Think You'd Like My Job?

Maybe not based on this week. Here's my story:

The client site is down south in a place that's hard to get to. I've been there a few times, but this time they said they wanted to make all my travel arrangements. That's usually a red flag, and this was no different.

After they made those arrangements, I did make it to the arriving airport Sunday evening. I had to stay in that city overnight, because their local hotel was full - in fact, they couldn't get me in their hotel at all this week, so they put me up in a lesser hotel located about a half mile away.

But that started Monday night. They sent a driver in a van to pick me up early Monday morning and take me to their office, about an hour and a half away from the airport city. That worked OK, and I was in their office by 8AM, tired but ready to get to work.

A side note about the tired comment - I'd been feeling really run-down over the busy weekend leading up to the trip. It was a sign of things to come.

Anyway, at the office on Monday morning, they weren't ready for me. My main contact offered a somewhat lame apology, parked me in an open office, and left me alone all morning. I signed onto their system to check progress since my last visit, and discovered there had been none. You might be surprised how often that happens. I figured I was going to have to zap their folks with some jumper cables to get the project back on track.

Predictably, when they actually got the gang together to meet with me, things started off with lots of finger-pointing. Yeah, nothing I laid out for them to do since my last visit had been done, and the fault was his! No, hers! No, that other person I haven't met!

Calm down folks, let's just get this thing back on the rails.

So Monday night I settled into the second-class hotel room after my half-mile hike with my bags in tow, really feeling pretty rotten. But I'd promised to take care of some things for another client that night, so I went online and went to work for a couple of hours. Then I crashed for the night, going to sleep at halftime of the Monday Night game that right now I don't remember even what teams were playing.

Tuesday it was back to work and back to pushing the gang to move the project along. If they don't make up for that lost time, they won't make their project deadline. So I pitched in, showed them what to do, and did quite a bit myself. We divided up the work between about 5 people, including myself. I finished. Nobody else did. One of them actually didn't accomplish a single thing I could detect, making me wonder what he'd been doing all day on that computer - he'd actually seemed to be bent over something right there in the same room with me, but at the end of the day, nothing I'd given him to do had been done.

Turned out he was clueless but too proud to admit it. So somehow he managed to pretend to look busy all day without accomplishing a single thing, but never actually giving the slightest clue that he was lost.

Then there were the two ladies who spent a lot of time fighting with each other instead of doing the work they were assigned. I found out at the end of the day that they had a disagreement on how to structure some code values in the system, which bogged them down for most of the afternoon.

All the while I'm getting a headache and a sore throat, feel the sinuses draining down the back of my throat, and was wondering if I could find some strong medicine that would knock me out and let me get a good night's sleep. But I conculded that wouldn't be possible for several reasons.

First, I had promised other clients that I would take care of some things for them on Tuesday evening. So as soon as I got back to the hotel, I booted up and worked another 4 hours.

Second, since the local client was in control of my travel, I had no way to get to a drugstore. So medicine wasn't going to happen.

So when I finally shut down the laptop and went to bed that night around 10, I was sick. The congestion wouldn't let me sleep more than an hour at a time, and I wondered how I was going to survive the week.

Next morning, something interesting happened. I got into the office and kicked off the day with the fueding gang, and they noticed I wasn't feeling well. I was losing my voice, and may have looked a bit peaked. Somehow they stopped fueding and became cooperative, and we got quite a bit accomplished that day. I can't figure out whether some sort of compassion for my miserableness played a role, but I simply showed up resolved to do my absolute best to fight through another day and help them get the work done.

They decided to wrap up about an hour early, I think for my sake. It gave me an hour to rest before my Wednesday night conference call. After the conference call, I was supposed to be doing other things for other clients, but simply couldn't. I fell into bed and spent another uncomfortable night, but got a bit more sleep than the night before.

Thursday morning my voice was all but gone. I could barely croak out words, but I actually felt better. Back to work, I again found a somewhat more cooperative crew, and we had a reasonably productive day. That afternoon their Benefits Administrator actually walked me over to their clinic (this company actually has their own on-campus health clinic for their employees). I got examined by the clinic's doctor and tested for the flu. Diagnosis was respiratory infection, not viral. That's a good thing.

They hit me with a steroid shot, which if I've had before it must have been a long time ago. It had an amazing effect on me, giving me a boost of energy that I carried through the evening to finish the rest of that night-time work for the other clients. I wrapped up the day's work at 10 that night but couldn't sleep. It must have been the steroid that kept me awake all night.

So Friday, we finished up our work for the week, met with the executive sponsor to discuss the team's decision to ask me to take over a bigger role in the project. He didn't blink an eye, told me to just put together the time estimates and he'll approve it. I was pleased to find out the guy knew a lot about what had been going on this week, and was well aware of the, umm, staff issues.

Headed to the airport and home, so relieved and anxious to get a restful weekend to try to kick the infection before heading out on next week's adventure.

But the worst wasn't over yet.

It had been raining hard Thursday night and all day Friday, with flooding and high winds. My flight out of the little airport was delayed 2 hours, because it's a VFR airport and the plane was flying around waiting for enough of a break in the cloud cover that would allow it to land.

So of course, I got to the stopover point that night with no hope of catching my connection to Indy. Delta falls back on the weather-related excuse, so I'm on my own for a hotel room. I call the hotel and request the shuttle pickup. They tell me it will be there in 15 minutes. 45 minutes later I got on the shuttle and rode to the hotel.

I got to spend about 5 hours in the hotel bed, my cough denying me any serious sleep. Caught a cab to the airport at 4AM for my 6AM flight this morning. Instead of riding the 8AM direct flight to Indy, I had to take the 6 through Minneapolis because the direct flight was oversold, I assume partly with other people who didn't make it on last night's flight.

The flight finally arrives in Indy about 1:30 Saturday afternoon.

Without my bag.

So how was your week?