happy endings

Today we did the final presentation for my project.

People who were involved on the periphery of the project found out we were taping customer testimonials of how the project helped them, and so everyone invited to the meeting insisted on having themselves taped talking about how great the project was. That made the meeting less boring because they were all making fun of each other's videos. It also was a bit comic because the two guys who did the taping were not holding the camera steady so the picture was shaking around (there was no time to clean up the vids). The best one was when the camera man inadvertently zoomed in on the speaker's face, realized what he did and zoomed back out. There's an old sesame street song (for those of you who remember) where these puppets are singing "near, far, neeeeear, faaaaar"). I watched that clip at least 20 times so I wouldn't laugh when it came up in the presentation.

There was also the little matter of this one guy's name which is mentioned in the presentation. His name is Binu Babu (pronounced as spelled). R, who has a lebanese accent, kept saying like that indian guy on the Simpsons because it made me laugh. Then accidentally he said it that way in the presentation. I was sitting right next to him and had to stab my finger with my pen not to laugh. R did a great job even though, an hour before the presentation, he found out his boss had been fired as well as another director in the company.


The bobble headed IT guy who gave me so many problems on the project was super nice to me today because I insisted R put his name in the presentation as the IT support. I guess it's a sign of a successful project that people want their names associated with it.

The "project manager", of course, didn't say anything to me, not even "good job", even after the customer said how pleased he was with the outcome of the project. The only thing she said to me is "I wouldn't have brought so many cakes if I had known only 14 people were coming". Uh. Hm. Whatever. We had more people than planned show up for the meeting, which is rare here. Then she picked up this big cake she had brought and said "I guess this is too small to fit in your hotel refrigerator (duh!) so I'll just take it home with me".

Nice. Get the company to pay for your cake habit.

As for me, I just worked out, room service brought me a pizza and a rose, and I'm going to eat that and then take twice the recommended dose of Nyquil so I will hopefully be feeling a bit more human tomorrow.

Though, I think R is glad I couldn't really talk today.

We climb on...