes, I read this in a flea bag once) is $500. I mean this room in this photograph is currently going for $404 per night and it is NOT in Manhattan. Not even close. It is in Hanover, NJ which is sort of Parsippany. Sort of. My rate, as a gold member would be a whopping $396. Nice savings. My rate with the corporate code I'm currently using is $224. Well hot damn! That's a near 45% discounted rate. My Unicorn contact at the Hanover Marriott has informed me that the 2018 negotiated rates are not going to be quite so kind to my company (with the code I'm currently using, Jason gave me six and this is BY FAR the very best) but it will be that way across the board, for all hotels for everyone, he tells me. Fear not, he says, when you compare rates again they will most likely let you come back. He is aware that I fear a return to the Indigo. The are such lovely people, I've told him, they try harder than any hotel staff I've ever spent extended time with and they were always so happy to see me but the property itself is a disaster and I can never sleep, not even on the top floor. Rice paper walls where the slightest noise in either adjacent room is amplified and I was never a light sleeper. I was terrified of the elevator. I am oddly fascinated with it though. If I could sleep I might keep going back just to watch the archeological dig of the peeling layers of wood floor laminate and San Francisco wall paper slowly reveal the truth of the hotel's identity. It is not an Indigo, not any Indigo is really an Indigo, they are all something ICG picked up and rebranded at some point but I think they were all different things other lives, independently operated old hotels, Howard Johnson's Motor Lodges, the original Holiday Inns which could not be converted, and others. When the laminates pull back, at whatever rate the prevailing humidity determines, releasing the memory of smoke filled rooms and leaking pipes, the bones of truth lie bare. I believe my Indigo is very, very old. It's the elevator that gives it away but the paper thin walls wreak of a mid-century takeover and remodel to double capacity which more or less ruined it. So that. 

I found out about the Marriott almost immediately because my boss asked, where are you staying? And I told him and he said, oh, you know Jason is up at the Marriott in Hanover and I said, their rates were just awful and he said, see Jason and so I did. Well shit, I hadn't considered using corporate codes from the last job or the job before or even the job Jason was on three jobs before which I have never been on. I tried to book a room with one code and came up with 257 but had a three week wait to get into the standard room which, by the way, looks pretty much exactly like that photograph. I waited three weeks and finally got into the Marriott the last week of June and had my first solid or nearly solid night of sleep. I wept. No, said Jason, you're doing it all wrong, it's this code. Ah, great, 224 and my boss, who is not really my boss but she signs my expense reports said, ok, that's a little better. Since I'm really her first contractor and she got used to the Indigo rate of 180, 257 was a bit tough to swallow, especially back when it was three nights a week and by the way, don't forget to add on the state and local taxes. I don't have airfare but this is still new to her. 

Given the initial wait, I booked out to the end of October. There were some nights I flat out couldn't get in but I didn't worry about  it. The first blocked night I put myself in the Whippany Courtyard about six miles East (? I'm directionally challenged) on Route 10. Oddly enough the Whippany Courtyard which is not a full service hotel by any stretch of the imagination is significantly more expensive than the Marriott. It is, however still a Marriott property and points are points. It's all about the points now. When I have enough points I am taking Elizabeth to Key West which is where Elizabeth has wanted to go for years (a lot of years, maybe six?) for some obscure reason. By the time I actually have enough points to stay at a Key West property (I have accumulated enough for about a night and a quarter), Key West will have restored itself. 

One night at the Whippany Courtyard had me convinced that I should pay the extra $20 per night and stay at the Basking Ridge Courtyard with Jason on the off nights when Hanover wasn't letting us in. They meant well but it was a bitch getting in and god awful getting out. The Jersey barrier forced a right turn which didn't allow any turn for two miles which only allowed a right turn with no good place to make a u turn which forced a giant loop which added, in the end nearly 8 additional miles back to the office. Too much money for a bad commute and an over priced motel. Basking Ridge was OK. They charged for parking. I was astonished at this. Why? You're in the middle of nowhere. A stones throw from the Indigo. Why are you charging for parking? Well, OK. Not hard to get to and oddly enough your 'bistro' will actually bring the food in a bag up to the room. Well that's cool. Not that I minded fetching it at Whippany but it's interesting that you do this. The first night was perfectly fine. The second time was OK except they fouled up the concept of mobile checkin where no credit card presentation is requested, no identification is presented (I'm ok either way with that), you simply validate the last four digits of the credit card used to pay for your room. The guy checking me in stumbled through this, screwed it up and swiped my card. I got really nervous. Listen, I told him, it is entirely possible that my card is going to be billed twice now and I'm going to have to unravel the whole thing so could you do me a favor? Flag my account. Tell them I was a fully checked in mobile customer and that you swiped my card. Just do that for me and I'll follow up, OK? OK. Good enough.

Yes. Double billed. But. He flagged me and it was unraveled immediately. Fair enough. 

Third stay was an unmitigated disaster. She picked up my room card from the box of mobile checkins and asked for credit card and ID. Crap. You don't need my card. I have to swipe your card. Why? Incidentals. You have incidentals here. You have food and that gets billed to the card on file. If you swipe my card I'm going to be double billed just like last time. You won't be double billed. I gave her the date of my last stay and results. She snarled, swiped my card, handed me my key in packet and said, room 219 and I thought... how am I on the second floor? Not to be a snob about this but I haven't been on a low floor since I hit gold why am I on a low floor now? I said, OK, thank you and went to the bistro to order dinner before I moved my car and went to my room because last time I didn't have a working phone. When the man asked me for my room number I looked down and said...um 413 because that is what the cardboard key holder read. The post it stuck to the key holder which should not still have been stuck to the key holder held all of the information she was supposed to validate. I gave him the room number, moved my car and went to the fourth floor.

At the door to 413 I held my breath and inserted the key. In I went. I unpacked and prepared for the morning and five minutes later opened my computer and attempted to connect to the internet. It wanted my room number and last name. Nope. Not a match. I should just have tried 219 but that would have caused bigger problems. I picked up my phone. It rang and rang and rang. I dialed 0 for the operator which should have given me the back desk. It rang and rang and rang. I picked up my computer and purse, leaving my work computer behind and headed directly to the bistro to intercept my food. I was just in time. He re-rang up the receipt to remove the delivery charge and I signed to room 413 with my name clearly on the check.

I got in line in front of the other girl. To my left was a longer line in front of my girl which is where I would have preferred to go. I explained to the girl when it was my turn that the interwebs did not know me. I showed her. She did not understand. She looked up room 413 and asked, did you get into that room? Yes, I am fully moved into that room and have billed food to that room. They let you bill food to that room?! Yes. They did. I have it right here. That's not possible. Sigh. Here is my food and here is my receipt with my name and room 413, I'm not sure I understand the problem. Neither am I.

To my immediate left was a VERY frustrated man. 

I'm telling you, someone is in my room.

That's not possible.

There is stuff all over that room.

What kind of stuff?

An open suitcase on the bed. A woman's red briefcase on the floor. Bathroom stuff all over the bathroom. A DRESS HANGING OVER THE BACK OF THE CHAIR! SOMEONE HAS MOVED IN!

Are you sure you were in the right room?

I opened room 413 with my 413 key and walked in. I looked in an open suitcase and saw ladies underwear, can you explain this?

DID YOU TOUCH MY STUFF?!!! ARE YOU TELLING ME YOU PUT YOUR HANDS IN MY SUITCASE?!!!

No. No. I didn't touch your stuff. It was open on the bed and your underwear was on top and I didn't touch anything!

The woman on the left (who checked me in) turned to the woman on the right who was clear this could not have happened and 

HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?!!!

I don't know.

FIX IT!!!

What do I do?!

I looked at the woman in front of me and said, you cancel his reservation and rebook him in another room on the fourth floor because I am not repacking my stuff and leaving and I already have food billed to that room. After that you find me, cancel whatever room I have and put me in 413 but make sure the food comes with me.

I have no idea what she did but in the end I went back to my room, ate my dinner and chatted with Elizabeth on FaceTime until it was time to settle in for the evening. I made a mental note to lock the door from the inside at the beginning, not the end of the night going forward.

In the morning I picked up the guest folio that had been slipped under my door probably just after midnight and prepared to photograph and email it to my work address because my expense reports (all bloody three of them) have to be submitted on Friday morning, one after the other. When I laid it out flat on the desk it read:

$8 parking

OK. I can't even. I called the front desk. I was still in a mild sleep haze but I wanted to get them before the herd started checking out manually. It was 6:15. 

Hi. This is room 413 (in case you aren't reading your phone). My guest folio is inaccurate and unfortunately I need it to be accurate this morning. I have only been billed for parking, not the hotel stay, and not the bistro meal. I need to have this corrected and sent back up. Can you fix this for me? 

(I have odd ideas when I'm not in a full service fully staffed hotel)

No, I can't. We're not staffed for that.

OK, so I can't leave here without an accurate folio. Seriously, I can't. So my room rate is this, and I'm holding the receipt for dinner so if you don't put that on the folio I'm ok and I'm sure you'll eventually work out how to bill me. Can you just put the folio together even if it's not pretty and print it out?

I'll do my best.

OK, I'll be down in 30 minutes.

At 6:45 there she was by herself looking like she belonged in Hanover. Perfectly groomed and beautiful, a wild juxtaposition to the two women from the night before who had clearly been rolled through the lobby half a dozen times by a herd of wild frat brothers on holiday through Jersey. 

Hi. I'm room 413. I just need my updated folio.

Blank stare. 

I handed her the folio for $8. 

Blank stare.

This is in the top five most surreal hotel moments in my entire traveling career and that includes the 2 AM murphy bed debacle at the Cincinnati Marriott when they gave me the club suite which doesn't really have a bedroom and failed to explain. 

Blank stare.

I'm not leaving without an updated folio and I can stand here all morning taking my conference calls from your lobby with my computer on your counter until my wifi runs out at 1 PM with my extended checkout rights. 

She turned around, gathered some papers, turned back and started typing. A few minutes later she handed me a folio with the correct room rate and parking. No food. Fine. I'll take it.

OK. So. If you could find my reservation for Wednesday, please.

Type type type. OK, I have it.

Hit cancel.

Click.

Done? Reservation all gone?

Yes.

Thank you very much!

Later when I told Jason there was a man in my room and I was never going back because they'd just handled it badly he asked where I was going to go. Bridgewater, I think. If that doesn't work out I'll just drive home and back but I am NOT going back there. Sorry, just no. I got into Bridgewater which was the same distance away as Hanover but South. We'd been talking about checking it out but when you're attached to a property you don't really want to leave; it becomes your second home. My boss was astonished. He said, you'll wish you'd just driven home. It will all be fine until you get to the 287 exit and then you're just going to park for 40 minutes. 

He was right. I parked for 40 minutes but the getting back wasn't so bad. Bridgewater wasn't so bad either but it wasn't Hanover. It wasn't staffed to handle all that many guests, it's more of a conference hotel I think and if there isn't a conference happening then it isn't a full hotel. They also charge for parking but it's in the middle of the city so I get that. There is one man at the door and one woman at checkin. They understand perfectly how to handle business travelers but there is only so much they can do. They're perfectly lovely and a reasonable backup if I absolutely have to but the discount is not 45% and I know why, the volume isn't there to support it. It is almost better to go home. So now I am limited to Whippany as a backup and the Indigo as a failsafe. Jason, who has 800,000 points to my 109,000 finds this hilarious but Jason can't exactly fly home to Rhode Island if he doesn't have a room. 

What was missing from Bridgewater aside from a lack of traffic (Hanover has traffic but not a 40 minute exit backup) and free parking (which is completely forgivable in the city) and full service room service (which so does NOT matter)? 

Hanover is home. When I walk in the side door, I never come in the front door anymore because I know exactly where to park for the quickest getaway in the morning, and approach the mobile checkin sideways I am met with at least one very wide smile and often a row of smiles. Welcome back, Ms. Alecto! We've missed you (the week and a half I was locked out). Or, Welcome back because it's Monday night or how was your Tuesday night drive? Because it's Wednesday night. The business manager who deals with business travelers and is the reason I have a room every single night I need one all the way out to the end of Q1, 2018 waves if he's on the phone or comes over to chat if he's not with someone else. I've introduced him to Jason who has now unblocked himself all the way to the end of Q1. 

The reason I eat every meal in my room (Jason is horrified) is because I have a standing appointment with Elizabeth at 7 PM which will not be disrupted for anything unless there's a screaming emergency on one end or another. From 7 to 7:30 we are together. It is also true that I don't have a lot of bandwidth when I leave the office but eventually I would get sick of cobb salads and chicken quesadillas and cheeseburgers (stay the hell away from the mushroom veggie burger thing, that didn't quite cut it) but mostly cobb salads. The timing is such that I check in at about 6:15, order food at about 6:20, unpack, which is really all about staging for the next morning - clothing ready to go, pillow on the bed (yup, it gets compressed and slammed into the suitcase), personal computer connected to the interwebs and ready for FaceTime, suitcase ready to be repacked, toiletries out with bag hanging on the door for each item to be dropped back in and then slammed into the suitcase, medication in a glass by the bed, medication container back in the suitcase, cliff bar in the brief case pocket, plain yogurt for breakfast out of the knitting bag (this works, ok) and into the room refrigerator (so far I have never forgotten breakfast), coffee maker out of the cabinet and set up for morning, coffee cup out of its plastic wrapper and placed next to the bathroom sink, shoes next to the briefcase and the only thing left to do is change out of my work clothes and into whatever I'm lounging/sleeping in but I don't do that until after dinner has been delivered because I do not want to scandalize the man. Last thing to do is login to Netflix which takes some time because my email address is my full name with an underscore between the names and that navigating back and forth with the arrow keys is maddening but I am truly grateful for the service. 

Now it is 6:40 or 6:50 if I am late and the food may or may not be there yet and if it is not I sit down and start knitting and if it comes while I am still moving about I stop and open the door and here is when something very lovely has started to happen. There are, as far as I know only two wait people who bring up meals in the evening. They are a man and a woman of color and I note that they are of color because there was something interesting going on with the man and I am generally taken aback when service people seem to be a specific minority across the board - so the combination of the minority and the man shook me initially. The woman is cheerful. She is of indeterminate age. She is probably my age but I'm not certain. When I figured out that I could change the tip on one receipt and submit the other without (because the client is not going to cover this and the amount of the receipt has to equal the submission) the relationship changed. I would have done this with cash but I don't really carry cash. It is bad form to not add an additional tip to a room service delivery. Seriously. They don't see that service charge and 20%, even if that is what's included is not enough to carry food up through the service elevator and through the halls. Sorry, nope. You don't have to add a lot, you really do have to add enough to acknowledge. So I figured out how to do it and the relationship changed. With the woman there was just an easiness about her, not that there was anything hard, the transactions just relaxed and she accepted my smile which was and is easier for me.

The man is an enigma. I am going to find out his name. In the beginning he would not make eye contact. There was nothing hard about him, it felt like overly deferential covering, I don't fucking want to be doing this. I don't really know for sure and I don't really have any business making assumptions but something was going on. His discomfort preceded him into the room and followed him out and I felt guilty every single time. When I figured out how to add the tip he made eye contact. I don't know if it was about the money or the acknowledgement or if it was timing or a combination but he made eye contact. And then one day he smiled and I about fell over. And then the damnedest thing happened. We didn't see each other for a bit because I was gone once and the woman got my order during the next and then he got my order and asked where I'd been. I explained. He smiled and said he was so glad to see me. I said I was very glad to see him too and that I would be gone for another week and a half because I had this one more lock out but then I'd be back hopefully for the next two years straight. The smile was brilliant.

My first night back on Monday the woman came to the door. I like the woman. I am happy to see the woman but I was worried about the man. What if he thinks I didn't come back? I don't even know his name. I don't know her name. I was running behind on Monday and I was already in the middle of a full screen session with Elizabeth.

She set my salad on the desk to the left of Elizabeth and took off the cover to shows me the way she always does with the flair she seems to have perfected and I smiled and said, yes that is my Monday night salad and took the binder with the check from her and said,

Say hello to Elizabeth, we're having our nightly chat.

This is your daughter?!

Yes, this is Elizabeth. I miss her every Monday and Wednesday night so we have thirty minutes of FaceTime starting at 7.

Hello, Elizabeth.

Hi!

You miss your mother but this must help.

It helps a lot.

Well this is very nice. I've never seen anyone do this at a hotel. You can have dinner together.

(getting Elizabeth to eat what I've left her is a never ending struggle)

I signed the check, added $3 and handed it back. She wished us both a good night and left the room, closing the door softly behind her. More softly, it felt like, than ever before. 

On Wednesday he was back with my dinner. I startled myself when I opened the door.

There you are! I'm so happy to see you!

I am happy to see you too. I have been thinking about you.

I was here on Monday but that very nice woman brought me dinner so I didn't see you.

Well here I am now and you are back so this is very good. You won't have to leave again soon.

No, I won't have to leave again soon. I will be here every Monday and Wednesday so if you don't see me you'll know someone else has my order and it's OK.

Yes, I will know that and I won't worry about you.

Now what does that mean? What does I won't worry about you mean? What does I have been thinking about you mean? Never mind, I know what that means. People who care about each other think about each other. I don't understand the worry part but I don't suppose I have to understand. Maybe he worries I won't come back. 

I know, and I have talked to Jason about it, that I am very attached to this property and it is really about the people. I check in and get into the elevator and go to whatever floor and room I have been directed. It is our home away from home, Jason says, and we don't want it to change. We know they'll be remodeling next year and we are both afraid of what will happen to our rooms because we are very used to the walls and the carpets and the furniture and the beds and oddly enough that green thing at the foot of the bed. It's not even very useful. It's scratchy. Jason says, as long as my friend the bartender is there when I go straight to the bar for a beer after I get my key and he's happy to see me again, I can live with the redecorating. And I say, as long as that lovely man who brings me cobb salad keeps bringing me cobb salad I suppose I can live without the scratchy green thing at the foot of the bed. I throw that damn thing on the chair, Jason tells me. I hate it. You're going to miss it, I tell him. 

The other night I was about to turn out the light and I looked around at the room and thought, holy shit, Jason and I have matching rooms. This is actually really freaking funny. Like two kids in a giant house, our rooms decorated identically by some insane mother who thought we might also be dressed alike at some point. 

When I first checked in I was sent to the third or fourth floor and I stayed there for quite a while and wondered about the guests who continued on up to five and six and every once in a while someone went to seven and then the mysterious eighth floor. I wondered what was up there. I didn't think too much about it but one day I was sent to the fifth floor and thought, finally! I have made it another level, like a game and what will I find when I get to my room? Nothing. Just another room up another level except with each level there is the expectation of more quiet. I don't know that each floor gives you more quiet but I do know there is a significant difference between two and four and there is definitely something different about four and five. But the rooms are the same. One day I was sent to seven. Holy crap. Right back down to five which is where I stayed. Back to seven. OK, I get it. The stuff in the bathroom is a little different. The bottles are bigger too. I wouldn't necessarily notice because I don't use them. I only use the soap which is my favorite hotel soap ever because of its size and shape and I have been collecting the spare bars to take to hotels which are not the Hanover Marriott. 

On Monday I was sent to the eighth floor. I about fell over. This is like space invaders level 10. You hit the top level and nothing happens, you've just hit it. So now what happens? Do I have to go all the way back to floor 2 and start over? On Wednesday I went back to the eighth floor. The bottles are definitely bigger and there is a shower cap but not the ubiquitous sewing kit. Maybe they have done away with this. So what is the difference? I see there is one giant suite across the hall and a junior suite down the hall but I don't know what it takes to get an upgrade around here. 

I'm not really attached to an upgrade, by the way and I'm not sure what I'd do if I had it. Having been slammed into suites in the past and walked past kitchens I had no use for and sometimes very large dining room tables and looked at multiple bathrooms, it just left me wishing I could have reserved those upgrades for family travel. But lately every mobile checkin on my phone has read: eligible for upgrade. No idea what that meant.

I had no idea what that meant until I went cruising back to the Marriott site looking at current room rates and then I saw it. The difference between the two room rates that kept me out during the first three weeks. There is a standard room which is a double or a king which is called a Guest Room and there is an M Club Deluxe. The M Club Deluxe looks EXACTLY like a guest room except it comes with the following: M Club Lounge, M Club Lounge Access, High Floor. The M Club Lounge sort of requires access so I'm not sure why they've called out. The M Club Lounge will feed you snacks around the clock and a full breakfast most mornings. The only thing you get charged for is alcohol. So there it is. At some point I got upgraded to the M Club Deluxe and totally missed it. It's not all that relevant because I'm the last person likely to set foot in the M Club Lounge or any other sort of public space like that but that's what happened. I got upgraded, silently, I just missed the boat. I'm not even sure where the M Club Lounge is, I'll have to ask Jason. My guess is Jason's not an M Club Lounge sort of guy either. He's too attached to the bartender at the Auld Shebeen pub. 

Getting to the 8th floor was never about the 8th floor although being at 5 or above is a good thing because silence is a good thing. Getting to the 8th floor is about a bartender who calls out when you walk through the door which makes the ache of being away from your wife three nights out of the week a little bit bearable. Getting to the 8th floor is about a man who brings you dinner and worries about you when you've been away and a woman who knows you well enough to understand why your dinner comes when it does every single time. Getting to the 8th floor is about having been there long enough to have the business guy plug your rooms in six months out even though you're booking Mondays and Wednesdays which leave an unbooked early week gap which will be harder for the hotel to book. Getting to the 8th floor is about knowing that the temperature needs to be set at exactly 74 for an hour to bring the room up above standard icebox and then at 72 for another hour and then down to 70 for the remainder of the evening and then at 69 to sleep.

Getting to the 8th floor is about turning out the light, falling back and letting go without reservation, which is something I have trouble doing at home some nights. 

I did not kill it on purpose

Lucy the hamster was the harbinger of death and destruction, or at the very least, her death was the harbinger of the guaran-fucking-teed destruction on the horizon. Somewhere toward the end of 2007 after months of periodic 'ritual escape' from the aquarium in Elizabeth's room which nearly always resulted in the immediate relocation to the clothes hamper in the closet (seriously, Elizabeth?) Lucy eventually made her way down the hall and into the kitchen where she wedged her little body into the safety of the dark, cozy space behind the refrigerator. And there she stayed. Until we smelled her. And there she stayed even after we smelled her because when we tried to pull the counter deep French door Amana forward it wiggled side to side with maybe 1/8 of an inch or less of give but no clearance to come forward. The damn thing was built in. Little intricate pieces of molding worked into the wall and then down to the door frame blocking the exit by at least 3/4 of an inch when all was said and done. Getting the shit unglued and un-nailed and detached from it's ridiculous wavy attachments just wasn't worth it. Besides, we weren't sure we could do it without breaking something and we weren't really sure how to put it back.

Lucy the dead hamster was left to quietly decompose in peace. This would have been fine except for the horrified nanny. 

What? It's less than a mouse. Smaller than a mouse. Mostly fur. It was going to die in a wall eventually anyway. Three weeks tops and we'll never even know she was there.

Truth. We never did. 

I worried about that Amana though. I worried about that Amana every time I replaced an appliance in this house. Just this summer when I replaced the wall unit in the living room, the A/C unit that may very well have been forty years old I realized there was nothing left to replace. I'd turned over literally everything, including the furnace. The dishwasher, the microwave, the toaster oven, the range twice, the washer and dryer twice, the oil tank (that counts), the one wall A/C unit, ignoring the scary attic fan that only turned itself on that one time scaring the crap out of me... what else could possibly go wrong?

The Amana. 

Please, God, no. Just no. Just wait until I've sold the place, anything but that. 

It seemed perfectly fine. The only time I ever had to replace a refrigerator was right before Lucia was born. It was hot as hell in the middle of August in a stone house without AC and the place got hot like a bread oven and the sound of the refrigerator, older than some minor gods, was like a small steam engine coughing up a small steam engine sized lung. It was soothing in an odd sort of way. At 2 AM I'd go out there and stand in front of the freezer and Joe would yell from the bedroom:

CLOSE THAT FREEZER DOOR! THE COMPRESSOR CAN'T HANDLE THE STRESS! 

BUT I'M DYYYYYIIIINNNNNNGGGG!!!!

NO YOU'RE NOOOOOTTTTT BUT THE FREEZER WILL BEEEEEEE IF YOU DON'T GET BACK IN HERE!!!

In my defense, the night it got suddenly quiet and woke us both up, I was NOT standing in front of the open freezer door. I was in my bed in a pool of sweat. 

Joe:    What the hell was that?

Me:    I don't know. Something's wrong.

Joe:    Is it Mike?

Me:    Let's check.

Mike was fine. He was sleeping in a pool of sweat. We stood in the hall, all wired up, ready have a go at something. 

Joe:    It's too quiet.

Me:    Shhhhh

Joe:    Like THAT'S going to help?!

Me:    I'm listening for something.

Joe:    Want to let me in on that?

Me:    Joe. 

Joe:    What?

Me:    We have a problem.

Joe:    ...

Me:    The refrigerator is dead.

Joe:    NO FUCKING WAY!!! YOU KILLED THE REFRIGERATOR!!!

Me:    Joe. I did not kill the refrigerator. I was in bed lying in a pool of sweat just like you when we woke up because the house got quite. Listen how nice that sounds. 

Joe:    I loved that thing

Me:    It was thirty years old and evil.

Joe:    I loved that thing.

Me:    I did not. I want a side by side with an ice maker and water on the door. And I want it tomorrow. Get your Sears card out, baby, we're going shopping. That piece of shit is leaving my house.

Joe:    You have no respect for old things.

Me:    This is not true... I have no respect for old things that make a shit load of noise and don't work properly. Also, it wouldn't cool me off.

Joe:    IT'S NOT AN AIR CONDITIONER AND YOU KILLED IT ON PURPOSE. 

I still haven't really been forgiven for killing the refrigerator which leads me to the last microwave which I wished dead one day, out loud in front of both girls. I wanted it dead because David bought it and I did not want it and he left and didn't take it with him. I glared at it and said: I wish you would just die!

Mom! What the hell?!

Two days later it was dead.

Three days later I brought the replacement home from County Appliances because 1. both girls were suddenly terrified of their mother and 2. I realized we really did need a microwave and killing the first one was a stupid thing to do. 

The Amana. Elizabeth has trouble closing the freezer door. This set off alarm bells in my head but I wasn't processing. I just said, look, Elizabeth, close the freaking freezer door because when you don't, all my burritos in the freezer door compartment DEFROST and I hate that. Then they refreeze and they just aren't the same. One time she left the freezer door open so long all her frozen pizzas thawed and then refroze and let me tell you, THAT is a disgusting mess. The cheese just isn't the same. Alarm bells in my head but I just wasn't processing. 

On Sunday of last week I came home with the groceries late in the day and had a few freezer items to put away. When I opened the door I noticed the ice cube trays were full of water.

Well fuck. What I couldn't be sure of was whether or not the seal was tight when I opened the door. No way to tell for sure but put the food in the freezer, shut the door and check on Monday morning on my way to Basking Ridge. The refrigerator seemed perfectly fine and I thought, you know, when the compressor goes, the whole thing goes, right? Well, I don't really know for sure but freon is freon and I think the circular system is not all that complex. I think it's connected so it's still pretty cold in the fridge so maybe everything is ok. I put the rest of the groceries in the refrigerator and promptly stopped thinking about it.

On Monday I asked her to check the freezer because I'd forgotten. Soup. Soup in the freezer. OK. We have to deal with this but for some reason I have refrigeration. 

On Tuesday night we went to dinner and on Wednesday morning I put my hand in there and pulled out two yogurts. I must have been damn sleepy. Or it was dying very, very slowly. On Thursday night I opened the door and stepped back fast. I closed the door.

ELIZABETH! THE REFRIGERATOR IS DEAD!

Oh. This is why the butter is soft then. 

What have you been eating?

Um.

Elizabeth.

Um.

This morning we went to Sears. I did NOT want a Kenmore. I take issue with Kenmore for many, many reasons but the world has changed and there are not many small refrigerators left out there other than small apartment size things and I'd say 90% of what's out there has ice and water and I don't have a water line and I don't have the bandwidth to bring in a plumber right now and I do NOT feel like throwing in another $400 to put water in an appliance. Ice would be nice but not for $400 plus whatever. So I'm limited. 69" brings me flush up against the top cabinets. 35" puts me against the granite counter and the wall. Flush. And then there's the issue with the door frame and the molding. If I go counter depth I lose a lot if I come in to 33"; if I come out to standard depth, well, then I'm sticking out, aren't I? If I don't go with French doors I'm at a terrible disadvantage because of the location of that thing in the kitchen. If I go with French doors and a side by side with the freezer on the left I have to deal with not being able to open the freezer all the way because of the effing door frame. If I go with a slide out drawer freezer and half French doors my options dwindle to just about nothing in my size range. 

So. The Kenmore 73003 it is. It will arrive on Friday. I have already emptied the Amana and broken it free. There is no sign of Lucy; she should be dust by now anyway. I did find some ant traps though. I wonder about that. He put ant traps back there and then promptly built in an appliance that could never be moved. Interesting. 

The 73003 does have an internal ice maker. In the event that I decide to run water in the future I can do that. The reviews say don't even think it though so maybe I won't. 

Love in the passageways

I walk alone whenever possible. It isn't an attempt to be antisocial; it's a power grab for personal space, a reasonable amount of time to spray down the white board and maybe just look out the window at the landscaping in front of the great, curved building before turning right toward the stairwell and heading into the passageways which are part of a multilevel warren I've yet to work out that contains - at the very least - a cafeteria with decent food, a large seating area which smells oddly like high school, outdoor seating and gardens, a giant sweeping staircase leading to an airport lobby without the airport but definitely with the Starbucks and rows and rows of nearly empty consulting carrels. Like rigid octopus tentacles, the yet un-inventoried passageways lead off the upper level; places I don't care to revisit. I've been lost down one or two of them, badly enough to avoid repeating the process. The back end of the very lowest level leads to the gym which eventually leads to outside my building which I only understand because I landed outside that gym during an evacuation.

I walk alone because I'm rebooting the system the same way I have to reboot my phone at least once during the day or it starts doing weird stuff. I am on my phone four hours a day at a minimum which generally turns into six and can max out at eight and one day went nine. I blew through a brand new set of Apple earbuds in three months. Yup. They do wear out. One day they just stopped working. So the phone, I am clear it gets to a point where it just can't cope. If I have five minutes before I have to launch the next web session which will be associated with my phone, I reboot the phone just to make sure it doesn't decide to tip the session over on its ass. 

The problem with rebooting me is during the process everything is out of context. I once ran into my boss's boss, who I really just need to start calling my boss, understanding I have three bosses and that's just how it is, in the hall and I gave her a completely blank look. Later she asked if I was alright. I said was trying to work something out and just deep in it and since I'd only been there maybe six weeks that explanation flew. I've learned to just smile for the most part at any and everyone coming at me these days. That sort of sucks, you know that, right? It's this thing women do, we smile to disarm and this is because it stops two things from happening. It stops that INSIPID, smile, sweetie, you look so much xxx when you do, and also when we are smiling we are harmless (you know we're not harmless, right?) so it is necessary that we smile. Eff the patriarchy... but I do it anyway, it's been useful and keeps me out of trouble during the reboot. For the most part. 

It does not keep me out of trouble if I happen to run into my Boss during a reboot. On the other hand my Boss doesn't expect me to be harmless and my Boss expects to find me rebooting periodically. My Boss checks to make sure I'm not going to kill something if it looks like I need a reboot...

My Boss is quite certain I am eventually going to kill the Collibra guy who is really a solutions guy and not a dev guy and that I will kill him on general principle. I have assured him I have absolutely no desire to kill the Collibra SL. The Collibra SL is more than likely to kill his own self and I'm mostly motivated to save him from his own self for purely self-serving reasons. If he is dead, even by his own hands, the shadow of that ONE SINGLE TIME I ATE HIM FOR LUNCH will settle over my head like Shelob's gossamer web and I will have to live with that. Far better he continue to stumble along making people crazy and I will traipse along behind him offering help. One of us looks absolutely delicious. Sometimes I have to reboot twice.

There is a very large project that launched well before my arrival. I was stuck on that project just to watch in the event that our part of the project might actually show some sign of upcoming traction. At some point I fell off the meeting distribution list and didn't even notice. It was moving so slowly it didn't even matter. I got back on the distribution list, jumped back into the weekly meetings, reviewed the notes from the meetings I'd missed and realized not much had happened. I am marginally embarrassed to note that I was entirely unaware of the end date. It was moving so slowly the prospect of an end date didn't even register. What my team would have to do, which is massive, since the project actually revolves around two of our systems wasn't even registering because so much of the pre-work with the existing systems just wasn't moving. Theoretically speaking I knew exactly what was going to happen when it got to us, my Boss knew, theoretically speaking, but we were tracking the way you track a hurricane heading for Florida (Irma) a week before the Caribbean has gotten particularly upset. 

At some point the project manager was given another project manager which is an odd thing. They didn't replace him, they just stuck one in on top of him and suddenly we had to yank a resource off a high profile project (sorry, guys) and throw him into the melee head first. Here are your line items and here are the associated deliverable dates. Can you produce this by these dates? I don't know, he said, I have to look at this. Wise move. New PM didn't like that but I understand; I'm guilty of an assumptive close now and then and if I was in his shoes I'd be pushing the entire team like their lives depended on it because apparently the date on this thing is Q1 and I'm just not seeing it. 

My boss's boss came to visit me in the dungeon (back when we still had the dungeon and I seriously miss that room) and I have never seen her lean in with such intensity. She wanted two things. She wanted to not promise anything we couldn't deliver. Right, that's good. And she wanted to give him what he was asking for. Yeah, I hear you. You, she said, get people to make deadlines. Yes, I said, I do, but in this case, we don't quite understand what we're looking at yet so we're asking for a minute. Go talk to him, she said. I'll find him, I said.

I went to the original PM, a really approachable guy, and asked, where is he? I need to talk to him. He pointed out the back of this guy's head. OK. We are in open workspace now. This is what open workspace looks like:

This is close to what we have except those workspaces have dual monitors which are a little bigger and the desks come up and down so you can sit or stand. The round tables are for conversation and don't have power (so you can't sit there all day) but the long table with the lamps is called a library and you can stay all day. We don't have a row of offices, we have conference rooms and collaboration rooms which can only be booked on the spot. The open workspace is supposed to take us out of our cubes and offices so we can collaborate but what it does is create a noise fest which drives us into conference and collab rooms as often as possible. When people stay at their desks they develop a hard shell, keep their headsets glued to their ears (the landlines are all gone, if you want a speaker phone, you go to a conference or collab room, the number of meetings that take place by webex with people sitting right next to each other is astonishing) and their eyes focused on their screens. When we were in cubes you could stand at the edge of a cube and politely try to get someone's attention. Now you are invading personal space if a headset is on and eyes are forward. 

I stared at the back of his head willing him to move. 

I didn't want to ping him on IM without an introduction with a subject this heated. I slid around into his peripheral vision. He looked up. I mouthed: phone? He shook his head. I mouthed: I'll come back. I slunk back to the dungeon.

That was not a repeatable offense, I had not managed to introduce myself, none of our meetings were actually face to face, I had absolutely zero intention of having a resource conversation during a status meeting which meant I was going to have to resort to an IM introduction. Crap. Crap. Crap.

Crap.

AND Crap.

I fetched lunch later than usual because, life, so I was rebooting at about 1:30, head up, eyes forward, hugging the glass wall on the right to avoid taking out anyone with a full lunch tray and

Hi. You were looking for me.

Dead stop. Processing. I don't think I've seen your face dead on before and I have no freaking idea who you are and why are you looking at me like that? Crap. You want something from me. I want something from you? I don't think I want anything from anyone right now. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This is going to be a missed opportunity if I can't think of what I need from someone and attach it to your face...

You want to talk about J's deliverables. 

(oh holy crap it's you!)

(it's you and how do you know it's me? I am nearly certain we have NOT been introduced)

(you have beautiful eyes)

(where the hell did that come from?)

(why are you smiling at me?)

(stop that. seriously. stop that. stop smiling at me.)

(oh my god. we're just standing here not saying anything and you're smiling at me and we probably look beyond stupid)

I smiled at him and said, yeah, about that, listen, J can give you the green lines and the blue lines in this sprint but the red lines are still a big black hole and we seriously don't want to promise you something we don't understand yet. 

PM:    What can you give me?

Alecto:    He said he could give you timing on the red lines by the end of next sprint. I realize that's a horrible answer and we really would prefer to tell you we'll GIVE you the red lines next sprint but since we don't even know what it is we can't promise you something we can't deliver. 

PM:    What the hell is a sprint?

Alecto:    Oh. It's a two week cycle. I'm sorry. I thought you knew. We use Agile project management and I just realized you're on Waterfall and none of that is going to make any sense. So listen, about those other line items below J's. The one's with my boss's boss's name on them and the September 11 date, that's a joke, right?

PM:    I don't joke.

Alecto:    You're still smiling at me.

PM:    That has nothing to do with this conversation.

Alecto:    Well, I'm going to use it to the best of my advantage anyway.

PM:    You're still smiling at me.

Alecto:    That has nothing to do with this conversation.

PM:    And I'm going to use it to the best of my advantage anyway.

Alecto:    Of course you are. 

PM:    Those lines are going to have her name until you can give me a resource and a date.

Alecto:    How about never?

PM:    Did you really just say that?

Alecto:    No. Not really. I just don't know what it is yet but it looks like the re-engineering lines and if it's the analysis, we're going to need to break it up. 

PM:    By when?

Alecto:    God! You sound like me!

PM:    So you'll have something for me by Tuesday's meeting?

Alecto:    I will. 

PM:    It was nice to see you. Where do you sit?

Alecto:    In the dungeon.

PM:    You're a contractor?

Alecto:    Yes.

PM:    How long are you here?

Alecto:    Forever.

PM:    Seriously?

Alecto:    No. Contractors can stay for thirty months.

PM:    Well, that's long enough I guess.

(long enough for what?!)

(stop smiling at me)

(you have the most beautiful blue eyes)

This Thursday we moved back upstairs to our new space and I had no idea where anyone was located. Bhaven and I secured a Collab room for the day which kept us out of the chaos and the Deloitte crew got the big conference room right next to us but it felt weird being separated from them despite their overall noisiness. 

This Thursday was hard because I'd screwed up my hotel reservations and only had Tuesday night because of the holiday. So I drove home on Wednesday night, which made sense if you look at the normal pattern of stay Monday night, go home Tuesday night, stay Wednesday night, go home Thursday night, but drove back on Thursday morning and then right back on Thursday night and fitting 50 hours into four days - which was NOT my intention - while driving 400 miles was a bitch. So on Thursday in our new home on the third floor I was having trouble processing by about 3 PM and the world was on fire. I found myself with my Boss standing in front of boss's boss because we actually caught her at her workspace, discussing those really scary re-engineering lines and, well, the resources we either do or do not have. We talked about the new PM and what I agreed to and what I did not agree to and why her name was still on that spreadsheet with those atrocious dates. 

Boss's Boss:    Get them off!

Alecto:    He isn't going to take them off or move the dates until we have a resource and dates and we won't have dates until we have and analyst looking at them. But please, notice the entire thing is in pale grey. 

Boss's Boss:    Go and talk to him.

Alecto:    I don't even know where he is.

Boss's Boss:    Well he knows exactly where you are.

Alecto:    What?! 

Boss's Boss:    He's staring at you like he's about to reel you in and he's got a funny look on his face. 

Alecto:    What?!

Boss's Boss:    Turn around.

Twelve feet behind me he sat at his new workspace with his headset on but not staring at his screen. Smiling. 

Boss's Boss:    Do you see that library table over there just behind him?

Alecto:    Yes.

Boss's Boss:    That's where I want you to sit starting Monday.

Alecto:    Seriously?

Boss's Boss:    Yes. 

I walked over and said, well, now I know where you sit. 

PM:    And now I know where you sit.

Alecto:    How do you know that?

PM:    I have very good ears.

(Fuck)

Later my boss said, I have never seen that guy smile. Seriously. Never. 

Alecto:    That is because he thinks he's going to eat me for lunch. 

Boss:    I don't think that's why he's smiling.

Alecto:    I don't need a smiling shark sort of complication in my life right now so I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that. Do I really have to sit at the library?

Boss:    Yup.

Alecto:    Fine, but J sits with me. His head might pop off but at least I'll have something to feed the shark first. 

Scrum Master 2.0

According to my timesheet I am a level IV Project Manager. I don't even know what that means. I have a feeling it means whatever it had to mean to get me in the door at the same bill rate as a technical consultant lumped into the category as consulting professional (meaning they can actually lead a project - maybe, we hope, please). I have been called Release Manager (meaning whatever the person using the title needed it to mean in the moment), Project Manager, Engagement Manager, DRM (it's a thing) Resource Manager, Departmental Interface, DSM (not a thing, a department) Ambassador (erm), and Scrum Master. Oh, and the person who keeps Mike's head from popping off. 

Here. Do this. OK? 

What is this, exactly? 

That's the thing, if I had ANY remaining fear left of not having a freaking clue or people knowing that I didn't have a freaking clue about something I'd have sunk to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and gotten my foot stuck just shy of Challenger Deep. Who names these things anyway? 

At least six times a week, maybe even twelve if I'm counting:

What is this, exactly?

I don't know, start with this person and that person and see what you come up with. Do you want me to draft the email?

No. I do not.

He gave up asking that question weeks ago. 

Oddly enough I was handed two incoming consultants and asked to onboard them. Not because I should onboard them but because I was the only successful incoming consultant to onboard herself in under three days without requiring intervention. Apparently I'd worked it out. 

Alecto, can you get Max sorted out when he walks in the door? I don't know what you did but can you show him how to do it?

Yes.

Alecto, when Bhaven comes in on Monday morning can you...? 

Yes.

Max attached himself like a barnacle which was understandable because we kept him in the dark and fed him like a mushroom. We just want him to write code. No distractions. Just. Write. Code. But he has needs. 

Alecto. 

Yes, Max.

Alecto, can I...?

Yes, Max.

And then we introduced him to a business partner and gave him a deadline and halfway through to the deadline I realized NO ONE WAS CHECKING ON HIM.

Max. Can you send me the link to the site where you're storing the documents you promised our business partners for review prior to our Monday meeting?

Yes.

Max. Where is your link?

Coming.

Max. It's Friday.

Coming.

Max. It's Friday at 4 PM.

Coming.

Max!

OK.

Alecto. Can you book me a room and schedule a meeting for this other thing I'm doing?

On Fridays we are all remote so I couldn't very well walk over to his cubicle and throttle him. He'd copied the entire team expected to be in this meeting which was news to me because I didn't realize he'd been let out of his cage for more than one project. I also didn't realize he really was my barnacle. 

I booked the room and scheduled the meeting.

Max. On Monday I'm going to show you how to do this.

subcontext: do I LOOK like your mother?

OK. 

Fridays are hellish. I don't know why people do this but my first meeting starts at 9 and my last meeting is over at 4 and after that I owe notes on the last meeting that need to be so extensive I want to pull my hair out and remove limbs from someone. There are increments in between where I put out fires or I multi-task but at the end of the day there is literally nothing left. 

Early next week we are moving to something called a swing space for two months while they gut our current space, ripping out the cubicles and offices and putting us all into this new sort of open seating which is really just a series of benches with monitors in pod like groups that leave no space whatsoever for anything even remotely personal. From a consultant's perspective it's perfect. We stopped carrying personal a very long time ago. From an employee's or director's perspective it's a god awful transition. The consultant/contractor/contingent workers will all be in one big room which is actually an upgrade for us as the five of us in this particular group have been scattered. My problem is Max. Max has to have an external monitor. We do not ask people who code, especially working with flow to work with a laptop. He's been squatting in a cube which has a monitor and docking station so he's been OK. 

About midweek I realized the shit was going to hit the fan when we went to the big room and I came up with a plan.

There is a guy who helps me onboard. I discovered him by accident. He's part of my ever growing pool of millennials I keep in my back pocket for times I really need to make something happen because good lord, these people will move mountains if you ask them in the right way. I call this one The Unicorn and I call him that to his face. Well, not his face exactly, his IM. He's in the Florida office. As of Friday he became The Best Unicorn Ever because he succeeded in achieving the impossible. He obtained a peripheral for a contractor without an assigned seat. 

So he sent me an IM letting me know he had this handled and I didn't see this IM for a good forty minutes because I was on webex tearing my hair out. 

For forty minutes The Unicorn was rewriting his resume because he just doesn't know me that well yet.

For the record, a dock is a docking station. He plugs the notebook into the dock and the external monitor lights up. It would be nice if he had an external keyboard too but we decided not to push our luck. 

It is going to take The Unicorn the entire weekend to catch his breath. I read the exchange to Mike. I didn't send the screen shot. I just read it. It made Mike's day too which was a really good thing because Mike's head was just shy of popping off. Meetings, 9 - 4. Why do people do this?

After we finished laughing I asked Mike,

Mike. What do I do?

What do you mean, what do you do? What's broken?

Everything is broken, Mike, we have a handle on all of it at the moment, wait until Monday and then it's a whole new game. I mean, what do I do?

You mean like what's your job?

Yeah, what's my job?

Are you telling me you need a job description? Seriously? Because I really can't box you like that.

No. I know. I'm not asking you to box me. I guess I just realized I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Last client I walked in the door with zero expectation and I grew into something and that was great. Here I walked in with some expectation and every day it takes another twist and that's OK too but I realized I was just sort of going with the flow and I might be missing some sort of expectation. Probably I should have asked Elizabeth.

Elizabeth probably has other ideas.

Yeah, I know. I have to keep you both happy but the truth is the scale tipped in your favor a couple of weeks ago. So really, what do I do?

Well, on the Collibra project you're a scrum master.

No I'm not. I'm a project manager. Actually I'm a program manager. Nadia said so. 

No. I'm the program manager.

OK, I'm the project manager and Erika is the solution lead and Max is the developer and then what the hell is Andy?

Andy is the perfect storm. 

I'm not even going there.

I'm not going there either.

So what am I?

You're scrum master 2.0

What is scrum master 2.0? 

I don't know, I just made that up. Scrum master 2.0 is everything scrum master does plus shovel the project into structure and do whatever it takes to stand it up on time and within budget. 

That sounds like a project manager with a diaper wipe.

What's your bill rate again?

Right. Scrum master 2.0 it is. 

Also, Max's spare dick is coming in on ice sometime Monday morning. I'm not sure I want that written into any part of any job description anywhere. Just sayin'. 

Not even if it increases your bill rate? 

Not even if it increases my bill rate. I do not intentionally order spare dicks for anyone. You need a spare dick you are On. Your. Own. Buddy. 

 

Right down the rabbit hole

In June of 1812, shortly after his seventy-second birthday, the Marquis de Sade made an abrupt career change against the wishes of his sixteen year old girlfriend who would have preferred that he return to the stage. Probably she wanted a better part. In any event, the Marquis, aware that he was running out of time did what very few old men have the balls to do (he'd already taken up with the adolescent); he dropped everything, turned on a dime and despite any sort of training, formal or informal chose to follow his childhood dream.

The Marquis de Sade became an architect.

Donatien got himself a drafting table and went to work. Given his precise nature learning to draw a straight line was not difficult. Respecting building codes did not come naturally. In the end it didn't really matter because none of it came to fruition. Donatien drew hundreds of buildings, each classified and stored by category in a series of flat files which collected a great deal of dust after his death and toward the end of the nineteenth century were rolled into storage units by disinterested family members and deposited into random attic dormers which is where they sat biding their time until January, 1972 when a random architect was kicking canisters in his grandmother's attic. He pulled out the precursor to the blueprint. I don't know what it's called, you'll have to look it up if it matters all that much. I'm really tired. I'm getting to that. It's mostly the Marquis's fault anyway. 

He pulled out the precursor to the blueprint and looked at the drawings, one after another. Interesting stuff but not particularly viable. The guy had a funny habit of running hallways into dead ends and he couldn't seem to make up his mind his mind where one building stopped and another started. It didn't make much sense. For example, there was a main entryway on the ground floor but you couldn't access it from the ground floor. You had to walk around and around before you could get to the circular staircase that would take you down to the lobby. There seemed to be a secret elevator shaft but it lacked evident doors. Maybe there were secret panels. There were seven interconnected buildings which provided one point four million square feet of totally not navigable space - as in, walk more than twenty yards and two turns from your desk and you're not going to make it back. God help you if you park in P1 and work in building 5 on the third floor. This was clearly not a building that should ever be built. 

There's really no rational explanation except this: he was a direct descendent of the Marquis de Sade. He had a mean streak a mile wide. He boiled bunnies in the kitchen. Or something. Or everything. I don't know. In November, 1974 in Basking Ridge, NJ, AT&T moved 4200 employees into this building. Later they all moved out. Pharmacia & Upjohn (PNU) were going to move in when they left Kalamazoo but then there was an uproar with Pfizer and that didn't happen. The building remained vacant long enough for a significant haunting to root itself into the walls. 

In 2005 my client moved itself in. 

They show no signs of leaving. They're outgrowing the space. They're making it bigger. There is internal construction. Hallways are walled off forcing you to go down one floor, navigate a different layout and then come up another elevator bank and back track. There is only a bare minimum map showing the location of the defib devices and the map is DEAD WRONG. People seem to understand where they are but they cannot give directions one building past their own. You might as well be asking for directions to St. Louis from Portland, Maine if you're in building four and you need to get to building one.

There are signs pointing to blocks of buildings. This is helpful right up until it's not. This way to buildings 3,2,1. OK, now where do I go? I think I can see building 1 through that window but I'll be damned if I can see any way to get there. I walk in circles asking people. They shrug. No one goes to building 1. Well I do. I go there because I put my car there because when I asked the parking guy where to park if I was in building 5 he pointed me to P1. EFFING SADIST!

So here's what I started doing. I couldn't leave bread crumbs. Someone might clean them up or move them or eat them or I'd be sent home for bad behavior. I started taking pictures. I came in through elevator banks 3 and 4. I live at elevator banks 15 and 16 (got that too). At the big pink door (it's a wall like thing, I have a picture), turn right and go down one level. When you see the lobby, follow the outside wall three quarter turn and then take the last door on the left. Walk twenty paces and turn right. The stairway will appear. 

Don't ever, ever go to building 1 again. 

One point four million square feet and nothing is in a straight line and no floor looks the same. 

I go down one level for coffee. I am not entirely sure which way I turn but so far I have always found my way back. I am just sure to never go through the glass doors. If I go through the glass doors on the second floor I could be gone forever.

I'm just going to leave this upside down. It's not how I found it but it pretty much illustrates my experience in navigating the building. It is kind of cool though. Every day I go downstairs for coffee and someone has done something with those rubber bands on pegs. For the first two days it actually just read Kyle. Apparently Kyle was MIA for a couple of days and the Millennials working in the next section over were protesting. So they put his name up there in some sort of attempt to invoke his presence? Apparently it worked. Kyle showed up and changed it to: ITS THE END OF THE DAY. I wish I'd thought to capture that one. I might have pinned it up in my cube except my cube is borrowed and when Sree comes back I'm going to be banished to the cafeteria with the rest of the contractors so never mind. This showed up yesterday. I thought, really? Haven't we outgrown that yet? It must have been on my face because the kid standing next to me said, don't worry, we're just being snarky, we've learned to be mean. He had the sweetest smile.

Here is how I found my car at 7 PM on Thursday evening:

Mine is the red car but you do understand that taking a picture of my actual car would not have been particularly helpful. The picture of the elevator bank AND the picture of the pillar together were key. I don't actually know how many parking garages there are but if I had to walk through more than two of them with multiple levels - I don't want to talk about it. 

Bread crumbs. 

Oh. My job. That. Yeah, so me and my brain went back to work this week and we're suffering from it. My kid keeps asking if I made any friends yet and I keep telling her I'm not sure that's the point yet. I'm too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on but in the mean time I realized I did actually get my arms around and wrangle a runaway horse this week so there's that. It's all very new and I keep thinking about the post where I wrote that I wasn't ready for it to be over, I wasn't ready to be done learning, I wasn't ready to be done being scared from the overwhelm. Well guess what? Be careful what you ask for. A mountain just landed on my head. I'm glad for it. 

I don't feel like proofing this doc. Sorry. 

 

How best to cancel a dating subscription

I had a subscription to Match when I was forty-five and it ran me ragged. I didn't have to say yes perpetually but I did for a number of reasons, the biggest of which was that I'd agreed to face forward and say yes for the sake of avoiding saying no on general principle. I'm pretty sure I was running on a six month cycle but I don't think it was on auto renew; I think I had to make a conscious choice to continue each time. There may have been a break in the middle before I finally hung it up after that one night at the Roadhouse when that poor guy realized who he was sitting with. We were listening to a band called The Pears. There was Momma Pear, Poppa Pear and god help us, probably Baby Pear. They weren't good but they didn't suck either. They were loud. All music at the Roadhouse is loud and we were sitting right next to them. I remember this because Poppa Pear gave me a little round disc with a bunch of pears which I pinned to the lamp on my night table. It's so small you'd hardly notice but I left it there as a reminder. It's still there. 

So here's what I remember, when I finally killed my subscription it stayed dead. I think I might have gotten a few more hits but I didn't get hammered and I didn't have to dismantle my profile. I didn't have to turn it off either, I just let it expire and then it was over. A couple years later when I turned it back on it was outdated as hell but suddenly active with all that outdated information and I had to pull it down fast because it was in the wrong pool and that was the last thing I wanted. So I fixed it. About three months in I couldn't take it anymore and I suspended the account. It took a year to put it back up. During that period of suspension which included the three months after the grace period when I could no longer reactivate it and without having to pay for it again I got HAMMERED, SPAMMED, SLAMMED with email announcing that SOMEBODY NEEDED TO TALK TO ME RIGHT THIS SECOND. Now that's just not fair and even if you do know it's marketing it's a hard thing to ignore especially if you're feeling hurt and vulnerable. 

I did ignore it. Eventually I brought the account back online and very carefully rewrote it to attract exactly what I thought I wanted. I did this before I figured out men in my demographic don't read. Eventually I had to put this up at the top:

***I do not respond to winks. If you wink at me I will permanently delete your profile***

Sometimes that works but sometimes they're still only looking at the pictures. Mostly I have better luck on one of the other sites (the eHarmony site is where I found the really crazy people and I only spent three months over there) so I have largely ignored Match, just letting the subscription run out and deleting what rolls in periodically. As I approached the end of the month I realized I was going to have to catch the auto renew before it happened but more importantly I was going to have to do something about my profile to make sure the vendor had nothing left with which to falsely advertise; in this case false advertising meaning putting my inactive profile in front of active men. Since I can't really stop them because I can't really prove it the best I could do was delete all the pictures and remove the profile information. 

Deleting the pictures was easy. None of these sites require a photograph. Deleting the text was not so easy. Not all of the sites require text but Match does. There are some things that have driven me batshit about profiles for eight years now. I see the same things show up on eighty percent of them and I finally worked out that they're responding to female profiles and in large part, women are responding to men and we've created one big, effed up, feedback loop. While I couldn't bring myself to actually use any of the text speak that litters these things I went one step farther and put in the batshit crazy. 

See, this way I will know with absolute certainty that any spam email I receive from Match once my account has closed for the season is either a complete fabrication or has come from someone who is responding to random profiles without photographs OR looking for batshit crazy women who walk around with barking albino pythons.

This is what is currently published on Match Dot Com. I think that's really all it's going to take. Think I should put back the part about no winking?

 

What even was that?

Worst thirty minutes of my day so far. I've only ever had two other phone interviews go belly up and both were with the same company, just six years apart; same company, same department more or less and I had the same set of expectations going in on round two. I was not disappointed. I was not what they wanted and needed and I never will be. People should just stop trying to shovel me under that door. I had limited expectations going in on this one because it came out of nowhere. My recruiter threw it over the wall along with a junior account manager and promptly left the country. We, the junior account manager and I had a brief conversation thirty minutes before the thirty minute interview to review the thirty minute interview that went before mine. She dropped acronyms I'd never heard of. I googled wildly. Elisha, I've never heard of that. Tell me again what they're looking for? She dropped some more. Elisha. Are they looking for a project manager or a technical person who can make decisions based on these products, some of which I've never heard of? Elisha. Who are these people? Elisha. Of these three names, who is the hiring manager, or the decision manager, or can you give me the hierarchical structure? OK, what do they do? Why are they on this call? OK, I'll ask them. 

They are self-defined chaos but when questioned can't explain beyond what they've already told me. Or won't, I'm not sure. I'm OK with chaos; I've been living in it since 1997, but anarchy? I hate anarchy and it generally hates me. I have a big sign on my forehead which reads 'punch me'. I'm sure that's what's up there. God knows what's on my back. 

It took me a while at the last company to learn the corporate language but once learned I spoke it fluently. I know it's not limited to that one company specifically because I saw one contractor from another large company come in at least partially fluent. He might not have been very good at his job but at least he spoke the language. I was forgiven for not speaking the language probably because I kept my mouth shut until I picked up on it. My favorite was the use of the verb socialize in the context of communicating or introducing a new concept to a group of people. Have you socialized that to the user base yet? I never could get that out of my mouth, preferring the old fashioned use of the word communicate. Communicate has a nice ring to it although it might lack certain complexities. 

I don't lie or hide things in interviews. That shit will come back to bite you in the ass so fast your head will explode. I do ask questions, a lot of questions if I have the opportunity and I do my damn best to make them sound intelligent. I say what I do know, what I have done, and what I don't know as well as what I'd like to do and why I think I can do it even if I haven't yet. I always ask for acronym clarification if I haven't had the opportunity to clarify that shit before hand. All that stuff is easy and shouldn't raise any red flags unless you ask so many of them it sounds like you've never been exposed to a particular product in which case you probably shouldn't be there but corporate language or parts of products ought to be understandable.

The bits that are tough are understanding who they are and what they want. OK, not always, but sometimes. If I don't know who you are, what you really do, where you fit into this picture, what you're trying to accomplish, then I'm going to have a really hard time understanding what you really want in which case, I sell me to you exactly how?

Woman who appears to be the Lead PM: "We're really impressed with the years and the detail of the project management on your resume. Can you tell us about that?"

Me: "OK, there's a lot of project management on my resume. Can you tell me where you'd like me to start or what you're interested in specifically?"

silence.

Me: "OK, I'll go into the dark ages because that's where the chaos really started."

dark age story about chaos and resolution and conclusion. 

Me: "I think that sort of scope creep and team dysfunction on an offsite, short term project is not uncommon but I'm not sure the solution I used then is the solution I could necessarily use today. I'd have to come up with something different. On the other hand, it works locally."

Woman who appears to be the Lead PM:  (I think she's the lead PM?) "I don't know, that might work today." 

You all have that kind of money? seriously?

In the end I struggled with white space. I hate white space in an interview. What is it you want me to tell you? I can't fill in the missing pieces because I'm still trying to figure out what you are so I guess I'll tell you more about what I am, what I'm not, what I can be, and what I'd prefer to be. Then I'm going to ask you some questions. 

I wasn't looking at the clock.

Largely Silent Third Party (Gender: Male): "Do you have any questions for us?"

Me: "Yes. I have a lot of notes, there are things I'd like clarified."

I wasn't looking at the clock but if I had to guess I'd say I probably had -55 seconds remaining.

"Woman who appears to be the Lead PM, if I understand correctly, your role is overall project management, is that accurate?"

Woman who appears to be the Lead PM: "Well, yes, but I'm supposed to be the portfolio manager, that just hasn't happened yet."

By now I've figured out what a portfolio manager means in this context.

"Quiet Guy From Florida, can you please clarify your ownership in this project?"

Quiet Guy From Florida: "I manage the data integrity."

Not what I expected. What I really want to ask is: Can somebody please explain why you need me? If you explain why you need me I can tell you the parts that fit. Was there a job description somewhere that I missed? 

"Largely Silent Third Party (Gender: Male), and where does your responsibility lie in this project?" 

"I own it."

REALLY, ELISHA?! BECAUSE A HEADS UP WOULD HAVE BEEN AWESOME.

Largely Silent Third Party (Gender: Male): "Do you have any other questions because we've got another appointment we're going to run late for?"

Me: "I'm sure I do but I can always come back with them."

Largely Silent Third Party (Gender: Male): "Yes, any questions please run through Elisha."

Woman who appears to be the Lead PM: "Great, thanks for your time."

Click.

 

Several hours later I climbed back up the cliff and handed my end of the rope to Elisha. Elisha's end of the rope was tied to one of the legs of her desk. 

Me:  "Here, Elisha, here is the other end of the rope I've been hanging onto, dangling off this cliff since 11:40 this morning. I thought you might pull me up but you haven't so I climbed up myself. I know you need the rope back, so here it is. Also, while I'm here, how did you think that went?"

ELISHA!: "Oh, thanks for that! I think it went really well."

Me:  "Seriously?"

ELISHA!: "Yeah, it was a little quiet in the beginning but then it picked up."

Me:  "Oh. I didn't think it went all that well. I thought the beginning was OK but in the end it got a little muddled but maybe that was just me. I've been wrong before."

I'm not sure I have but there's a first time for everything.

ELISHA!: "Well I think it went fine and I'll be talking to them tomorrow afternoon."

Me: "ELISHA!, is there a job description or anything like it? Because I had a really hard time getting my arms around what they're really looking for."

ELISHA!: "No, I don't think there really is. They ask everybody different questions. Sometimes it sounds like they want a more technical person, sometimes they want more of a PM. It sounds like they just need an extra body."

Me: "OK"

ELISHA!: "I'll call you sometime tomorrow afternoon around three or four, OK?"

ME: "OK, that's great, I'll talk to you tomorrow."

You know, I walked into the last company without any sort of job description at all. I was thrown into a pit full of consultants in the middle of a release cycle and abandoned. I walked around, went to a couple of meetings and found something to do. Then I found some more somethings to do and got pulled into some more meetings. After a while somebody gave me a job title and a little while later I wrote the job specs, the job description, requirements, guide, powerpoint, and step by step instructions not to mention the manifesto. Eventually I left leaving that legacy to be divided up and cannibalized behind me since they couldn't afford the headcount and nobody was willing to do the job but the point is I did this thing and it was OK. No, it wasn't OK, it was good. 

That job and this job had two major differences. That job had Vision Man and Clarity Woman (otherwise known as Headspinning Woman because we are still living in a very sexist world and people STILL cannot cope with intensity in a powerful female. assholes). Vision Man sat on top of everything and fought our major battles and got us what we needed. Clarity Woman changed her mind every seven and a half days often scaring the shit out of us in the process but changing course every seven and a half days was probably what kept us on track and out of the deep end of the pool long enough to catch our collective breath. Clarity Woman held every one of us accountable no matter what. It might have been hell trying to figure out what that no matter what business was some of the time but she'd white board it as many times as it took as long as you were willing to sit there and pay attention.

Largely Silent Third Party (Gender: Male) and Woman who Appears to be the Lead PM sound like Vision Man and Clarity Woman or at least that they should be but I just can't tell. 

no neat and tidy closing sentence available (but at least I managed to give back the other end of the rope) 

What may or may not be incubating in that duffle

I freely admit to being terrified. I kind of wonder how my mother felt when she dumped out the contents of the green canvas duffle after two damp weeks at Girl Scout camp. I can still remember what that smelled like; nice in a musty, woodsy, but I don't want to keep wearing it sort of way. Except I would have. At ten, eleven, twelve, and possibly even thirteen (questionable) she still had to peel clothing off my back and throw me in the general direction of water. One summer my uncle handed me a wash cloth (I'd heard of them but not once held one up close) and a bar of soap and told me to go scrub my neck. That nice tan I had going on turned out to be summer dirt. I hadn't been home enough that summer for my mother to have seen me (or my brother) in direct sunlight for much more than thirty seconds. 1977. Right. I was thirteen and Star Wars was awesome! Quality time with Mom; too dark in the theater to see the dirt. That woman had her priorities straight. 

Elizabeth has done her best to keep the still clean clothing in one large bag and the pretty much not so clean with the ohgoodgodthisisrancid clothing in the other large bag but there's also a bit of a free for all going on in there. The good news is they gave away all of the white B3 work shirts which, despite how clean she may have looked in the video on Tuesday morning, looked like holy hell by the end of the day. Over to the right is the blue duffle with the flowers. It's eclipsed by all that plastic which makes it hard to believe all that plastic started out in the duffle in the first place. I trip over the mountain several times a day as a reminder that I'm going to have to deal with it one way or another before the next unsuspecting non-family member crosses the threshold. 

If I take it out with the trash she'll be naked until fall. Every piece of summer clothing this girl owns, and then some, is in one of these plastic bags. We don't have a lot around here and it's not so much for lack of spending as lack of spending. That made sense to someone. This started shortly after the divorce but went into full swing the year her dance tuition quadrupled and we stopped spending money on anything and by anything what I mean are those little things that aren't so little as you think because they add up. We still bought clothes and shoes and household items but we did oddly. I remember offending the living shit out of Portnoy when I bought two pairs of work shoes of reasonably decent quality (remember, I was his first and most likely only exposure to Corporate America and also the benefactor of my only real experience with direct reverse snobbery). I looked at him and said, I don't think you understand. It's going to be another two to three years before I buy another and by then both pair will have been walked into the ground. Which, by the way, is not such a good thing but I do it anyway for reasons other than money (shoe shopping is right up there with bra and bathing suit shopping).

So about buying things. You can suffer death by a thousand cuts and wonder why your budget is blown. You can watch your checking account empty down to about nothing and have no freaking idea why. I spent the majority of my money on food and gas. Those were the things that mattered to me. I stopped buying clothes, Elizabeth stopped buying clothes. She bought pointe shoes and ribbon and elastic and I told her boyfriend the other day that a pair of shoes ran $80 to $93 depending on the shoe and she quipped, add in the elastic and ribbon and you're up over $100 and if you need new toe pads and any other sort of thing you can hit $125 in a heart beat. 

My point is that we knew exactly where the money was going and I know those plastic bags hold every stitch of summer clothing that kid owns plus every last bit of underwear, all of her socks, all of my wool socks, three new t-shirts from Walmart (I notice they're still in their original bag; she was afraid they were cut a little too big and she was probably right so fine, I'll wear them), and her very best dress and sweater which she apparently stood in front of for a good fifteen minutes trying to work out if it was worth spending that much babysitting money on for, well, just a dress. When she tried it on back home I agreed it was worth that and probably a little bit more and that yes, it had called her name the minute she walked in the store. I have a dress in the very same color that I nearly cried about before I bought it this summer. She stood beside me and whispered, do it!

When she unloaded this explosion of unruly stuff I stood over it wondering how this kid had managed to accumulate so much and asked about the luggage contents brought by other girls. She laughed. They changed twice a day just like she did except, she informed me, Mom, if I'm only wearing these clothes for half the day I don't really see any point in not wearing them again the next day. It just seemed sort of ridiculous. I did wear all my underwear though. THAT had to be changed. Socks though, you were right about the socks.

And Mom, they started giving stuff away at the end of the week.

Wait, you guys were specifically told NOT to do that under any circumstances.

Yeah, I know, they did it anyway.

What did they give away?

Socks. Wool socks. Socks like my socks. OK, your socks but you know what I mean.

Elizabeth. Do you have any idea how much those cost?

Yep.

And they gave them away?

Yep. Hundreds of dollars of socks. Also, underwear.

WTF.

Yep. WTF.

Raised in barns?

Rich barns. One girl gave away half her clothes.

Elizabeth. Do you know what would have happened if you'd given away half your clothes?

Yep. I would have been missing half my clothes.

Thank god. Some sense.

Shadow hit the nail on the head when she said Elizabeth would come away with more than she'd leave behind. There was never any doubt about that but she came away with some things I wasn't counting on and they're not bad, I was just startled. 

Let's face it. My daughter is entitled. I don't mean that in a negative way and the one or two times I put that in front of her she burst into tears the way I did when I was told back in 2007 that I was privileged. My daughter tries very hard not to be entitled. She doesn't want to be that person and she's not; at least not for the most part. Quite honestly, you can't grow up in this environment without believing there are things which you should have and if it looks like you're not going to have them then something is FUCKING WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE. Let's face it, that's going to happen. The balance is the intelligence to recognize the truth no matter how much it hurts. You are not going to Tufts. Your parents can't (and will not take out the loans) pay for that and if you even think of taking out that sort of student loan you'd better check in to the earning potential on the other side of whatever degree you choose. And you're probably not going to land enough of a scholarship to get you over the hump. That's just an example and it's OK. This is not unexpected.

Back on coming away with more than she left behind. She worked hard and it was good. She knows how to dig, she tells me. She can dig for days. She can sift but sifting gets hard after a while but that's OK. She can use a pick axe on the rocks in the ground to loosen them up before digging again and she can make cement. She is pleased with herself. She understands painting very well to prevent rust and why it's so important to prevent rust. She has been paying attention and she knows just exactly how much a cinder block weighs having spent a good amount of time passing them down the line. Her work gloves show significant labor. She also knows what work avoidance looks like and she hasn't any use for it. She is embarrassed by it. She is possibly the smallest member of this very large team and she often feels alone although she knows perfectly well she isn't because she is surrounded by other students working just as hard as she is. One girl is crying but she can't say why. She keeps painting. 

At home she can't say what she learned when I ask her directly but she can paint around the edges. She tells me she was cold at night until she got up and turned off the fan closest to her cot. I feel bad about not packing something else but I'm not sure what that might have been. She says she stopped using the deet the second day because she forgot to put it on and then discovered the bugs didn't touch her but they were eating up the kids around her. Most of them had been sprayed or used the fluid she had but none of them had their clothing saturated or were taking B12. We don't know what did it but she never used the deet again and came home without a mark on her. Permethrin. Apparently it kills those bastards on contact. I have no idea why it seemed to be acting more like a force field because it's not like they don't want to eat her alive here in the swamp.  

She wanted more time with the kids. She didn't get it and it made her sad. She felt isolated but when they went into town she stayed in one local shop sitting on a stool watching a man paint small leather binders. He spoke no English and she had an entire four Spanish phrases (and six years of French which did absolutely no good). Later she had a few more words. She watched him finish and sell the binders as people came in and out of the shop. Sometimes he personalized the bindings if people wrote a name on a piece of paper. In the end when she had to go, she wrote my name on a piece of paper and pressed two flowers in the book, snapping it shut and burying it in the bottom of her bag. Later I explained about bringing plants across borders but I'm happy to have them. 

She swam in the crater of a long dormant volcano and saw an island with monkeys (the monkeys were not in the crater). She drank coconut water through a straw and then threw the coconut to the ground to crack it open and eat the inside. This confused me. Coconut water comes from greenish coconuts and coconut milk comes from ripe coconuts which is the sort of coconut you want to eat but she seemed happy enough to drink and eat what she was given. 

She went back to the site and dug up more dirt and moved more gravel and passed on more blocks and painted more rails. 

In the end they came home and it took the same twelvish hours and her bag was searched and she wondered why and I said, that's just the way it is, welcome to the family. Our bags are always searched. Never become a mule. It will end badly. 

I retrieved my girl and her explosive bag at 2:20 AM on Sunday morning. When I drove through the very dark towns to collect my girl I did my very best to keep the gas pedal off the floor. She was perfectly filthy and tired as hell but we stayed up until 4 anyway because we were wired from waiting. And also because I drank roughly 32 ounces of very strong coffee at 1 AM. I may have drifted off just before sunrise. 

She is happy to have gone. I have no doubt about that. She got more than she bargained for but I don't think she can articulate it yet and I'm quite certain she wasn't expecting anything of the sort. I still need to take the photographs off her camera. The battery died on day three and she lost the spare. I'm not sure if it died from heat exhaustion or something else but I'm hoping she's got enough in there to jog her memory a bit. She has always needed processing time and as she gets older the need for that time becomes greater. 

Choir Fest '08

I hate Choir Fest. I hate it so much I spend the entire year looking forward to hating it. Here is why I hate Choir Fest (you knew I would tell you, right?):

The parents, siblings and possible grandparents of 139 students are crammed into the old middle school gymnasium along with said 139 students. Parents, sibs, and grandparents are herded up into the antiquated bleachers that were constructed at the turn of the century (I'm making this part up) for midgets (this part is true, I'm sure of it). By the time we are all packed in together, knees jammed into backs, hips and shoulders disjointing in the heat the farting starts. The farting doesn't start until it gets really hot either and then it just hangs there, stagnant and deadly and you pray you don't pass out and fall forward into the beehive hairdo in front of you. Or maybe you should, it might be more comfortable and she looks sturdy enough to withstand it.

Choir Fest is kind of like the rainbow bridge. Not like when animals die but when brownies turn into girl scouts and there's this cute little ceremony where they walk over a decorated bridge and are greeted by their sisters in fascism (did I just use my out loud voice again?). In any event, this is the High Schools way of making sure the enrollment doesn't drop off when those eighth graders move on up and music stops being compulsory. So they do it in the middle school to make the middle school students feel something or other (I have no idea what because those 40 year old squishy seats in the High School Theater/Auditorium are LOVELY and the acoustics are just fine) and we all suffer. Also, it is purgatorial in it's length.

This thing starts at 7:30 and you might get out by 9:15 if you're lucky and it's Friday night and all most of you want to do is get home and commence with the Friday night drinking. As it is no longer politically correct to consume any form of adult beverage prior to any school sanctioned event no matter what time or day of the week, there have been no cocktails either and you can see a fair number of the congregation sweat. Toxicity is not fun.

There are 8, count 'em, 8 different choral ensembles. We have the 8th Grade Chorus, the Jr. Chamber Singers, the Women's Choir, the Concert Choir, the WesTones, the Chamber Singers, Women's A Cappella and the Bittersweet Harmonies. Lucia, by the way, is in two of these so there's no release in sight. There are, on the program, 22 pieces to be gotten through. I mention this because our choir directors have been known to mix things up a bit and add a song or two in between. Everyone in the bleachers counts the songs down. Everyone breathes a small sigh of relief as we pass the mid point. Some of the larger men use the mid point as the breaking point and bolt for the hall, sweat stained shirts billowing in the imaginary breeze.

It isn't that the music isn't beautiful. It is. These children are talented, devoted and well led. It is the conditions in which we sweat, wriggle, and smell. There are high points, like when the Jr. Chamber Singers sang Adiemus and there was this one tall voice in the second row that brought the house down and all you could think was, 7th grade, she's in 7th grade, will she make the Chamber Singers before my kid is off the circuit 'cause God I do want to hear her again. And it isn't as if your kid isn't spending more than her fair of time belting her lungs out. This is all good. This is the stuff that dreams are spun of, this is the reason for being. Except somebody just let out another of those silent but deadly things and good lord! is that woman really breathing into her handbag? Why yes she is.

And then it happens. All 139 of them, less the 4 who have become the band called The Fireflies, take the makeshift stage and the anticipatory hush washes over the bleachers creating that single moment of stillness when you can almost hear your heartbeat because you know that what is about to happen will never be recreated but will happen again and again, year in and year out and you know, right then, that you will cry when it is over and wish for one more chance to sit in the middle school bleachers.

This year it was Let it Be. I don't remember last year because that's the day Lucia left her father but the year before was Bohemian Rhapsody. I remember that I cried during Bohemian Rhapsody, that I could not believe what I was hearing and seeing. I remember wondering how they'd got all those kids to sound that way together in just three short hours (the only time they'd been together as a complete group). Last night I positively wailed. I clutched my gut and let the tears wash over my tired face and I let the music lift me up and carry me to heaven.

I can feel it in my middle, even now.