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.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
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.
(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.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, July 16, 2010
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
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!
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.
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.
Friday, July 9, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
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?
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.
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.
Friday, July 2, 2010
can't take me anywhere
Suffice it to say, it was a rough week. On top of the changes in scope for the project, and the reorgs going on with my customer, one of the main supporters of our project was fired on Thursday. He is supposed to take over the project while my customer is away on vacation for three weeks. On top of teaching class for 9 hours a day, and trying to run my project, I also had to deal with that.
My customer, Dr. M, and I were about to embark on a trip to a bar called Frankie's for a well deserved happy hour when my internal "project manager" (that's her title anyway, though the only thing she seems to manage is her vacation schedule) told me that I have to do some more training for the military. I was incensed. She asked me to do it earlier this week and I said no. I didn't want to be away from my project for a week because that would delay my return trip. Did she turn around and tell the customer no? Uh, no. She said I would do it.
I went off and said that since she had agreed with my other customer that I would deliver things on the project that weren't even in the statement of work and that doubled my workload that, if I had to miss a week to do the other training, things were going to start dropping on the floor. I have to put together an email about what we aren't going to finish, on top of everything else I have to do, because the "project manager" left for holidays for 2 weeks after dropping that little bomb on me.
Needless to say, I was ready for a drink. Dr. M and I showed up at Frankie's to await the rest of the Thursday afternoon crew, only to discover it doesn't open until 7 PM (it was 5 PM). I was like wah, will anything go right today? The bartender gave me a tour of Frankie's and we told him we would see him in 2 hours.
We went out to the beach bar and waited for people to show. A brit couple showed up and I ended up talking to them the whole night. It turns out the husband loves sharks as much as I do, and the wife is recovering from knee surgery. They are the type of couple that finish each other's sentences. I was laughing so hard at their description of the wife's first impression of the middle east. And they invited me over for an all made from hand dinner next Friday. The wife said I seemed to be in need of some mothering. I was like yeah, bring that on, and can you also make me some lemon cookies?
Then the big boss showed up with a guy in local dress, and we were introduced. The husband of the brit couple was telling me a story about tiger sharks so I didn't pay much attention to the local, which seemed to upset him. He stuck a piece of skewered chicken in my face and tried to feed me. I was like get that away from me because chickens are gross. Then he offered me a cigarette and I accidentally (because I had had two glasses of wine on an empty stomach) said he smoked girly cigarettes (he did - the really skinny ones) and said if he wanted a real cigarette he should smoke one of mine (gauloises blue - the french got something right). He did and had a coughing fit.
We were sitting in this area of the bar that's all sofas, except for where the local and I were sitting. I had a chair and he was sitting on the ottoman. At one point the husband, wife, and I were comparing knee scars (I won, surprise surprise) and the local almost fell over on me (guess he doesn't see many bare legs). Then he offered to fill up my wine glass, which was empty. At that point I accidentally, momentarily forgot where I was and I punched him in the arm and said "you're just trying to get me drunk". He almost fell off the ottoman. I noticed that the big boss was looking at me either trying not to laugh or because he was suddenly overcome by a migraine.
After the local left, the big boss, who was sitting across from me on a sofa, said "do you know who that was?" I hadn't even really heard the guy's name. It turns out he's the nephew of the sheik in charge of 'dhabi. I was like, um, oh, really? because I had been sort of rude to him. Then the big boss said "do you realize you punched the nephew of a sheik?" I mean, it's not like I punched him in the face. It was his arm.
Dr. M thought it was funny. And he gave me some advice about working here:
1. you have to have a high tolerance for stupidity
2. never get between two locals
Anyway, I'm looking forward to my home cooked dinner that will hopefully happen on Friday!
My customer, Dr. M, and I were about to embark on a trip to a bar called Frankie's for a well deserved happy hour when my internal "project manager" (that's her title anyway, though the only thing she seems to manage is her vacation schedule) told me that I have to do some more training for the military. I was incensed. She asked me to do it earlier this week and I said no. I didn't want to be away from my project for a week because that would delay my return trip. Did she turn around and tell the customer no? Uh, no. She said I would do it.
I went off and said that since she had agreed with my other customer that I would deliver things on the project that weren't even in the statement of work and that doubled my workload that, if I had to miss a week to do the other training, things were going to start dropping on the floor. I have to put together an email about what we aren't going to finish, on top of everything else I have to do, because the "project manager" left for holidays for 2 weeks after dropping that little bomb on me.
Needless to say, I was ready for a drink. Dr. M and I showed up at Frankie's to await the rest of the Thursday afternoon crew, only to discover it doesn't open until 7 PM (it was 5 PM). I was like wah, will anything go right today? The bartender gave me a tour of Frankie's and we told him we would see him in 2 hours.
We went out to the beach bar and waited for people to show. A brit couple showed up and I ended up talking to them the whole night. It turns out the husband loves sharks as much as I do, and the wife is recovering from knee surgery. They are the type of couple that finish each other's sentences. I was laughing so hard at their description of the wife's first impression of the middle east. And they invited me over for an all made from hand dinner next Friday. The wife said I seemed to be in need of some mothering. I was like yeah, bring that on, and can you also make me some lemon cookies?
Then the big boss showed up with a guy in local dress, and we were introduced. The husband of the brit couple was telling me a story about tiger sharks so I didn't pay much attention to the local, which seemed to upset him. He stuck a piece of skewered chicken in my face and tried to feed me. I was like get that away from me because chickens are gross. Then he offered me a cigarette and I accidentally (because I had had two glasses of wine on an empty stomach) said he smoked girly cigarettes (he did - the really skinny ones) and said if he wanted a real cigarette he should smoke one of mine (gauloises blue - the french got something right). He did and had a coughing fit.
We were sitting in this area of the bar that's all sofas, except for where the local and I were sitting. I had a chair and he was sitting on the ottoman. At one point the husband, wife, and I were comparing knee scars (I won, surprise surprise) and the local almost fell over on me (guess he doesn't see many bare legs). Then he offered to fill up my wine glass, which was empty. At that point I accidentally, momentarily forgot where I was and I punched him in the arm and said "you're just trying to get me drunk". He almost fell off the ottoman. I noticed that the big boss was looking at me either trying not to laugh or because he was suddenly overcome by a migraine.
After the local left, the big boss, who was sitting across from me on a sofa, said "do you know who that was?" I hadn't even really heard the guy's name. It turns out he's the nephew of the sheik in charge of 'dhabi. I was like, um, oh, really? because I had been sort of rude to him. Then the big boss said "do you realize you punched the nephew of a sheik?" I mean, it's not like I punched him in the face. It was his arm.
Dr. M thought it was funny. And he gave me some advice about working here:
1. you have to have a high tolerance for stupidity
2. never get between two locals
Anyway, I'm looking forward to my home cooked dinner that will hopefully happen on Friday!
Monday, June 28, 2010
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