February 6, 2003
Dear Everyone:
Earlier this week, “Jeannie” was involved in an auto accident. She says she’s “fine”. The car is “fine”. (In fact, I looked at this evening and you can’t see so much as a scratch.) She got hit from behind while leaving a parking lot. Although she’s “fine”, her back is sore from the jolt, so I took my heated back massager to her place after work today. Get well cards would be in order.
A few weeks ago, I got “assigned” to a “project” with the folks in “Miracles & Avalanches”. Those would be the people who look for other companies to gobble up, while looking out for anyone who might want to gobble us up.
The acting supervisor and I met with the woman in charge of their files back in early January. She had a pretty good handle on the situation, a working file structure and inventory of her files. We made some suggestions and said we’d get back to her with something in writing.
Then the acting supervisor “coached” me through writing up a proposal; two proposals, actually, based on our suggestions: What needed to be done; what it would cost and how long it would take for us to do it for the customer; what it would cost and how long it would take for her to do it herself. And, for some reason, it was imperative that I email this proposal to her right away.
What we got back was a rather angry email. Seems the “project” was little more than a gleam in the eye of the acting supervisor who now said she “may have made some assumptions” and that “might have been a mistake” on her part. I bit my tongue not to say, “Ya think?!”
I ended up going back to the customer, smoothing down some ruffled feathers and assuring her that we weren’t really trying to shove a $5000 project down her throat when all she actually wanted was a few words of advice. That settled that. Bottom line: 13 hours of time that can’t be billed. Lesson learned: Always get the customer’s expectations up front (something I foolishly assumed the acting supervisor had already done before our initial meeting).
As for blowing a simple request up into a major project, I’ve been noticing a pattern. It seems like people ask for one thing, then the consultant tries to anticipate every possible contingency, thus resulting in something much larger than the customer originally wanted. I’ve seen it happen a number of times now.
It’s like the customer asks for some help setting up a lemonade stand. And before they know it, they’re being handed the blueprints for the Taj Mahal. With a price tag to match.
This results in the customer scaling back, asking
for a small pilot project to test whether or not they really want to go
through with rebuilding the pyramids of
OK enough about that.
Movies. One.
Gangs of
It’s set in the
Five
Points region of
The attention to detail is almost staggering.
The clothes, the sets, Day-Lewis’s early “New Yawk” accent (which
none of the other actors attempted).
You can almost smell the place.
As the title suggests, there were
gangs in
As always, there are power struggles between the
various gangs and the interrelationships between the characters play out
against the backdrop of violence, intolerance towards immigrants, and
the Union Army
eagerly gobbling up those unsuspecting Irish who were able to scrape
together passage to
Ultimately, there is a showdown between Day-Lewis and DiCaprio, followed by a scene that brings it all right back to the present day. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you haven’t seen it, and it’s still playing, and you can sit still for 3 hours and 5 minutes, go for it. If you missed it, don’t worry. When it gets nominated for a plethora of Academy Awards, they’ll bring it back into the theaters. And there’s always video and/or DVD.
Love, as always,
Pete
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