Moving Day

I made my decision about the jobs. I am going for the start-up. A little less money now, and perhaps a bit more work. But this is what I came to silicon valley for – to participate in technology innovation. And, perhaps, to get some financial reward beyond the salary. And the salary is more than adequate.

I called the hiring managers and let them know. Company A (the start-up) was pleased and asked for a start date. He wanted me to start today. I held him off to Monday. That’s when Lynn starts her new job, too. This gives us a long weekend – without me having the stress of unemployment looming over my head.

I called company B (big computer company) and let them know. They were disappointed asked if there was something in the offer that could be fixed to change my mind (cool, I hadn’t thought of that.) No. They thanked me for the interest blah, blah, blah.

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One thing about having a truck is that you make a lot of friends really quickly. You do a lot of moves for these friends. I was happy to move Lynn out of her townhouse in Milpitas. Eric (former co-worker and all around good guy) came along to help. We lifted with heavy things and Lynn got all the knickknacks and light stuff. While we were dragging the heavy dresser out though the living room, Lynn came up behind me, grabbed my ass, and said “You’re so wonderful.” That’s all the payment that I need. (Usually I demand beer and pizza).

There was a for sale sign in the yard. I had forgotten that she owned the place with Jim. I don’t know how they did it, or what the split was.

We took all of her clothes, a dresser, a desk, a book shelf, one of the TVs. She had a bunch of boxes packed which we loaded onto my truck. She had her car stuffed with things. We packed up most of the firewood off the rear deck, I took that back to my place – her apartment does not have a fireplace. All told, it was a single trip.

When we got to the apartment, the bed had been delivered. It’s a waterbed called a somma. It’s a unique design, where the water is in these 6 foot long tubes that are about 8 inches in diameter. Very phallic. Needless to say, we had a great time filling the tubes and putting the bed together. There was a lot of giggling. I haven’t had this much fun in a long time. Once the bed was together we broke it in. I think I rather like the waterbed effect.

We then spent most of the evening shopping – for glasses, kitchenware, towels, basic food. Everything you need to set up a home. We found a really neat wine rack at Crate and Barrel - it only holds 8 bottles - which is not enough – so I bought 2. Tonight we’ll go to K and L wines and I’ll fill it up. A house warming gift.

We got some Chinese take-out from a place in downtown Los Gatos, and sitting the floor of her dining room – kitchen nook, really. I put up some pictures while she set up the kitchen.

We ended the day with a soak in the Jacuzzi. It was a cold night and I wrapped myself in a towel and ran for the pool (but I did at least bring my swim trunks). The warm water was wonderful on the tired muscles. After a while we went back to the apartment and stepped into the shower together. She was wearing a gray one piece bathing suit that zippered down the front. We undressed each other slowly and, ahem, well… got really, really clean.

I woke up at 3 in the morning tangled up in her limbs and sunk into the water bed. I was quite hungry, and was going to root around in the fridge. I woke her, unintentionally, while trying to untangle myself. She pulled me to her. Half asleep, we made love again.

Afterward, I snuck out to the kitchen and found a container of oreo cookie ice cream. Lynn wandered out. “There’s a naked man in my kitchen eating ice cream” she said with mock alarm.

“Then you should pull up a spoon and join him.” I replied as evenly as I could.

We finished the ice cream. I have a new favorite flavor.

When I left to go home this morning, she gave me a key to the apartment.

It's Freaking Cold!!

Forecast high temperature in Minneapolis today? -3 , wind chill of -25!

Yup. That's the High. Low of -10.

Not C - that's F - for Freaking cold!

I'm in Minneapolis on a business trip with my co-worker Eric, whom I don't think has ever seen anything more than a heavy frost.

Eric is dying. I brought expedition weight capiline thermal underwear. (I can't believe that I'm blogging about my underwear) But this stuff will keep you warm for over an hour when worn under a wet-suit when immersed in freezing water (which wicks hear away about 25 times faster than cold air). Even though we are only going from the car to the office or hotel, Eric is really having a hard time walking even 50 feet outside. I'm doing OK, but I forgot to bring a hat - any more than a minute or two outside and my ears will get frostbite. Eric just brought a heavy jacket.

I don't know how people live here. It's crazy.

Mile High Night-Club

Its 2:00 a.m. pacific time, and I can’t sleep in these cramped seats (I am 6’ 1’’). So I might as well blog.

Things could be worse. I did get into United’s economy plus seats (extra 5” of legroom) and Meg (the wonder girl from travel) got me a whole mess of free drink coupons.

The flight attendant just came by with the drink cart. I was sitting next to Eric at the start of the flight, but it's pretty empty so he took the open row in front of me. I noticed Eric passed on a drink. I ordered a bottle of red wine (single serving airline size)and gave the flight attendant 2 drink coupons. “...and get the guy in the front of me anything he wants.” I told the flight attendant.

The flight attendant looked at me with a shocked expression “You want to buy him a drink?”

“Uh, yeah” I really should have added “don’t you think he’s sexy?”

“Are you sure” he asked. He clearly thought I was making a serious error in judgment. I’m not sure if he thought that Eric was out of my league (or wasn’t good enough for me), or that he was offended that I might be trying to pick someone up in-flight (I think it was the former).

“Yeah, I’m sure”

The flight attendant talked to Eric for a minute. Then came back to me and said “he didn’t want anything” – sounding very relieved - and handed me back my drink coupon.

I banged on Eric’s seat. “Hey, I have free drinks from Meg,” and showed him the coupon.

“Oh cool” Eric grabbed the coupon and got a beer from the flight attendant.

The Joys of Corporate Travel

Yes, another trip.

Minnesota in January - call it punishment.

On Tuesday Dave called me into his cube. “Rich, I need you and Eric to go do the install in Minneapolis. The customer is complaining about support and the sales engineers can’t handle this. They’re not trained on the new version and we can’t screw this one up. I need you there Monday morning. Call travel and get yourself tickets.”

I got myself a nice NW flight from SFO to MSP leaving at noon and getting in 6:20 p.m. Booked a room at the W Hotel (yeah, I like those) and got a car. I actually like the travel and a few more frequent flyer miles are always welcome. I’d usually stay a couple of extra days, but Minneapolis in January is brutal. I do have a lot of capeline that I use under a drysuit for kayaking and windsurfing so warmth should not be too much of a problem. Still, the temperature is predicted to get up to 17 degrees on Monday.

At least I’ll be away from Dave for a while.

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On Wednesday, Dave stopped by my cube. “Hey, Rich” he called. “I talked to travel and we need to move you from the W to the Courtyard.”

“Why?”

“I know you always like to stay at Ws, but the courtyard is half the price. We need to keep the expenses down.”

Oh well, courtyards are kinda decent hotels – things could be worse.

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On Thursday Dave caught me in the hallway, “Hey Rich” he called, “we needed to change your flights. You are on a United flight out at 10 p.m. through Chicago. It was 1/3rd the price of the old ticket. Sorry Guy, but this is a new travel policy – if there is any fare $100 less than your current ticket we need to switch your flights. " He smiled. I really believe that he is taking some amount of satisfaction from this.

It is actually an 11:35 p.m. flight that gets into Chicago at 5 a.m. with a connection that gets me in to Minneapolis at 8:30 a.m.

Then I need to work all day.

Work Sucks - more than ever

Dave is my boss. Dave and I don't get along. Dave is quite a character. He is an older guy, but he doesn’t have a lot of experience on the job. He used to be a truck driver and got a programming degree at a night university about 6 or 7 years ago. I can honestly say that he is not a very good programmer. He used to be one of my co-workers. We both reported to another guy who quit a few months back. The company tries to promote from within. In this case they promoted Dave to group manager.

I suspect that they promoted Dave to get him away from the code. He is a sloppy coder and didn’t test his work very well. While he was a co-worker of mine I didn’t hide my lack of respect for his abilities. And he didn’t hide his dislike for me. I also didn’t hide from him the fact that I was starting to look for a new job (something that I now realize you should never share with *anyone* you work with). And then, in a quirky twist of fate, he became my boss. Whoops.

Now I get all the assignments from the bottom of the barrel – and more work than most of the other folks. Which is OK. I do like the work – just not the company or my boss. And I can do the work faster than most of my co-workers. It helps not having much of a social life either, as I can eat dinner from the candy machine and work late into the night without missing anything other than some bad sit-coms on TV.

Dave reports to Tony (more on Tony later – Tony hired me into the company, over Dave’s objections). Liz also reports to Tony. All of Dave’s and Liz’s workers are in a block of cubicles together. Mine is in the same hallway as Lynn’s office. My office is on the corner near the main hallway, hers is at the end of the cubicle hallway, in sort of a cul-de-sac – so there aren’t too many folks walking by. I take my coffee breaks in her office. We play backgammon on her computer and discuss the problems of the day loud enough for folks in neighboring cubes to know that we are collaborating on work. I probably spend too much time there because Linda – the group secretary – knows to look for me there if I am not in my office.

On Friday, I was sitting in Lynn’s office when Linda found me. "Dave wants to see you right away," she said. I got up and followed her to Dave’s cube.

Dave had his feet on his desk and was doodling on a note pad. "Come in" he said not moving his feet. "I’ve been going over the bug reports and you have been very productive in September and October. You passed even Eric on fixes in October, even though you were out for a week and a half. – that’s impressive."

"Thanks" I replied.

"So," he continued, still looking at the pad of paper "I’d like you to start leading the India meetings"

"You mean the status meetings with Sanjay?"

"Yup" he put his feet down and looked at me. "Sanjay and his guys are doing more bug fixing and I need them to coordinate their work with the project team here. We’ve had too many problems with them making changes that interfere with work going on here, especially in the last month."

"OK" I shrugged "Tuesday nights at 7:00, right?"

"No, I changed the time. It interfered with my baseball. It’s now at 5 a.m." He paused. Dave is a big baseball fan and goes to the local games as frequently as possible.

"Can’t we change it back? I don’t go to ball games." It's not even baseball season.

"I don’t think that would be a good idea. Sanjay will have most of his engineers there so we need to schedule it during their work day."

I felt my face turning red. Dave smiled.

"The meeting is in video conference room B."

"Can’t I call in from home?"

"No, Richard, communication works better when they can see you."

"Can’t I use a webcam from home?"

Dave laughed.

"Who else will be there from Sunnyvale?" I asked.

"No one, just you." He smiled again.

"Isn’t this supposed to be your job?" I tried to ask as evenly as I could.

"Yes it was. But now I’m delegating it to you. As a manager it is my job to delegate tasks to the people that will do them the best." His phone rang, he checked the incoming number quickly. "I’ll e-mail you the agenda. Keep up the good work, Dick" with a strong emphasis on the word “Dick”. He picked up the phone and turned his back toward me.

Dave had been on my case about the fix count since he took over the job. My counts were usually close to the average for the group. Eric is the boy wonder of the group, and has had the highest monthly fix count since he joined - he also held the group record (until I took it in October). He’s actually a really good guy and a good programmer. I gave him a bad time when he first joined the company – which I feel bad about now. Before he came on board all the managers were gushing about how great he is. He came from one of our biggest customers and knows the application really pretty well – so he hit the ground running.

About a week after he started working with us I found that he left his computer unlocked and had gone home. I added a startup script to his machine that displayed a file and logged him out. The file said:

"Security section has determined that you have not followed proper logout procedures – your computer was left logged in, unlocked, and unattended. This represents a security threat to company intellectual property. Your access to company computers and networks has been suspended pending an investigation. Your management has been notified."

I meant this as a joke, but the company is sufficiently up-tight that it is plausible that we might have a security section and they might take that kind of action. This really panicked Eric. I guess it would have panicked me too. He went to both Tony and Linda when he came in the next morning and tried to figure out how much trouble he was in. No one could figure out where security section was. No one was aware of any security policies requiring logging out. No one tried to hack into his machine and remove the script either. When I got in – around 10 as usual – I fixed his machine and apologized. Eric saw the humor in it I think, although maybe he was just really relieved. Dave though it was irresponsible and childish, and he let me know it. But he wasn’t my boss back then.

Anyway, in October I put in some extra hours and got my fix count higher than Eric's record before I went on vacation. I figured that Dave couldn’t argue with my productivity. My reward for the hard work is a weekly 5 a.m. meeting.

I’m going to check monster.com now