Well, time can fly under certain circumstances. Sunday was a good day - alternating between lazy and productive.
Monday started out as a good day, but by noon I had a splitting sinus headache. It felt like someone was poking me between the eyes with a sharp pencil which made concentrating at work impossible. I came home early with the intention of taking some allergy medicine and a nap, but it turned out to be a long nap. I managed to swim out of my groggy state about six p.m., long enough to wake up, eat something for dinner, take a shower, make a phone call - and then go back to bed.
Tuesday was an all day meeting (a career counseling training session), followed by a corporate dinner at Fontana's in Cupertino, which was excellent. It did make for a long day though. The dinner was excellent (I had one of the specials, a penne pasta with scallops, mushrooms, and fresh basil, followed by the Chocolate Decadence dessert). It was good to socialize with some of the members of my extended work team (about half of my extended work team works virtually, so we get together once or twice a year, all things permitting). It is always nice to see the people you work with virtually in person. I got home and basically fell into bed though - it was close to a sixteen hour day by the time it was over. I capped off the day with a great telephone call and then I was out like a light.
Wednesday (today) I went into work at about six a.m. in order to put the finishing touches on a presentation that I gave during a working session with our upper management, outlining a project that we are undertaking this year that has been several years overdue, designing and building a very task specific information management system which will interface with another system. The two systems are designed to provide a looped reinforcement framework for operational information exchanges. In non-corporate speak that means it will be two systems that will contained related data which will be cross-referenced and allow for real-time storage, retrieval and analysis. I've been wanting to do it for a while and now is the perfect opportunity.
Following another long day I came home tonight, cooked a simple dinner, watched "Chuck" on my DVR and then paused here for a few minutes to write. It has been a good week so far, but I have managed to cram forty hours of work into three days, so my eyes are kind of heavy right now. My plan for the evening is pretty simple - I am going to watch a little TV, see if I can find some energy to write, and if I can't, then I am going to curl up early with a book. Tomorrow is going to be a challenging day because I am now two and a half days behind, which means tomorrow will be spent reading several hundred email, sorting them, and deciding which ones to act on.
The career session was a little canned and a little to heavily populated with pretty boxes (and for me, a guy inordinately fond of power point to say that, it must have been pretty bad). They did present some good tools but by and large it was mostly rote as far as such sessions go. The working meetings were far more productive and helped provide me with some clarity as to the overall direction for the coming year, explaining some of the things I had observed. There was an awkward and uncomfortable moment for me, but it was one of those moments where that feeling was because, when asked, I did not dance around and instead named names and expressed my opinion. That is always a little awkward for me because I tend to think that naming names is usually counterproductive, especially given the variance in perception.
In this case though, my personnel had reported to me rude and borderline unacceptable behavior from a customer and I felt it was the right thing to do. I am not sure what is going to come it, most likely nothing, but it had to be done. Time will tell. I could have cured a problem or made a corporate enemy. Wouldn't be the first time and won't be the last in either case.
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