July 30, 1993
Dear Everyone:
Ogden is back and feeling much better, thank you.
I haven't been able to figure out
from the handwriting on the Fix-It Ticket if they upgraded an "encoded"
chip, or an "eroded" chip;
but either way, he doesn't repeat keys anymore, so I'm happy.
I'm beginning to get very fond of Thursday's.
Mondays are horrible, of course. Waking
up and realizing that the weekend really, really
is over and you have to get
up and go to work again. Not only
that, but there's facing the fact that you're going to have to do it
four more times before the next weekend.
Then, there's the morning ritual, designed to run on automatic pilot as
much as possible, that gets you out of bed, dressed, out the door, down
the road, and on to the 6:02 BART,
remembering to pick up the morning paper on the way.
On the plus side, the train ride
into the City
is perfectly timed; it takes just as long as it takes to read all the
important stuff in the paper, with a mental note to read the more
involved things at lunch time.
Tuesdays are a little better, but there is still that feeling that you
couldn't possibly have hit
the snooze bar six times already, is it
really that late?
Do I
have to get up now?
By Wednesday, your body has gotten used to the idea of dragging itself
out of bed in the middle of the night; but there's the weekly Staff
Meeting to look forward to.
Then comes Thursday. On
Thursdays, I get to set the alarm an hour later than any other day of
the week (weekends excepted, by definition).
And, I get to dress
Casual, which
is more comfortable and shaves about 5 minutes off of dressing time.
(This is the day that my RMSEP
Team meets in “Pleasant Hill”.) Then
there's the commute: 20 minutes and plenty of parking.
Even so, I arrive nearly an hour
early; so I go to the cafeteria and have breakfast, while enjoying the
paper and a nice cup of tea. Our
meetings start on the 4th floor at 8:00 a.m., or when
everyone has arrived.
These meetings are such a pleasure. There's
no one who's consistently negative about everything.
No bickering about utterly
unimportant things. No half-hour
discussions of things that shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.
Everyone is there to
contribute something useful
and positive. In other words,
these meetings are the exact opposite of Wednesday's meetings.
And we get so much done! It's so
nice to be able to concentrate on just one single subject (albeit a
complex and complicated one), instead of jumping all over the place,
trying to fix 16 things at once. And
to do it for a whole day! I don't
even check my phone for messages on Thursdays.
My outgoing message says that I'm
working outside the office that day and leave your name and number and
I'll call back when I can. Which
isn't until Friday.
And you know what? I'm
unavailable for one day a week and the Company
still hasn't fallen apart
because of it. Imagine that!
Most importantly, Thursday nights, after I've done the evening chores
(mostly intended to allow the automatic pilot to run in the morning), I
get to settle down to two hours of
Star Trek (The
Next Generation and
Deep
Space Nine).
Then, of course, there's Friday. Fridays
are also Casual
Days, so they're more relaxed. And
there's a sort of unwritten rule that you don't schedule meetings on
Fridays, if you can avoid it. This
is partly because many people use the Alternate Work Schedule that gives
them every other Friday off, so they aren't available.
Which is why Tuesdays, Wednesdays
and Thursdays are often crammed with meetings.
Fridays are generally the day that you get all the work done that you
couldn't do during the week because of all the meetings.
In fact, I've been told by people
who are on Alternate Work Schedules that the Fridays they
are at work, they get twice as much done because the other half of
their group is off and therefore can't interrupt them.
And, of course, Fridays lean right up against the weekend, which is my
favorite part of the week anyway, even if I take work home with me.
So Fridays are my favorite
working day; but Thursdays are a very close second.
Love, as always,
Pete
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