May 2, 1994
Dear Everyone:
My first official week in “Livermore” and I spent most of it in San
Francisco.
Monday was the first working day of the month, which brings with it
certain important customs and rituals, such as:
·
Changing your passwords on
all of your computer IDs. (I have
about 6-8 of these. It takes a
while.)
·
Changing the calendar(s).
I usually handle the big
write-wipe Four-Months-at-a-Glance one on the wall in the work room.
This is where we mark where we
are going to be if we're out of the office so that
other people, when they are
trying to schedule things can go and look and say, "Darn!
Fred won't be here next Thursday.
How's Friday for the meeting?"
·
Spectrum End-of-the-Month
processing. This is something
that I haven't done before, but will be doing from now on, as part of my
"Business Systems Analyst" (temporary title) duties.
“Mahitabel” assures me that this
is best done in the City, since that is where the computer that holds
all the data being processed is located.
I could do it from “Livermore”, computer-to-computer, across the
Bay, but it
would take considerably longer.
Wednesday is the RACS bi-weekly Staff Meeting.
This is a two-hour meeting which
usually manages to take the entire morning.
It was also “Mahitabel's” first
experience with a RACS Meeting. She
even came to work with a cold in order not to miss it.
There was the usual recap of some other meeting, which was allotted 15
minutes, but quickly expanded to half an hour.
Then we were supposed to discuss
"X". But "Fill-In-the-Blank" (FIB), who was supposed to have completed X
a couple of months ago, only finished the rough draft just in time for
the meeting. (Naturally, FIB is
the one most likely to request that someone
else get their work in to the
group before the meeting, so
people can have time to read and digest it before discussing it.)
In this case, FIB passed out
copies of X, then promptly announced that people probably needed "soak
time", i. e., time to read and digest X, before discussing it, so the
discussion was postponed until the next meeting.
We looked at the usual list of Action Items.
These are things that people have
committed to doing by such-and-such a time.
Naturally, the due dates have
been changed every two weeks, or so. As
the Recorder (the person who writes up the Action Items, among other
things, during meetings) went through each Item, the usual people
reported that they "hadn't done it yet", and the due date was changed to
the following meeting, in two weeks.
The meeting ended promptly, only 45 minutes late.
Afterwards, “Mahitabel”, her eyes
like saucers, asked if they (the meetings) were all like that?
I cheerfully assured her that
this one was better than most. (Not
true, of course, but why get her hopes up?)
Yesterday, I had a meeting in the
City with my
three Supervisors, in which we agreed that replacing CRMIS with
Versatile comes first in priority with everything else in the world a
close second.
Today, I'm back in “Livermore”, still moving into my new office.
My five boxes of books, mostly
three-ring binders, won't fit into the file cabinet that “Mahitabel”
used. So I've made a "bookcase"
of cardboard boxes, stacked on top of each other.
This will last just until “Brad”,
the “Livermore” Lead and, incidentally, the safety rep, sees it, at
which time we will work on finding a real bookcase either in
“Livermore”, or amongst the surplus furniture at Company Park.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |