DON'S MESS

   I grew up in upstate New York. The winters were long with a fair amount of snow.  The area I lived in had what they call hills since they had nice rounded tops but in most people's terms they are mountains with deep valleys. During the winter we skied, went sledding did some ice skating, snowball fights, building snowmen and other winter sports.  One day when I was a junior in high school there were 5 of us sitting in Jeff's basement drinking some beer.  We came up with the idea of going tobogganing.  Over the years different places for sledding were open or closed . This was usually due to some accident where someone was either seriously hurt or killed.  Toboggans were not allowed in any of them since they are impossible to slow down or steer and they are generally dangerous.     None of us even owned a toboggan but after calling around we found that Pam would lend us her nice wooden 4 person toboggan.      We were also discussing where to go.  We came up with a place we ha

      The outsourcing company we worked for had bid and been awarded the contract to take care of the IT for a large fortune 500 company. It is a company that you know but the name is not important. I will call it xx company.  Our outsourcing company had bid the contract extremely cheap and planned on moving every IT job to India to save money.  Company xx had union IT employees and due to union rules the training period for the people in India would be short and then all the employees in the U.S. would be let go.  In most other outsourcing I have been involved in the transition is more of a gradual process.      There were many IT groups to transition to the offshore team.  The Production Control/automation team was only one of them.  I don't think our company really understood what the Production Control/automation group controlled and how critical it was to the company.  At this point I wasn't involved in any of this.   The first few of months the xx staff members were suppo

    As I mentioned I didn't know much about Mary.  So far, the first few days were a total struggle. I soon realized the reason that Mary was included in this client was because she is extremely dedicated to the job. On a normal day I think Mary works 16+ hours.  Many days way longer than that. This isn't just 5 days a week. She works Saturdays and Sundays as well.  Over the years of doing these long hours she has acquired a lot of knowledge and is very sharp. She definitely has her quirks, and some of them are difficult to work with, but having her on the project and both working long hours was the only way we were able to accomplish the project with just the two of us. 

This is a continuation of the previous story about Mary.     It is our first trip to Las Angeles.  Leaving on Monday and returning Friday night.  Monday morning Mary stopped at my house,  I loaded my suitcase into the car and she drove us to the airport.  We get out at the airport parking lot and we start walking to the terminal.  I have a roller bag that fits in the overhead bin and my computer bag.  Typical for a business traveler.  As we are walking I look over at Mary and I see that she only has a computer bag. "Wait…you forgot your suitcase."  She replied that she had everything and continued walking. I look back at her computer bag. It is just the size of her laptop and MAYBE a tiny bit thicker. I was concerned.  I couldn't believe that someone would go on a 5 day business trip with very few or no additional clothes.     If you remember from the previous story…. on Monday we walked 3.5 miles to the office in the heat and were very sweaty. AND over the week she wore

      I had been automating processes for a large company for several years. Along the way we were outsourced to a very large outsourcing company.  After a few years the outsourcing company had acquired another account and needed some help with the automation.  My boss asked me to start commuting to Los Angeles Monday-Fridays for the next year.  He mentioned that Mary would also be going.  At the time I thought it was odd to include her since the problem they were having was with my stuff(automation) and that wasn't Mary's expertise. I didn't know Mary well since she didn't work in my group. The only things I really knew about Mary was that she slept under her desk most nights in the office and some of her coworkers didn't always appreciate her.  However, I didn't know why.  (more to come on that later)     Our first task was to get plane tickets and I said I would rent the car.  Mary immediately said we were going to walk and did not need a car. She had done so

 I got a new job working for a very large bank.   I thought it was odd that on my first day I showed up at the front door I found that my new boss was on vacation for a week.  One of the other managers came out and helped me get through the process of getting a badge.  He asked me to sit with another coworker for the week until my real boss returned.  I watched as she read information from a report and typed in the information into a new file. She had been doing this for 8 hours a day every day for the last 6 months. The numbers were exactly the same but she typed them into the new file in a different order.  After a couple of days I couldn't take it anymore.  I had her look up the program that created the report. I told her I could modify the program in 5 minutes so it produced the file with the data in the updated order.  This was a wasted 6 months.  Shortly after my boss returned I took over the project. I was able to build and analyze the data in a few days. The project was com