master data

I'm working with this fairly obnoxious woman. The rest of my customer set has been great. I hate working with women because I think they act super bitchy to try to prove themselves or something. She's over weight and likes to sit so close to me that I can feel her breathing on me which is so gross. Also, she smells like fried chicken farts.

The other day we were in a meeting, and we were talking about documenting what they call "master data" (the definition of which is not relevant). This woman was nattering on as if she's super smart (though what she says is inconsistent and doesn't make sense) when she suddenly said "masturbater" instead of "master data". There's a kid who's my age that's been in a lot of our meetings and we've been joking around the whole week, and I couldn't look at him because I knew I would start laughing.

Everyone of course pretended they didn't hear the woman say "masturbater" but now people have started saying just "data". I laugh every time I think about it myself...

it only looks like you're lost

Contrary to rumors, I'm still among the living, and have finished my book proposal, which I'm sending out this weekend, thanks to my great editor Matt. I've been traveling and working a lot.

Currently in lovely Aiken, S.C., working at a site next to a silo of nuclear waste. The silo's name is Hector, which is an acronym for something that no one can remember.

I've decided to break down and buy a GPS after getting totally lost driving to the hotel from Columbia (it's about an hour drive) at 11 o'clock last Sunday night. It was so dark I couldn't read any of the street signs and I ended up driving way out of my way. Then I got to Aiken and my mapquest directions were totally wrong. I found the street my hotel purported to be on, but it was a winding road into a forest with a few houses. I called the hotel and told them I was lost. The woman asked for my cross streets but didn't recognize the names of any of them (I was only 3 miles from the hotel at that point).

She kept assuring me that I was going the right way, and that soon I would happen on an Applebee's. I was having my doubts, and she said "You're not lost, it only looks like you're lost". Then I came around a turn, the road opened up to 2 lanes, and there was the Applebee's.

I have a room on the ground floor of a motel. I don't like it because I have to keep my curtains closed and no natural light gets in my room. The woman at the front desk assured me I'd be safe in the room, and I was like why would I worry for my safety? I'm in the middle of the woods.

Besides Hector, there are some other weird things about where I work. They have alarm drills constantly. The one for a nuclear waste spill is reminiscent of the sound track to a 70s sci fi movie. It a series of weird tones like doo doo DOOOOOO doo. Then there's the fire alarm and a safety alarm (meaning someone was injured in the building). The site is huge, and the only way I can ever find my building is by looking for a sign in front of another building that says "Whole Body Counting Facility". What ever that means.

The other day I went to an outbuilding that looked like a rusty trailer. An hour before I got there they had chased a rattle snake out of the conference room. Although I'm doing well with my snake phobia (saw a snake on the trail when hiking with my dad and was fine) I decided not to put my feet under the conference room table because it was dark under there and I couldn't see if anything was hiding in the corners.

Today I might go to a blue grass festival and then work on my book...tired and need a few down days to get ready for next week's fun and adventures.

I'm not blind, I'm blond

For some reason my travel profile has been updated to say I'm blind when making airline reservations, and that I'm handicapped when making hotel reservations.

I discovered the handicapped thing last week when I checked into a hotel in Columbus, Ohio. After a weird whispering session behind the front desk one of the clerks finally asked me what my handicap was. I was like "I don't play golf". Then she said I had somehow gotten booked into a handicapped room (though I didn't want to point this out to her, to get out of the lobby you had to take stairs either up or down, so they're damned lucky I'm not handicapped).

I fixed my profile as soon as I got into my room, but apparently it didn't work. Flying to Seattle today, I was requested to ring my flight attendant button. I was worried because I had had a lot of problems checking in on my flight and figured everything was a result of my company buying me a cheap ass ticket. But when the flight attendant came over to my seat (I was squished between a woman who wanted to sit cross legged in her seat and a morbidly obese woman who ate an entire bag of candy bars on the 2 1/2 hour flight) she said "Oh, you aren't blind". At first I thought she said I wasn't blond, and I was really confused, but then she told me that my ticket has said I was blind. Then I checked into my hotel today in Tacoma and same thing - handicapped room.

I deleted my profile and rebuilt it. Hopefully that will fix the problems.

And then yesterday I was talking to another consultant who congratulated me on getting married. I'm not sure who started the rumor I got married but if I find out who it is I will break his fucking legs. This is the fourth conversation I've had with someone in my company where I've been congratulated for my fake wedding.

Rainy and cold in Tacoma. Wishing I had brought a jacket and umbrella. I knew I should have looked at the weather forecast yesterday. I was just getting over my jet lag when I had to switch to east coast time last week. Now I'm on PST. Next week I'm back on the east coast. Since I've been back I've felt like my life force is draining out of my body to be replaced with concrete.

I need a vacation.

The good news is I'm going to work on my cover letter for my book prop this week, and my editor is going to have my prop reviewed by Monday. If I can find an agent for my book by the end of september I will be very happy.

back

I've been getting some concerned emails since I haven't updated my blog in two weeks. Yikes.

I arrived home last Saturday. My luggage did not. I ended up playing a fun game of tag with the moron who was supposed to deliver it to my house (I finally drove to the airport and as I got there he called and said he was 20 minutes from my house - I sped home only to wait 2 more hours for him to show up). The good news is they only confiscated 4 packs of the Gauloise cigarettes I brought home with me. Which left 10 to smoke. Now I'm back to Marlboro Reds. Wah.

In the week I was home I managed to get all of my windows repainted. I also replaced all of my blinds, which was an ordeal I don't wish to ever repeat. Work is as insane as ever and I didn't do a good job of relaxing and recovering from my jet lag. Today I arrived home after spending 3 days in Columbus with a client (nothing like changing time zones AGAIN 7 days after landing back here) and crashed for 4 hours, which is more consecutive sleep than I've gotten since I've been home.

And the BEST NEWS is I have an editor for my book!!!!! Katie Ives of Alpinist fame (named the best editor on the planet by more than one of my friends) recommended a friend in Boulder. I just sent him my proposal. The book is back on. Working 80 hour weeks? Not on. I am on a mission to get this book done by October and hopefully find a new agent by then, since my old one lost interest in me because I couldn't make the deadlines due to work.

So this entry concludes this blog. I will NOT be going back to the middle east. It was an adventure, but not worth the stress and aggravation. The best part of the whole experience was coming home and finding out people missed me.

time to go

I don't like the day before a big trip, especially if I'm not at work. I have way too much time to pack, repack, change my mind about what books I'm bringing on the plane, worry about what snacks I'm going to eat, worry about my blackberry and MP3 player battery dying, and wonder if it's okay to wear clothes that haven't been washed in 3 weeks for a 28 hour trip.

Disaster was imminent when I realized yesterday that I had accidentally forgotten to remove my crackers from the filing cabinet I've been using at work before I locked it and turned in the keys. I realized right before I was leaving work that my crackers which I had been planning to eat on the plane ride home were in the cabinet and not in R's cabinet (I moved them because he was eating them).

I was stuck in a conundrum. If I asked for the key back they would wonder what I had locked in the cabinet that was so important, and they would send the tea boy to spy on me to make sure I wasn't stealing something. When he saw I was removing my crackers he would automatically assume it was so I could eat them even though we were forbidden to eat anything (some companies cut westerners a break on ramadan - this company is not one of them). As soon as I went back into the conference room where I was working he would tell the whole office I was eating and then people would be rude to me even if I could prove I didn't eat the crackers. So I had to leave them, knowing, since I had dinner at R's, I wouldn't have time to get more (Spinney's sells crackers, sure, but not the right crackers).

Then, today, I had opened a bottle of wine at 5:30 (strictly forbidden to have any alcohol during ramadan, though the shops sell it, you just aren't supposed to let anyone know you have it) to breathe while I finished up my packing. I also had a tea light candle (also forbidden in the hotel) on the desk next to the bottle of wine to make my room not smell like smoke, which seems to be leaking into my room through the air con.

I was opening an apparently highly pressurized box of tea to put into a bag so I could bring it home (best tea, it's arabic, no idea what's in it) when the box exploded and the tea went everywhere. The box also slipped out of my hand knocking over the bottle of wine which also knocked the candle off of my desk. So the wall and the carpet were coated with half a bottle of red wine (wah) and candle wax. I also ruined the ramadam kareem iftare and sohour menu that was nicely printed and sitting like a little tent on my desk.


I've spent the past half hour cleaning the wine off of the wall. I couldn't get it out of the carpet so I trimmed it with my scissors, cutting off the top of the stained parts. It's under the desk so hopefully they won't notice the carpet is a little shorter under there. Not sure what to do about the wax, but maybe they won't notice until I'm gone.

It's definitely time to go.

spaghetti western

R has been asking me for the past two weeks to have dinner at his house and meet his family. I don't know why my customers always want to have me over for dinner. My list of foods I can't eat, or won't eat, would be daunting to anyone. Throw into the mix my lack of social skills in family settings, and my dread of meeting "the wife" who normally suspects I'm having an affair with her (always) unattractive husband.

I figured that was why R's wife wanted to meet me. When we worked together on the weekends she would call every half hour curious as to what we were up to. While I can understand someone doubting that I would want to work on the weekend and must have some other plot in mind, this is Abu Dhabi, and what else is there to do...

And lately, R has been acting a bit strangely towards me. When I came into work sick, and was sweating even though I never sweat and was sitting directly under the air conditioning unit, R suggested I had a fever (I did) and that he could tell me accurately how bad the fever was if I would just let him put his lips on my forehead. I was like, um, thanks, I'll just take a double dose of panadol instead.

Then he told me that he'd finally figured out that enterprise architecture is not sexy, but I make it sexy. I was a bit puzzled by this comment as it was 7 oclock in the morning, I had arrived in the office with unwashed hair (5 days) and wearing the same outfit I had worn the past two days because I didn't have time due to the hours I was working to go to the laundry and collect the rest of my clothes (this is the problem with packing light and bringing only 5 work outfits).

In any case, we finished work yesterday at 1:30, and then went to Spinney's to get some salad and bread for the upcoming dinner at R's house that I had finally agreed to attend. The maid was currently cleaning his place and wouldn't be done until 3, so after 15 minutes of shopping we still had time to kill. As it's ramadan, that time goes by very, very slowly. We drove around to a few hotels looking for a place where we could get an alcoholic drink. Nothing. So R proposed that we get a bottle of wine and drink it somewhere, that somewhere of course being my hotel room although he was too polite to ask.

We grabbed a bottle of wine from the A&E and headed to my hotel. 1 hour until dinner. I was actually looking forward to it because I had requested spaghetti with real tomato sauce since no one here puts tomato sauce on anything (they use ketchup even on pizza) and tomato sauce is a major staple of my non-UAE diet. R's wife had commented that I have a 5 year old's preferences for food. Like I care what anyone thinks as long as I get spaghetti.


We sat in my room sharing a bottle of Trapiche. It turns out R's family owns a bunch of night clubs in Canada and that's where he gets his money (it turns out, just like everyone else here, he's super rich). He wanted to start a consulting company with me. Then he told me that he's an alcoholic (after he chugged two glasses of wine in the time I was pouring us both a bottle of water). Luckily, he said as I was encouraging him to drink an entire bottle of water, alcohol has little effect on him (he's a large man, 6'2" and 250 lbs). Around that time his wife called and said the maid was done and so was dinner. R told her we were at Spinney's still and would head home shortly. As he talked to her he waved for me to chug my glass of wine. When I said I couldn't (hadn't eaten or had anything to drink all day because of ramadan) he called me a pussy so I chugged it and immediately felt dizzy and giggly.


We got in the car and R said "don't tell my wife I was drinking because she'll kill you". Then he started talking about how nice it would be if he was married to me and how we would be like the couples in the 1960s movies. Luckily I was buzzed so I just stared out the window and pretended I was in the car alone.


After an initial half hour of total awkwardness where I tried to act sober and at the same time control my nicotine withdrawal symptoms in the face of a screaming infant and two year old, I got into the swing of things and R's wife started to like me and realize that I wasn't sleeping with her husband. I was so happy when she brought the spaghetti out that she started to like me even more.

By the time my buzz wore off and a few hours had past we were both making fun of R, who decided it was time to play with the kids and ignore us. I did my imitation of him talking to the indians at work (he has a tendency to mimic people's accent without realizing he's doing it) and she told me how he almost drown the second day of their honeymoon because he ate too much and got a cramp while swimming. The story was even funnier as she played out her confronting R's mom to say "sorry your son died while we were on our honeymoon". She was even interested in black holes, or pretended to be interested.


At the end of the evening I told her I was really sorry we hadn't met earlier. They are going to move to Canada in a year or two and I hope she stays in touch with me so we can visit each other someplace where we can have a glass of wine and be normal human beings.

After the almost year I've spent here I think the best people are the Lebanese (at least the ones I've met). They aren't radical or crazy religious. They like to have fun and laugh. They don't take themselves too seriously and even though they can be materialistic they are generous. And even if R said some inappropriate things on occasion, we were a great team and he's probably my most successful mentoring project. And he introduced me to The Big Bang Theory, and gave me a pirated copy of the first three seasons (as well as Buckaroo Banzai and Up In The Air).


Nice kid. I admit I'm going to miss him.

rats it's ramadan

I woke up this morning, scoured the paper, and discovered that those 4 dozen cookies I bought for my team are going to go to waste because it's ramadan. Typical of this place, I searched on line until midnight last night to find out if it was going to be ramadan or not (although they can predict the date scientifically and make it easier for everyone to plan around, they prefer to do it the old fashioned way so you can't plan anything) but apparently the decision wasn't made and broadcast until after I went to bed (and they would have known at 8 pm if it was going to start or not).


No eating, drinking (of anything), gum chewing, smoking, or even taking medications during the daylight hours. Today was a miserable day at the office as I'm fighting a cold still and I was coughing every 5 minutes because my throat is sore and I'm not allowed to drink water. Combine that with the 122 degree heat...it pretty much sucks.


Though ramadan is a holy month, and fasting is supposed to be a sign of dedication to the faith, what it boils down to is:
-eating way too much at iftar and staying up all night
-being super cranky at work from lack of sleep, food, fluid and nicotine
-an increase in traffic accidents
-people buying excess food and presents when the stores are open in the evenings
-a decrease in the economy since people are working less hours

My old hotel at least had an area blocked off for us non believers to smoke or eat during the day away from the eyes of the cops. But the intercon does not have such an area so I've had to make a smoking area in my shower that blocks the smoke from getting into my room proper and out the door where it could be reported and myself arrested. Yeah, I could just not smoke for 14 hours, but, if I could do that, I wouldn't be smoking at all, would I?


Here's a quote that explains why I'll never convert:

"Certainly our message to Egyptians during Ramadan is no excessive food and no excessive partying or staying up way too late, because that's hated by Islam," says Ali Abdel Fattah, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, a political movement that is officially banned in Egypt.

Anyway, I'm on a plane in two more days. So close, and yet such a far time away...

ramadan kareem

Tomorrow we may all wish each other a happy ramadan. But, we won't find out until tonight if ramadan starts tomorrow. That's because a special guy has to see what phase the moon is in a whether the crescent moon has been seen:

You cannot guess the exact days of when Ramadan will start, many times a calendar or website will say it's on some day, but ends up being the day before or the day after. In the end, it all depends on the sighting of the crescent the evening before the supposed day, if it is not sighted, they must wait till the next day to look for the crescent again:

Ramadan will last for 29-30 days, depending on the moon (should be a crescent that looks like a curved strand of hair). Regardless of which day it starts, Ramadan will be considered to have started the night before the actual day, since in Islam, Maghrib (Sunset) marks the beginning of the next day.

You can't precisely calculate the next Ramadan because it all depends on when the crescent is sited. It's roughly 11 days before the previous Ramadan. 


Which is interesting, because it's going to effect working hours, and I don't know if I now have 12 hours left to work on the project or 16 hours. I really hope ramadan doesn't start tomorrow. Two full days in an office full of people who are cranky without fasting being involved, and me not being able to smoke. It could get ugly. Good thing I'm leaving soon.

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...

what, me worry?

The week ended on a positive note, with everything getting finished for the project. I even did a simulation of a business process which is really going to knock the socks off of everyone in the final meeting tomorrow.

I got done in spite of my "team". The two guys who have been supporting me on the project just stopped working on Tuesday and refused to do anything I asked. They did it in a nice way, but it was infuriating and because of the jack ass way my company works, there is nothing I could do about it. They are just damned lucky they left at 3 pm on Thursday. My customer R had agreed we would leave at 3 because I worked so much overtime this week and I had to go into the office yesterday. I was starting to come down with a cold and just wanted a few hours to rest. As my team walked out the door I asked them if they had tested the web site we have to demo on Sunday to make sure it's working. They told me it was.

But, since I've worked here for long enough to know people are full of shit, I decided to test the web site before I left. It wasn't working. R started flipping out. I had to spend 2 hours fixing it. I was furious, but all those guys are rolling off the project and Thursday was their last day so there's nothing I can do.

As it seemed the day couldn't get any more annoying while I was finalizing the web site fixes, Habib called and insisted I go to dinner with him. I refused, saying I had too many errands to run (since I knew I would be working all weekend I had to get everything done Thursday night - groceries, picking up dry cleaning, getting stuff I ordered from the pharmacy). I walked out the door to the office 20 minutes later and there was Habib. He insisted he would drive me around for my errands, and then take me for sushi. It was 130 degrees outside, and no cabs were in sight, so I finally agreed.

I told him where I needed to go and he started programming his GPS. It was taking forever. I was like "dude, I know how to get to all the places I need to go" but he insisted on using the GPS. Then he cranked up the radio and started blasting Hotel California. I had a splitting head ache and I wanted to kick him in the nuts for acting like a college kid.

We finished my errands and I dropped everything off in my room. I was going to ditch Habib but right as we got to the hotel he said "the reason I came to see you is that my son (who's 12) was diagnosed with bone cancer. He has 6 tumors in his legs and the doctors say he can't do any sports or activities because the bones will break. I can't find a good treatment here." I felt bad so I agreed to hang out with him for a bit so he could talk about his son (he's going to take him to Germany for treatment).

But Habib totally took advantage of my good nature. We went to the Yacht club and he drank 3 martinis. Then he man handled all of the cigars before deciding he didn't want one. He treated the staff there so badly and I was so embarrassed that I gave them a $30 tip on top of the tip he left them. He was in a horrible mood, I guess because of his son, although he kept saying it was because I was leaving. He tried to grab my hand at one point and I told him I would punch him in the face if he touched me (can't call the police on him because he has wasta, though normally that's what I would do). He then started making a scene because I said I was tired and didn't want to go to dinner. I was like whatever dude, let's go get sushi. We drove to my sushi place, Sushi Samurai.

While we were in his car he said he was mad that he had planned a trip last weekend to a resort in Egypt and I didn't go. Then he was mad that he was going to a resort in Liwa this weekend and I refused to go (not just because of work but because I have no desire to hang out with him). To piss him off I started smoking in his car. He didn't say anything to me but I think I got my point across to him about how little I care that he's upset.

Once we got to Sushi Samurai Habib admitted he didn't like sushi. He told the waiter to bring him something that was like KFC. I was like dude, why don't you eat something healthy instead of having fried chicken and he went off on another tirade about how he was fat and probably had cancer so who cared if he was eating healthy. He also was upset that I had taken him to a restaurant that didn't serve alcohol.(which I did on purpose).

He told me that while he was in Egypt he and a friend of his had gotten their driver to get them some hashish. Drugs are not treated lightly here, and in most countries there is a potential death sentence if you are caught using drugs. He might have been trying to impress me, but I told him that I couldn't believe he would take such a stupid risk since he has 4 kids. He got mad at me and said he's going back to Egypt next week to smoke more hashish. Seriously, the dude is just crazy.

After dinner I told him to take me back to the hotel so I could get some rest. It was 10 o'clock, I was exhausted, and I had to get up at 6 the next morning for work. He kept driving the wrong way, so I finally started yelling at him. I'm not even sure what I said, but he started crying. I felt bad but I didn't apologize.

I got a text message from him yesterday and today, but just ignored them. I hope I don't have to see him again before I leave. It's sad that he has so much money, and family connections, and is one of the most negative and miserable people I've ever met.

I was talking about that with R on our way into work yesterday. He said that this place is one of the most negative he's ever lived in. It just seems to be the nature of everyone here. If you do a good job they still criticize you. If you piss of the wrong person, for whatever trivial reason, they make it their life mission to destroy you. R said that if the people in the middle east spent even half the time they spend screwing each other over doing something positive there would be a huge difference.

But, things aren't going to change in the foreseeable future. What happens instead is that people like R, who are good people, get sick of this place and leave. He's had a hard life. His family was decimated in the Lebanese war. But he won't even go back to Lebanon now. He's working hard to save up money for his family, and then they are going to Canada.

In any case, I'm out of here next Saturday. And I won't be coming back.

my week, and it's only wednesday

So much for cruising through the last weeks of my project. Highlights of the past few days:

• The server where all of my work is had a patch installed on Sunday. This somehow removed my rights to the server.  All of my work is on the server. It took 2 hours that I didn't have to fix the problem.
• 20 people were fired on Sunday. Chaos in the office.
• Etisalat blocked bb service because RIM wouldn't agree to let them monitor messages. All Sunday I couldn't receive emails on my bb at work which is a major problem as the customer was emailing me stuff to use for a presentation I had to put together but COB sunday. I was at work from 7 am to 9 pm.
  
•  Monday a fired employee took down the wireless network. I didn't have email access again, and couldn't get on the server, which was fixed by then, because I connect through the wireless. Service came back Monday afternoon, but the office was full of people screaming and yelling. Two important meetings I needed to have were postponed because of the security incident. They finally happened at 7 PM. Once again, I didn't get home until almost 10.
• Jakey, my car, was rear ended in Montana. Not sure what's going on with that, too busy and tired to find out.
• The office I was working in smelled horrible. It turns out two birds flew into the air con shaft and died. The tea boy kept coming in and spraying some vile baby powder air freshener in the office. It almost made me vomit.
  
• Tuesday I decided to make some vid clips of my customer to use in the final presentation. The clips were great and everyone was really excited (they don't do stuff like that here, mostly because the locals usually won't let you even photograph them, but, my customer likes me) but I was up until 2 am editing them for the presentation.
• An idiot member of my architecture team imported some faulty code and took down our database. Then the little shit left while I was in a meeting. Of course the IT guys weren't backing our server up. I didn't leave the office until 9 PM fixing the issue. And then the little shit came in at 9 this morning and was mad because I didn't let him fix the problem. Like, if you break my system and think I'm going to wait until your candy ass rolls in here at 9 am, you really know nothing about working for me.
  
• An idiot sales person introduced a technical requirement at a customer meeting that we couldn't do. My customer was freaking out because we had to have the requirement done by today. I probably could figure it out, but not in the amount of time I have left. Allah bless this kid in Singapore who fixed the problem. I seriously wanted to get on a plane, fly there, and hug him.
• I found out the CEO is going to be on vacation during the final presentation for my project. He wants to set up a vid conference on August 16 so I can do the presentation again, from the US. Ech.
• The vids were so successful that more people want to make them. I have no time to film people.
• The air conditioning in the office I work in broke at 2 pm. It was almost 100 degrees in the office by the time I left this evening.

I know. Stop whining. I'm almost home. Thankfully..

explosions in the morning, my nose is injured

Don't read this post unless you are really immature. I'm laughing as I write it, but I'm really immature.

On Thursday I was working in R's office because we were trying to get a presentation done and my desk in the hallway is just too chaotic these days to be able to concentrate. R and I have been working together for over a week. We get along really well, mostly because we are so much alike. We have food obsessions (like sandwiches and pizza), architecture obsessions (R said he has nightmares about me quizzing him at the hague about why he did certain things in his models), and music obsessions (he went through my 60 GB music library, which I thought was big, then showed me his 2 terabyte library - I was like "I have everything Billie Holiday ever recorded" and he said "I have everything anyone ever recorded" - but, lebanese are like that, always trying to one up you).

R's office, I should mention, shares a wall with the upstairs bathroom (which I'm not allowed to use because I have to go to the ladies' room two flights down).

Anyway, I was sitting at a desk opposite of R and I had just taken a bite of my apple when suddenly I heard this very loud noise coming from the bathroom. It sounded, literally, like someone's ass had just exploded. I made my face really tense so I wouldn't start laughing. I made the mistake of glancing over at R to see if he had heard the noise. He was staring at me with this retarded grin on his face. That was it for me. I suddenly was overcome with laughter. I choked on my apple, and a piece of it flew out of my nose, which made me laugh even harder. R covered his face with both of his hands. We must have laughed for 5 minutes straight. Then I said "I knew I shouldn't have looked at you" and he said "I thought maybe I imagined the noise". This caused us both to start laughing again.

Worse, we heard whoever was in the bathroom rinsing off in the tub. Every bathroom here has a tub so people can wash up for prayers (I guess - I honestly don't know why they have tubs, but every bathroom in every office I've been in has one). This caused another fit of laughter. When I finally had myself more or less under control another bad thing happened. The tea boy went into the bathroom and started cleaning it very loudly. I would say I was incapacitated by my laughter for at least 40 minutes.

I got a nose bleed from the apple coming out of my nose.

strange snake test

I've always had a really bad fear of snakes. So bad that I jump at the sight of something that might vaguely resemble a snake. My dad has gotten to the point where he can ignore when I seize up because I've seen a tree root that looks snake-ish. I've wrecked my mountain bike numerous times because I've seen a snake or something that looked like a snake (one memorable time I rode over a black snake that was stretched out to get sun on the bike trail, and then I fell off my bike as it lifted its head towards my foot).

But the other night I had a dream about snakes that I think might have cured my phobia. In the dream there was a guy who's face I couldn't see because he was wearing a big beige hat. He was handling different snakes and trying to get me to pick them up. I was frozen with fear but he kept yelling at me in this australian accented voice "Pick up the black mamba! Just pick it up!"

Finally, I reached out towards the ground and picked up this bright green snake. "Oh," he said, "that one's a poisonous viper!" I didn't know what to do next because I had thought the snake was fairly harmless and now that I knew it was poisonous I didn't want to hold it anymore. "Just put it on the ground" he said, and the snake slithered away.

"Now that you picked up the worst one, pick up the black mamba. Just get it right behind the head." I started to reach for the black mamba and as my hand got closer the snake's head got smaller and smaller. But its fangs stayed the same size. "It doesn't want to be picked up and it's making it's head too small," I whined. The guy said "Right when they don't want you to do something is when you should do it because you have the element of surprise." I picked up that snake too.

When I woke up from the dream it was 230 in the morning. I had this thought that maybe my snake phobia was gone. To test my theory I first thought about a snake being under my bed ready to strike when I put my feet on the floor. I put my feet on the floor but didn't experience the heart pounding fear that I normally would from visualizing this scenario. Then I decided to put my belt on the floor so in the morning, when I woke up, I would see it in the dark and think it was a snake. But when I woke up and saw my belt, I didn't panic.

I was very happy when R, my new customer boss, came to pick me up in the morning. I explained to him on the way into work about my dream and how I thought I was cured of my snake fear. Apparently my story had some effect on R because he missed our exit for work, even though he's been driving to the same building for over a year.

"So, you think you're cured of your phobia because you've had this dream and then you put a belt on the floor, and when you saw it you didn't think it was a snake and you weren't afraid of it?" he asked me. "Yep" I said, very proud of myself for not being afraid of snakes anymore.

"That has to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life," he said. "Is everyone in the US so crazy, or just you?"

I know it sounds doubtful, but I really do think I'm cured of my snake phobia. I was trying to get R to take me to some place in Abu Dhabi or Dubai that might have a snake that was real so I could verify that I'm cured. He said "I don't go places with crazy people that think they aren't afraid of snakes because if you see a real snake and are afraid of it you'll probably freak out and somehow injure me."

Heh. Ever since I wrecked one person's car in the desert and he got a little hurt (I did as well - I still have a bruise on my side from where the metal of the seat belt squished me when we were landing) everyone here is afraid to go anywhere with me.

Franki phobia. I kind of hope it spreads, actually.

if I had a million dollars I would buy your love

This morning, at 5am, I was awoken rudely from my sleep (for the second time, the first being the call to prayer at 430, why am I staying at a hotel near a mosque) to discover the following on my cell phone:

YOUR MOBILE N0. HAS BE AWARDED £500,000.00(GBP) IN THE ONGOING NOKIA MOBILE PROMO. REF No: SW805 FOR CLAIM CALL+447045754969 & EMAIL: nokia-uk@europe.com] [Country:UNITED KINGDOM] [Language:English]

Immediately sensing a hoax, I contacted Nokia, and got this response back:



Thank you for contacting Nokia Care. 
Nokia is aware that recently there have been several hoax messages on different Nokia promotions and lottery campaigns, sent via email or SMS, purporting to originate from Nokia. Nokia has not initiated any such campaigns and has nothing to do with them - the messages have been sent via parties that are not associated with Nokia in any way.
Please do not reply to these messages or pass them on, as it is possible that by replying to such e-mails or taking the requested actions your personal information could be misused by the originators of the message or others.
The most effective action is to delete the message without responding to the sender. You can also contact your local authorities to report such hoax messages.
For future reference, please feel free to check our website. Kindly refer to the link below:
http://www.nokia.co.uk/home

I guess I've been here too long. I'm getting hoax messages on my cell phone. Luckily I have less than 3 weeks left here.

I once was emailing with a guy who said he wanted to date me, but couldn't due to his personal circumstances. After reading through his email I sent one back saying, as a joke "what if I had a million dollars". He responded "That would make things harder, but wouldn't change them" or something to that effect. I bet he would have changed his mind if I had really won a million dollars. 

Of course, then he would have to be my bitch.

 

problem child has left the building

Today started out as the usual insane day, since I've been away from my project for 4 days doing training. My group of girls and I hung out for a few minutes to chat. Then I sat in meetings while simultaneously working on stuff. At 2 pm I left with R to go to a meeting.

As I walked out of my 2 pm meeting I received an email from a high level person at the company saying they had fired the problem child. Interesting. Especially because my meeting had been with HR to discuss how we can involve them in our project. The HR people were as shocked as I was.


Well, at least the last 3 weeks (yea! only 3 more weeks!!!!) should be less stressful.

my name's not Charlie, and these are no angels

The first 7 months I spent here I was subject to some pretty harsh treatment by the local women. But, I made it a mission to change that.

I taught a class a few months ago. There was only one female. I realized immediately that she was the smartest one of the group (not me being sexist, 54% of local women go to college vs. 23% of men, and of the 23% of men only 7% get a degree, unlike the women who graduate with degrees) but she was afraid to speak up because of her male colleagues. I invited her to do some one on one training with me during the lunch break and after class, with good results.

I've since started doing that with every female in my classes. I've also (even though I could get in a lot of trouble for this) allowed women not officially signed up for my classes to attend them. I put out notice that any woman interested in architecture can contact me and I will help them out as much as I can (given my current work schedule which is, at times, insane).

I'm proud to report that I have a serious group of 7 local women that I'm mentoring. I do everything from helping them with technical issues to plotting with them on how to deal with a difficult male boss. I'm not trying to free them from their hijab, I'm just trying to free their minds, and I think that is what gives me some credibility with them.

When we started our little group one of the women suggested we call ourselves charlie's angels (after the movie, she's way too young to have known about the TV show). Now they call themselves Franki's Devils. When I finally leave here in August if even half of them are making the same progress at work that they all seem to be making now, I'll be happy.

The weird thing is, when we were meeting the other evening, I looked around the room and saw a bunch of beautiful, fashionable women who are all really, really smart. I was joking with them that I feel like I'm teaching super models how to be geeks. They make fun of me all the time (like today when one told me that my hair can probably be seen from outer space because it was so humid today I looked like a blonde cotton ball) but I think that they are starting to like me for real, and not just because I'm trying to help them. We never talk about personal things, and we never gossip, we just talk engineering stuff. If just one of them makes it to a conference within the next year because she's run a successful architecture project I will be very happy.

It's always been my experience at work that women are the worst bosses and will do anything to hold another woman down. I swore I would never do that. And then a cousin of mine went in to the peace corp and taught african women how to run their own businesses. I thought that was cool and wanted to do something like that myself. I've mentored a few women over the years but every one of them ended up getting married or having kids and dropping out of the work force. Here, I feel that the women are motivated to make an impact, and not a slight impact, but a big bang.

Change will come here. And these women will hopefully be part of it.

hearts and hurts - is there really a difference?

Some text messages I've gotten from Habib. I used to correct his english, but he usually claims that I don't know what I'm talking about and that he's right. In particular, he confuses "hearts" and "hurts":

(as he's boarding the plane to Jordan - he's broken 3 nails, likely because he gets manicures every few days):

"Had  90 mimutes sleep. On of the 3 broken nails really hearts !!  boarding in minutes. Will miss you... Take care."

And yesterday:

"Spent the night n the hospital. My 3 years kid heart himself .  Deep wound over his eye, stiches...etc. Slept few hours and saw u  drawing with a pencil on my face . I did not see what you were drawing but you were smiling all the way!! So what is this ?"

Now I have to think of an explanation of why he might have had a dream I was drawing on his face. Comparatively, I'm not that complicated.

shark attack

The remains of my spaghetti...

local entertainment

I've developed a weird friendship with a local guy who works for the parent company of the company I'm consulting with. Well, he has a "job" there, but he doesn't really do any work. He's related to the sheik though, so he was given a position because he has a lot of wasta.

I'll call him Habib. He's a year older than me physically and about 25 years younger than me mentally. I first caught his attention in a meeting (he had only come in to the room to get some cookies but ended up staying). He said he was interested in me because of my hair. In fact, he once asked me to give him a lock of my hair. I told him to stop being stupid, and he got so mad at me he didn't talk to me for a few days.

Habib is interested in all things western. Even though he's super rich, he's barely done any traveling and has never been to the US. We started hanging out because I would show him pictures from my travels that I have up on the kodakgallery web site. He especially likes to look at pictures of my house (he's never seen a "real", that is not movie, house with brick walls or wood floors, shockingly) and asks endless questions like "where did you get that?" and "why do you have that picture on the wall?" I bet if someone broke into my house I could send him pictures and he would know as well as I do, or better, what was missing.

He used to call and invite me to meet him for dinner. At first the invitation was for a restaurant in my hotel, and the invitations kept escalating to fancier and fancier places. Finally a person at my customer site told me Habib thought I was turning down his invitations because he wasn't inviting me to a nice enough place. I had a long talk with Habib to explain that, even though we are friends, I'm not going to dinner with him alone because I don't want to get myself into some weird situation. He was mad at first but seems to be fine now.

He takes xanax every day. I asked him why and he said it's because he can't control his mind. He first became depressed when he was 14 because he watched a movie about a guy who couldn't sleep. That night, he suddenly thought that maybe he had the same disease as the guy in the movie. For six months he couldn't really eat or sleep. Finally he talked to his grandfather who said the disease in the movie wasn't real, and he was instantly better.

He got depressed again in his 20s. He met a woman that he really loved and they dated for 2 years. But he couldn't commit to marrying her because of his family (she was local but not from a prominent family). She ended up marrying her boss.

Habib then told his mom to arrange a marriage for him and he married his cousin (that's one of the few things he's said to me that actually shocked me - I was like "your cousin? your real cousin?" and he said "yes, she is the daughter of my mother's sister" - it's common to marry like that here which is why many of the locals end up with rare diseases). Although he has 4 kids the marriage, according to him, is unhappy because he hates his wife. He said that even on the first night of their honeymoon they fought (he called it a "hellmoon").

After getting married he woke up one day and thought "what is the worst thing I could ever do?" and suddenly the thought "F*k God" popped into his head. For the muslim culture this is the worst thing you could ever think. But then he started thinking it all the time and couldn't stop. He said he would be sitting in his car in traffic and inside he was screaming "F*k God" over and over again, thousands of times, and he couldn't stop.

He tried to become super religious in the hopes that would help. He began praying 10 times a day and studying the koran, fasting when it wasn't required, going to the mosque every evening, and he completely quit everything that is haram (he used to drink alcohol and smoke cigars). But that didn't help either.

So he went to a doctor and said that he was having trouble sleeping. The doctor has, over the years, given him various medications but none seemed to help. Habib did some research on line and finally decided he needed xanax. So he made up some fake symptoms that didn't make him seem crazy and the doctor gave him the prescription. He said the drug helps him "not think about things I shouldn't think about".


After taking xanax and getting un-depressed he decided that being super religious was a waste of time. He doesn't pray or go to the mosque anymore except for special occasions. He drinks alcohol and smokes cigars. But sometimes he gets anxious that he is going to hell. I keep reminding him that the koran doesn't say that alcohol and smoking are forbidden. Sometimes he asks me if I think God likes him. I used to say "I don't know". Then he would say "well if you were God would you like me?" I used to think this was a backhanded way to get me to say that I liked him, but then realized he was being serious. So now when he asks me I pause, and then say "when you asked me that question I just had a feeling that God was telling me to tell you that he likes you". This makes Habib very happy although it's crazy, really.


He was thinking to divorce his wife when we met. I suggested marriage counseling and he looked at me like I had suggested he run naked through the streets. He said "we don't do THAT here". I gave him the names of some books he could read but he is too afraid to buy them even on amazon for fear someone will find out. Then I suggested he just marry a new wife that he likes. So he's been asking my opinion of some potential candidates for his second wife. All of them are very young (some not even 20) and sound just as lost as he is.

I've introduced him to rap music, jazz, the word "angst", and some of my favorite bad word expressions. I also translate western culture for him. The other day he was reading a gossip magazine (he reads Hello magazine while he's getting his manicure and pedicure, but he would never have that magazine in his house or lower himself to buy it) and he called me up to ask me "when the magazine says these two people are dating, what does that mean? are they having sex? do they live in the same house?" He also read an article somewhere about women getting raped in the US; part of the article mentioned a woman who went to a bar, got drunk, went home with a strange man, and got raped. He was surprised that the man was charged. Then he wanted to know, in detail, what happens exactly when a rape occurs, how it's proven that the woman was raped, what the legal proceeding is for handling rape, and how much time men spend in jail for rape. Here 4 men have to witness the rape for the woman to get any justice and because of the huge social stigma even if men witness a rape they will rarely report it.


He watched the sex in the city movie, and that sparked a whole other series of conversations. He wanted to know if gay people really have weddings in the US. He asked me (and I assume this is from something in the movie, which I haven't seen) "do women in the US really visit each other and talk about their vaginas?" And: "I'm not ever going to recycle because recycling was invented by gay people and I don't want people to think I'm gay". I pointed out to him that I recycle almost all of my trash (except here because they don't recycle) and that I'm not gay. His response: "well, that's because you try to be nice to everyone, even gay people".


Habib left yesterday to go on holidays in Jordan (he wanted to go after looking at my pictures). He's getting depressed that I'll be leaving soon and he wants to come visit me in the US. His idea is to come to the US, learn how to swim (again, I'm shocked at how few people here can swim - I've told him to take lessons but all he ever wants to do is have me demonstrate how I move my arms and legs when I swim - then he spends 5 or 10 minutes doggy paddling in the air, which he thinks is going to help him if he ever ends up in the water) and to "go to the rocky mountain" (I've stopped correcting his perception that there is one giant mountain that takes up the whole state of Colorado). I pointed out to him that he has to get into shape to go hiking and he told me "I'll just take a donkey up". I told him there are no donkeys to take people up the mountains and he said "well I will buy a donkey and then ride it up the rocky mountain".

I'm going to miss talking to Habib while he is on vacation, although I've already gotten 10 text messages from him complaining about various things that have happened on his trip (the airport in Amman smelled bad, he can't find a KFC which is his favorite place to eat, his driver is egyptian, the hotel put the room for his kids and wife right next to his room so they are driving him crazy, etc.). I have to admit I'll probably miss him when I go home as well. I never thought I'd be friends with a local, and he comes up with so many crazy things he makes me feel that I'm actually normal.

"don't use this slope" (part 3)

The audio is a little clearer on this one, at least for the most important line...

And Carol is pointing out that I've really wrecked the bumper on the truck.

We're finally unstuck!

"famous stucks" (part 2)

Ib gives a lesson on how to unstick a stuck truck (this film shows the depth more clearly than the pics). I'm sitting with Carol on the dune above, and we're laughing as they try to rescue the car from the sand pit.

Because the audio isn't completely clear...the trip leader says "yanni (which is like saying um) this is one of the famous stucks (something in arabic)," trying to make me feel like it was the worst stuck that's ever happened on the trip (of course, other stucks later in the night were much worse) and you can hear the other drivers sitting with me on the sand dune clapping. Carol says "oh you did such a good job" and then I say "yeeeah" like an idiot. Someone else says "you must be proud" and I say "I am". Then Ib says "give you a lesson. I always made this (basically saying he told me to drive like that because other people were making fun of him for being my "coach" and causing me to wreck the car) to give you a lesson on this kind of stucks and how to get out of them. Thank you so much Franki". There was a momentary pause in the rescue because not enough tires were on the sand because the pit I had landed in was so steep.

blonde bashing (part 1)

You have to admire a company that wants me to come work for them so badly one of their executives let me almost wreck his car last night. Go ahead and say it - "women drivers".

But, in my defense, it wasn't my fault. After happy hours and dinners, the company decided to take me on an adventure in the hopes I might want to stay here. I met up with Ib, a guy I met through work whom I've become friends with, at 6 PM last night. He's an explorer in an off roading club in dhabi. There were 12 other people on the trip.


Off roading is very dangerous here, so the club has "ranks" of drivers. New drivers have no rank. Someone who's been driving for 6 months on "newbie" trips gets one star. The star system goes up to 4 stars (the stars dictate which trips you can go on). Experts can become explorers, meaning they find new trails. The trails are sort of marked on a gps system, but since the dunes change on a daily basis, the route isn't always clear.


Ib is an explorer. He's been driving for 6 years and he goes at least twice a week. He told me the trip would be done at 10. I figured I would be back to the hotel by 11 pm.


We started out by getting the car ready for offroading. Ib said "don't expect to be treated like a princess". I got out of the car in the 133 degree heat and helped uninflate tires at the edge of a road leading into the desert. Then we were supposed to put up a flag so drivers could see us when we were down in a dune so they wouldn't fly over the dune and hit us. But, Ib didn't have a flag. "How dangerous could this be though?" I thought to myself. Ib's 8 year old daughter's stuffed pink cat was in the car because she sometimes goes with him.


I was about to find out the answer to my question.


We started out on some mellow terrain. It took a bit of getting used to at first. You drive sideways across a dune, like a surfer surfing a wave. The car is constantly sliding down the dune and feels like it is about to turn over. People roll, but usually the sand is so soft that it's hard to roll the car unless you do something really stupid.


Night started falling and we were deep in the desert. We stopped at the top of a wide dune as the moon, which was barely a crescent, came out. We got out of the car and set up some chairs, and the group sat around and had tea and smoked either cigars or cigarettes. "What are we waiting for?" I asked Ib. "Complete darkness," he replied.


Once it was totally dark, Ib handed me the keys to his car. "We're going for a drive," he said. The rest of the group looked as surprised as I did. "But I don't know how to drive in the sand," I said. There was another female in the group, Carol, who's french and looks like a model. She's been driving for four years and is an explorer too. She had been telling me how long it took her to get the confidence to drive on easy stuff. And here I was, in the middle of some serious terrain.


Oh well, f*k it, I thought. I took the keys. My first maneuver involved getting the car out of the way of the other 8 cars parked on the dune. Ib's car was facing downhill on a steep sand slope. There was a car parked sideways in front of me. I had to roll 2 feet to get past the car next to me, and then execute a sharp turn to get around the car in front of me, without sliding into it. I managed to do that but was less than 6 inches from the car in front of me by the time I made my turn. Scary.


Then I made my first foray onto the side of a dune. You have to fight every driving instinct to do this. The car is sliding sideways as you are driving forward and you have to fine tune your pressure on the gas pedal to make sure you are gunning it on the more solid sand and easing off on the softer sand so you don't dig a hole. If the car decides to slide down you have to let it go and then figure out how to get out of the sand ditch. I got about 5 feet onto the dune and the car started to slide. Instead of turning the wheel down I tried to drive up more on the dune and then I hit some soft sand. We were getting stuck. I gunned the engine and all this sand flew off the front tire and into Ib's window. His face was covered with sand because he was sweating. I laughed and got stuck.


Ib tried to get us out, but couldn't. The jeep with the winch came and pulled us out. I thought that would be it for my driving, but Ib wanted me to keep going. He also said "just call me the sandman" because he was so covered in sand (the sand flying through the windows happened constantly the rest of the night because we drove with the windows wide open so we didn't have to have the air con on - what's the point of being in the desert if you aren't experiencing the desert fully?).


My second attempt went really well. I decided to treat the car like a boat and steering became easier, except that Ib said I was taking too tight turns, which can cause the tire, which is deflated, to come off its rim (called a pop out). He also said I should slow down coming over the top of a sand dune since you have to see what's on the down side.


But I was so afraid of getting stuck that it was hard to break coming over the top of a sand dune (that's one of the worst places to be stuck because it's hard to move the car with one set of wheels on one side of the dune, and the other set on the other side). The dunes rise up sharply like a shark fin. The last 2 or 3 feet are normally soft, baby powder textured sand. If you get stuck in that mess you can't drive out of it. So I kept flying over the dunes. Anyway, it was so dark, with no moon, I normally couldn't see where I was going anyway.


Then disaster struck. I went flying over a dune with the gas pedal to the floor because I had been zig zagging up a very soft dune. Ib was encouraging me, psyched I was able to drive up the dune. We came over the top, and for a moment it felt like the car had stopped. Then I realized we weren't stopped, we were falling.


The side we had come down on was super steep. There was a soft sand powder hole at the bottom of the dune and we landed smack in the middle of it. We hit so hard I ended up with a bruise from my seat belt (note in the picture there are NO tire marks behind the car).


I heard the rest of the club, who had been watching me drive from another dune cheering. One egyptian guy yelled out "Franki went flying!" The car had made a horrible noise when it landed. I thought Ib was going to kill me.


Instead he laughed and said "Your first stuck!" It took 15 minutes of winching to get the truck out of the sand pit. Ib laid under the front tire to show how high up it was off the ground. Then the club told me to sit under the tire so they could take a picture for their web site. These pictures so just how soft the sand is here. The back of the truck buried on impact. The front left tire was buried (I also damaged the bumper) but the right tire was really high off the ground.

After we got the car unstuck Ib decided that was enough of me driving. We took off further and further into the desert. Soon other people were getting stuck, so I didn't feel so bad.

Some of the group decided to go home at 10, but I wanted to keep going. The terrain was getting more and more treacherous. At times Ib just let the car slide where ever it wanted to go. Other times we would fly over a dune and hit hard on the other side after flying through the air. 


We stopped in a spot between the dunes around 11 pm. Everyone got out and we had dates and tea. Ib and I talked about work, life in general, camels, and then farting. He was telling me about how he had stopped hanging out with some of his friends because they were always having farting contests. He also said they sell this thing in his home country of Jordan that's like a stink bomb, and he used to throw them in his classroom because they would have to cancel class for at least two days because none of the lady teachers could stand the smell. I told him to bring some into the office (he and his family were heading to Jordan today for two weeks holiday) so we could get out of work. He laughed and said he didn't want his sons to know that these things existed because they might throw them in the house (they are 7 and 8 and apparently very badly behaved).

Around 1230 am we started to head home. That's when the trip turned into an epic. First we got a little lost and ended up on a soft dune. Everyone kept getting stuck. The only way out was to drive down this narrow corridor. As we headed towards the corridor Carol, who was in front of us, slammed on her brakes. In front of her was a newly constructed fence. She almost hit it, and then we almost hit her. Our cars were so close they couldn't winch Carol out because we were in the way. The guys in the group managed to push her out of the hole she had dug spinning her tires trying to not hit the fence. We then tried to back up the dune but the car slid forward into the fence.

About 20 guys came riding up on ATVs and started yelling in Arabic. Apparently a camel preserve had just put up the fence and they were yelling at us for being to close to the preserve. They yelled at Ib as he tried in vain to unstick the truck. His clutch was burning so bad that it smelled for the rest of the drive, but he couldn't move his car.

Finally the camel guys agreed to lower the fence so we could drive over it. We gunned up a dune while the camel guys screamed at us to not hit the camels. Then we got out and over the dune.

But a few minutes later the leader of our trip hit the fence in a new place. It took 15 minutes to get him unstuck and instead of being nice like Ib, he just cut the fence. Then another driver got stuck in the same place and had a pop out. While we tried to jack up his truck and fix the problem (which was not easy because the pop out tire was on the downside of the dune slope) the camel guys came over and started screaming that we would be arrested for ruining their fence. I was like great. It's 130 in the morning. I was tired, really dirty, and hot. I hadn't eaten anything since 11 in the morning so I was hungry but afraid to eat because I knew I would puke from all the spinning moves we were doing in the truck. And now we're going to jail, I thought.

But, Ib talked to the guys and in the end they let us go. We got the pop out fixed and Ib assured me we were only 10 km from the road and that we would be heading home shortly.

Then two more people got stuck. And Ib flew over a dune and landed in a sand pit. He had to be winched twice to get out of it and we thought for a few minutes we were going to have to leave the car because the position it was in made it so hard to pull out. The leader was the final stuck, ending up in a sand pit so deep that when the winch pulled him out we all had to move in case the cable broke and went flying.

Finally, at 4 am, we arrived at a gas station to reinflate the tires. Ib's car was first, but it took so long for the guy to fill the tires that it seemed he could do it faster by manually blowing into the valve. Ib was making fun of me because I was covered head to toe in sand and sweat. As Carol and I walked across the parking lot of the filling station to look at the damage she had done to her jeep from a stuck I left a trail of sand.

Ib dropped me off at the hotel at 530 in the morning. The intercon staff looked at me curiously as I made another sand trail through the lobby. I had blood on my feet from scratching them while I was trying to help unstick the truck barefoot. My shirt and pants were covered in dust. My hair was flying in a million different directions from driving in the heat with the windows open.

After showering I finally was able to lay down and shut my eyes. But right before I fell asleep I remembered the words of the trip leader: "so, next ride you will have your own jeep?"

Ha ha, I wish. No, I'd rather wreck someone else's.

the problem child and I become friends

Poor problem child. He has such a short memory. He skulked around me for a few days, but then was behaving badly in meetings all day today. I've dealt with it as well as possible. Today when he kept interrupting my data modeling session, I let him pick where we would start modeling. When he had technical difficulties with his laptop I got the IT kid to come fix it immediately.

In a way, I guess I'm just resigned to his personality. There's one problem child on every project, at various levels of being bad. And normally I get along with difficult personalities.

But things took a turn for the worst today when I was trying to draw a strategy map. Problem child said my map was wrong (it wasn't) and proceeded to lecture me for thirty minutes on what a strategy is. Nothing he said was making any sense. So, a local who briefly owned my project before foisting it onto someone else who was in the meeting started to pick on the problem child. First he played a trick to get the problem child, who sometimes gets confused with the english language when he's in an argument, to say he was totally incompetent at defining strategies. The problem child finally realized what was going on after he had said "I am totally incompetent at defining strategies" 14, yes, 14 times. I felt bad for him because he didn't look pissed, like I would be, he looked hurt. Then the local said that the problem child was a bad communicator. And then he said that if people at the company were confused by the strategy map it was because the problem child didn't know what he was doing.

In all honesty, I think the local was doing this because we have a good work friendship and he knows the problem child picks on me. But, I fight my own fights. And when I say stuff to the problem child he doesn't care - I'm just a woman. When a man does it, the sole reason is humiliation.

As the local escalated his barrage, and the problem child looked more and more pathetic, standing in the front of the room, pants belted and pulled up past his belly button, socks showing a full inch because his pants are too short, his weirdly spindly shoulders curving more and more inward, and his giant gut protruding like a target that screamed "hit me!", I couldn't take it anymore. I turned to the local, who was sitting next to me, and said "stop it". I didn't say it loud, or in a mean way, but it shut down all of the noise in the room (there were about 7 people arguing at the same time in the meeting).

I suggested that I meet with the problem child alone to combine both of our thoughts on strategies. I suggested we meet again next week. Everyone was glad the meeting was finally over so no one argued and they ran out of the room like school kids finally released for the summer holidays.

Except the problem child. He came over to me and said, after he had gotten the email I sent him yesterday thanking him for acknowledging my team's good work on the project, that he was sorry he hadn't said more often how pleased he was with the job we have been doing. And then he said " I expect so much from you because of the work you do that sometimes I forget to say thank you." But, I really think he was thanking me for defending him in the meeting.


I take that as a truce. Somehow maybe I have some wasta here, not with powerful people, but with the ground troops. And regardless of what pains in the ass they can be, I guess I'll survive my last 4 weeks here. Even the local, whom I thought would be pissed at me, came up to me as I was leaving work this evening and said "you have to be the most diplomatic person I've ever met".

Okay, I know you're laughing now. But I swear he said it.

bad interviews and polar bears

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/interviewees
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/polar_bear

Good for a few laughs. I would be the underdressed one...thanks for sending this Jason!

a little dirty, but we've risen from the ashes

I went into work on Sunday with a plan in place to try to fix my project problems. I found out that, over the weekend, a decision had been made to put the problem child in charge of my project. I was absolutely furious, so much so that I temporarily couldn't finish reading the email because my sight went blank. As if I was going to work with that asshole. I decided to pull out all of the stops.

First, I went to the COO and gave him the status of the project. I casually mentioned we will finish all of the deliverables by the end of July, so there was no reason really for me to stick around until the 14th as is currently planned. I also said I was not happy with the problem child H delaying things, and that, since I have projects back in the US, and since he finds it so hard to work with me, it might be better for me to leave at the end of July.

I have to admit I was hoping he would say fine, get the hell out of here. But instead he asked who I wanted to run the project from the customer side. I suggested a guy, R, whom I get along with (even though he's canadian and all canadians are strange).

Within an hour, the change was made (much to the panic of R). Then the problem child decided to retaliate by blocking all forward progress on a web site that needs to be published by the end of the week. The problem child was told by the COO to have it done, and problem child said that I did not provide him with the data he needed and that he couldn't proceed any further.

To this point I have managed my temper and let things slide because working here is such a political mine field. But to suggest I did not do my job was about the worst thing problem child could do. I fired off an email that was so strongly worded one of my colleagues later said he could imagine me screaming every word in problem child's face.

I guess the thing is, the real work is done. I don't care if they throw me out of here because I stepped on someone's toes.

Within 10 minutes of sending the email I could hear a commotion on the floor below me as problem child was slapped down by the COO loudly and publicly. The COO accused him of lying which is funny because everyone lies here and no one says anything because it's just the way the culture works. I wondered what would happen next.

What happened is that the problem child has been avoiding me. Why? Because he's afraid of me now. Before he would waste my time having pointless arguments. Not any more. When he speaks to me, he does it calmly and actually seems a little timid. He carefully phrases everything so I don't take it the wrong way and fly off the handle again. And finally, our web site will be published.

To make sure there were no further issues that would get him in trouble, problem child sent me an email today saying I had done an excellent job. Which is so ironic since he was always my biggest critic. I responded back to him that it really meant a lot to me that he would say such nice things about my work. Hopefully things will continue in this "we all love each other so much" mode until I can get the hell out of here.

As for the web site, we publish tomorrow. I have a plan to make it more exciting than the launch of a NASA space shuttle. I'm even going to play the rocky theme song once it gets moved to sharepoint and the test user is able to access it. Even the IT guys, who, well, are IT guys, are getting excited about it (they have to publish it and they were complaining about the extra work, so I've been dealing with them as well as the problem child which has been making me insane because I've set up the web site so that all they have to do is push a button to get it to publish).

All ends well. At least for today.

Mr. Salt and Ms. Pepper discover a crashed UFO

This is my brain after 8 hours of software testing...

why we'll never win a war here

I've been thinking this week that my project is a microcosm example of why Westerners will never succeed here.

I didn't want to come back to do this project. But the customer begged me. They even put in the statement of work that I had to be the consultant. I made demands for the project to ensure it would be a success, such as getting to pick the team that would work for me, having a proper work area (conference room, projector, white board), and having customer commitment. Oh sure, they said, you'll get everything you want.

Then I get here and it's like an out of control circus. Our working environment is horrible and we never have enough room to even set up our laptops. Forget working groups, the conference room is hardly ever available, and even when we have it booked we can be thrown out at the customer's whim. My company assigned a project manager who has something personal against me, and she is constantly reassigning my resources so, on a daily basis, I have no idea which team members will be showing up. That wouldn't be bad if at least they were doing other work but they aren't. They are sitting at home, or in the office, doing nothing while I have to struggle to do their work on top of mine because I don't want to blow my schedule.

The customer has tons of political issues going on in the company and they keep trying to involve my team in them. Keeping some of the junior members out of this game has been hard because they think they are gaining some power from this mess when in fact it's more like a set up. Keeping my company's resources working even 4 hours a day when I'm here is hard, and when I'm gone it's a disaster. Only the sub contractor working on the project is reliable. If I didn't have him I don't know what I would do. Meanwhile, there's a lot of pressure from my company to make this a referenceable project even though they are doing everything they can to sabotage it.

The customer has unreasonable deadlines for things, and try to force me to drop current tasks to work on unrelated, non-critical tasks. Then they ask me "why isn't this critical task done?" Even though I have a chain of emails showing I've been redirected and they've accepted that by forcing me to work on a non-critical task they are introducing risk of something critical not getting completed they refuse to take any responsibility.

And then they fire the people who are supposed to help us figure out who in the company we need to work with, and have assigned a new guy who's been with the company for one month and who doesn't even have a desk to sit at to be the head of the project.

And that's the way business is done here. Finger pointing back to the people who are trying to help. No matter how hard you work, someone is always unhappy and critical. People play political games and back stab each other and then try to force us poor consultants to take sides. And in the end, when we leave, I'm sure they'll claim that the project is a failure because it's easier to do nothing than to actually learn how to be self sufficient and successful.

People work here for years. I don't know how. Oh wait, I do. Last night at a happy hour with some people from a sister company it was recommended I get a prescription for xanax.

FUBAR

I'm wondering how much worse things will get here before they get better.

My project sponsor was fired on Sunday. His back up was fired the Thursday before. There was no explanation of why this happened, and I found out from other people in the company, not because I was informed before hand.

Wednesday I was back in the office after being gone for two weeks. The problem child H now has the project moved under his department. He is so gleeful about this that it almost makes me sick when I talk to him. Luckily I managed to maintain a good relationship with him so the splatter hasn't hit me directly. But still. Everyone in the company who liked my project sponsor keeps asking me what happened. As if I know. I'm avoiding politics here as much as possible but people keep trying to engage me in a speculation game of what happened. At this point, I trust no one and refuse to say anything. That's in turn creating a sense of paranoia that I know something and so people have been asking me if they are going to lose their jobs. They don't believe me when I say I don't know. That's causing them to do things like stand behind my chair while I'm trying to work, speaking in Arabic, saying my name and the name of my project sponsor. If you're going to talk about me, and not in English, do it in your office.

To make matters more interesting, I'm getting criticized for things that are just insane. I was yelled at yesterday for not putting the names of my customer on the to: list of an email in the order of their importance (COO first, etc.). I was like are you god damn kidding me? A sales guy claimed to H that I was having secret meetings with other sales people behind his back (which, while also not true, is completely improbable as I haven't been in the office to have any meetings). H suggested I sit with the sales guy and talk to him to make him feel better.

So, even though I have a ton of work to do, I sat in the sales guy's office for an hour yesterday and tried to discuss his concerns with the project. It turns out, he has none. He made up his concerns to force me to talk to him. I sat there while he tried to grill me about my love life (short conversation, that one) and then he tried to force me to agree to go to dinner with him. I hate this kind of stuff. I don't want to hang out or talk to anyone here anymore. I just want to get done and go home.

H is also throwing all these road blocks in my way to continue moving the project forward. Meanwhile, since Wednesday, I've had to waste hours of my life I'll never get back briefing the new project sponsors on what we have done and what we have left to do. That's right, sponsors. Since Wednesday 3 people have taken over and then resigned as the project sponsor. I'm hoping the guy I talked to on Thursday will stick at least for a week so I can get some work done. The latest project sponsor is younger than me and has no experience in this stuff. He claimed the project was behind schedule even though we are two weeks ahead of schedule and have delivered more stuff than was required. I've been driving my team to make sure that everything is high quality so the customer can't nit pick up to death about spelling errors or whatever. The team is taking it pretty well considering everyone at the customer site is saying "why work so hard, the project is just going to be shut down".

And then yesterday, after working an hour of overtime to deliver some bullshit report to H, he smiled and said to me "Thanks, but this report doesn't matter, because as soon as you leave we're replacing your software tool with another tool. What do you think about that?" I know he was baiting me because there were some important decision makers in the room. So I said "Assuming you've done a trade off analysis that shows that tool will work for you, you need to make decisions based on the best engineering approach to your current problem. I also assume you've analyzed the cost of changing tools along with the required training. By the way, that tool isn't even on the Gartner quadrant. I assume you've checked with the vendor to make sure you'll be able to get tech support if something goes wrong, since it's not a well established company and may be lacking resources." Asshole. I smiled back at him. One of the decision makers asked if H had checked into any of the issues I had just brought up as I walked out of the room.

Only 5 weeks left. If I survive this project and get it delivered on time, with customer approval, I can do anything.

helicopter

Last night I dreamed that I was in a war zone and I had a team of 6 people with me, men and women. A helicopter came in to rescue us because we had just finished our mission. I climbed up a rope and by taking up my end of the rope I was able to pull the rest of my team off the ground into the helicopter. But, for some reason, every time one of my team members would get on the helicopter, they would cut the rope a little shorter (there is no way to imagine the rope configuration I dreamed about as it was completely illogical).

By the time I pulled up the last person, which required me to pull myself up on my rope and then drop my weight down (kind of like belaying someone) my arms were really tired. I wanted to get onto the helicopter. By then we were way above the ground because there were still bombs going off. I went to hand a guy on the helicopter my end of the rope so he could pull me in, but I realized the rope was too short for it to reach him. I lowered myself on one end of the rope to make the other end shorter, and realized that I still couldn't reach the helicopter.

People on the helicopter started shouting at me to not let go of either end of the rope, otherwise I would fall. Some were telling me to make one end longer, others were saying to do the opposite. I realized no matter what I did I would never be able to get on the helicopter. I asked the people I had just pulled up to get another rope to pull me in and they said they were too tired and they walked away. My arms were getting shaky by then and I realized I was about to lose my grip on the rope. The guy who was supposed to be pulling me into the helicopter looked at me and said "that's going to be a very bad way to die".

Then I woke up.

in case you were wondering if the security situation is getting worse here

The answer is yes.

total disaster

Friday morning I thought that all of the problems on my project were contained. The "project manager" is on vacation for three weeks, so I don't have to read her annoying emails demanding I drop everything to go have some pointless meeting with her to discuss the "schedule" when she isn't even managing the schedule, I am. Even though one of our key players left, in an hour my customer and I figured out a solution. I also worked out this weekend how to finish the project on time, with all of the deliverables, in spite of my company's attempts to derail things by reassigning me unexpectedly to teach for a military customer, taking me away from the project for yet another week. The problem child H has been contained. I figured after I finish the training there is another week of really hard work, and then two weeks of wind down time where we wouldn't have to work so hard before I could be on a plane home.

Ah, why do I delude myself that anything in this country will work?

In the middle of class today, right as I was walking students through an exercise, my phone blew up. I paused to let the students catch up to me, and read the first email. The customer I work for, Dr. M, quit. In fact, was on his way out the door. I responded and his email bounced back - they had already disabled his email.

I was like are you god damn KIDDING ME? It was almost impossible to concentrate as my brain ran around in hamster circles going "NOW WHAT DO I DO?????????????" My stomach turned into a little rock fearing H would be put in charge.

About 10 minutes later all of my students were talking about how they had received an email that Dr. M had quit. I was accused of withholding information. A little political dust up occurred. I finally got everyone calmed down enough to finish the class for the day. I also ensured that the person taking over the project would be a guy I like to work with, and not H.

But now here I am, feeling totally demoralized, wondering, after all these months, if the project is going to crash and burn. To prevent that means keeping up the pace, and increasing it to make up for having two missing customer bodies (I am going to have to do their work because the replacement person can't, for example, prepare the briefing for the steering committee because he has a full time job). Every day I'm on the firing line from 7 am until I go home at 5 pm. I never have 15 minutes to sit at a desk, staring into space wondering why the hell I came here because I constantly have at least two people yelling at me or yelling for me. That's why when I go home at night I talk to no one, go no where, and submerge myself in drawing diagrams. It's been a while since I've been under this much pressure, in a foreign country, without having even my own company's resources to rely on. They are as bad as my customer.

Contact with the outside world? No thanks.

If I manage to get out of here in one piece I will be shocked. I'm pretty sure my face is twitching. Is that the sign of a psychotic breakdown?

welcome to your box, bitch

Last Thursday completed my plan to throw my problem child on the project in a box, and keep him there.

He's an obnoxious egyptian, we'll just call him H (he's the guy my customer tried to get fired as depicted in the blog colloquial). Since my project has started he's try to throw one road block after another at me to keep the project from progressing. He's supposed to be in charge of document management. The dude is so disorganized that he can't even find current versions of documents. He's supposed to learn how to use my software to get out of the mode of creating processes in word documents (how stone age) and into modeling them so they can be simulated.

Besides breaking things constantly so I have to fix them for him, he throws me under the bus in front of upper management, saying absurd stuff like "she never helps me" and even when I point out that I spend half my day with him he says "I never see her".

So, I started documenting in a spreadsheet how often we were meeting and what I was teaching him at each meeting, assigning a percentage to each skill (e.g. 75% comfortable drawing a business process diagram without help). I also made the meetings formal invites. In our last steering committee meeting when he started saying he hasn't gotten any training I pulled out the spreadsheet. Then he claimed I made up the percentages and that we had never discussed them, which was a total lie. So I produced all of the emails about the training I had given him. When I called him on his lie, in this sort of subtle but not really way, he changed his argument and said he would have to teach other people what I'm teaching him, and he couldn't do it.

Fine. Last Tuesday through Thursday he was in a formal training class I taught. He spent the first two days sitting there saying nothing was working. Time and again I had to go over and say "H, you can't display your diagram because you haven't opened it". Etc. Then he started carrying on long, loud conversations while I was trying to teach. I would give him a verbal warning and then send a follow up email.

The last day I said "I'm going to do something no person should ever do - I'm going to let an egyptian drive". I made him come up to the front of the room and teach class for two hours. He looked like he was going to cry. The other 15 students in the class liked me and so they harassed him mercilessly. He kept saying "I'm done teaching, you come up here" and I would say "no, keep going, you'll have to do this on your own when I'm gone". After the two hours were up I made the class clap for him.

Which all leads to my grand plan. In the next steering committee meeting, when he tries to report that, after formal training, he still can't do his job, I will point out that he in fact taught the class for a few hours, and everyone applauded for him at the end. Then I will also bring up the emails and say "maybe if there are things you still don't know it's because you were talking when you were supposed to be doing your exercises."

Welcome to your box, bitch.