Year End

Today is my last work day of the year, and appropriately, I’ll spend it on several planes traveling home. Here’s my stats for the year.

Days (working) on the road: 186
Days (Holiday) on the road: 15
Miles Flown: 100,000’ish
Flights: 110’ish
Sick: Twice (both while on the road)
Forgetting name of grandchild: Once
Forgetting own name: Once
Where I’ve been: MN, NY, TX, IL, IH, HI, MO, OR, MA, CA, Japan

Here’s a link for a location I visited from each location that was interesting to me.

MN: http://www.mallofamerica.com/
NY: http://www.sensuousbean.com/ The owners were more interesting than the coffee.
TX: http://www.gruenetexas.com/ Who knew so many shops could sell the exact same product?
IL: I’m drawing a blank here.
HI: http://www.honolulu.gov/parks/facility/hanaumabay/welcome.htm Park opens at 6AM. Suck it up and do it at 6. Take your own flippers if you go early. Rental units no open until 7:30AM.
MO: http://www.gatewayarch.com/Arch/index.aspx# The arch was closed the day I visited. I’m not kidding either. CLOSED.
OR: http://www.ci.garibaldi.or.us/ Can you see me waving?
WA: http://www.fishintimeguides.com/ I broke the curse.
MA: http://www.essexseafood.com/ Good, local dining
CA: http://www.beachboardwalk.com/ (shh…I kept a ring from the carousel
Japan: http://r.gnavi.co.jp/a231600 Who knew that some bars are open until 5AM?

Revisiting preivous post

This week I’m working on site with the customers I mentioned in my April 7th post. Fade eight months and here we are, the full disservice of the “bulk training” forced upon my customers by their own management now in full blossom.

The customer doesn’t have clue how to use the equipment his company bought from my company. This is not good. The customer’s internal customers are upset that the tool isn’t performing the way they think it should. This is bad. The customer won’t admit that he doesn’t remember anything I taught him. This is very bad. The customer requested that I come here to work with him and now he took a day off. I’m sitting here in a cubicle doing absolutely nothing productive to assist this customer and help dig him out of the hole he’s in. This is very, very bad. I’m drinking coffee, working on reports, and generally being unproductive. The clock is ticking away and the customer is paying serious cash for me to sit here and do nothing.

My other customers are rather annoyed that I’m not working with them at this exact moment, and I’m already booking my travel for January. I can’t believe I’m sitting here…doing nothing....

Flush

I’m in NYC this weekend with Grace and our friends. It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting all alone in my hotel room trying to take an economics final exam while they’re off in China town have a good time without me.

Am I doing the right thing in going back to school? Sitting in a hotel room on a “holiday” weekend and doing homework each morning and now a final this morning make me wonder what return I’ll actually see on this investment of our time.

I’ve sat here for three hours and I’ve been unable to access my final on-line. An entire morning flushed down the toilet.

No time to smell the roses

I have a live customer demo this week on a toolset that doesn’t work.
I have a final this week.
I have a trip to NY this week.
I have a boss who wants me to cancel my Christmas vacation this week to compensate for him dumping too much work on me.

Stenglish

I have just completed my 165th on the road. I am officially now holding on to the rim of the toilet bowl to avoid being flushed during the home stretch. Vacation is just a few blessed weeks away, I just need to hang on just a little bit more and I can make it into a new year.

I have a new co-worker! If my group was previously dysfunctional, now it’s much more so. I now work with:

1-Japanese
1-Chinese
1-British
1-Vietnamese
1-Amerian

That leaves us trying to communicate with each other while mixing, Jenglish, Chinglish, Vienglish, Benglish and Stenglish.

It’s generally more of a game of trying to figure out what someone means than exactly what they’re saying.

Retrouvaille

Grace and I are involved in Retrouvaille. It’s a group that helps troubled marriages. We attended a few years ago when we were ready to toss in the towel on our marriage. Retrouvaille isn’t a program for happy marriages. It’s a program for marriages that are in crisis. If you seeking a weekend full of light sharing, cappuccino’s and a brow wax, go elsewhere. If your seeking help for a marriage that is about to splinter, go to a Retrouvaille weekend.
Last weekend, after months (years?) of preparation, we attended a weekend as a presenting couple. The bona-fides for weekend presenting couples is that we have a story to share and the willingness to honestly share it. We do have a story and we agreed to present it. To be an effective presenting couple you must be willing to take the scalpel in hand, carve yourself open, and lay your guts out for everyone to see them.

We’ve spent several months writing out our material in preparation for this weekend. All our material was approved after numerous rewrites, and fights, on our part.

I thought preparing our story would be the hard and it was. We dug into the troubled areas of our marriage that we had opted to kick under the rug and not deal with. Grace and I fought like a dog and cat in a gunny sack for the past few months as we wrote our material.

I thought presenting our story would be tough. It was tougher than I dreamed it would be. It was hard to talk about why we first went to Retrouvaille.

What I wasn’t remotely prepared for was the amount of pain the couples attending the weekend would project on us. I wasn’t remotely prepared to cope with the amount of pain in the room overall.

Visit them at: http://www.retrouvaille.org/

Rain rain go away

I can’t believe that fall is here. This year, I find it depressing. There’s been so much rain, so early here in the PNW. I’m mentally conditioned to expect rain from around Halloween on, but not at the beginning of October. Sigh. I find myself wishing for somewhere dry and warm.