October 18, 2001
Dear Everyone:
Short Letter this week.
I did make it to “Hobby” and back. Left last Sunday afternoon, came back Wednesday morning. This was exactly the same schedule as the last time, only this time, no attacks by terrorists (not counting the whole anthrax thing). You know what they say, when you fall off a horse, the best thing is to get right back on again.
OK, so I took a month. That wasn’t me, that was scheduling. There was no point in going to “Hobby” before they were ready to do the training on this new software. And wouldn’t you know, the Four Seasons Hotel put me in a room right next to the one I had the last time.
As for the training, it went pretty much like you’d expect. In other words, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong (Murphy’s Law). (O’Toole’s Corollary: “Murphy was an optimist.”)
We had a dozen or more people there to be trained on Monday, some coming from as far away as “Austin” and “Lafayette”. But only four people could log onto the system at any one time. Turned out Technical Support dropped the ball on the number of concurrent sessions. By afternoon, things had settled down. Tuesday’s session went much more smoothly.
As for my part of the training? All I had to do was stand in the back of the room and watch for people who had taken a wrong turn, or didn’t see a step as the instructor fast-forwarded through the lessons. I also picked up on a lot that I hadn’t seen, or didn’t quite know before.
Got back from “Hobby” yesterday, brain dead from being up since 4:00 a.m. (Central Time – that’s 2:00 a.m. local time). Then spent all day today giving special training to a woman who came up from “Grapevine” on the train. And fielding phone calls from people who were trained Monday and/or Tuesday who wanted to know why they couldn’t use the system yet (because I haven’t had time to put them in, of course).
I’m hoping that tomorrow will be a little bit calmer and I can get some actual work done. And I’m hoping that “Jeannie” and I can get together this weekend for a movie (long time no movies).
As for next week: Training in Company Park for the West Coast move coordinators (who will also be scrambling to get into the system) Monday and Tuesday. Good News: Company Park is even closer to home than “Livermore”. Bad News: The project manager has already scheduled one of his infamous “checkpoint” conference calls to take place while the trainees are off having their lunch.
He’s also making noises about the two of us going to “Grapevine” to help with the actual data entry later next week (or the following week). So there may not be a Letter next week, if I’m driving to “Grapevine” Wednesday afternoon.
We’ll just have to take it as it goes. On the plus side, with the exception of one other person in the whole (new) company, I’m the only one who knows this software, so not getting placed in a job (announcements in the next few weeks) is not high on my list of worries right now.
Love, as always,
Pete
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