Thu - February 17, 2005

The Usual Day




So I had the usual day at work. But since my wife advises me it's not smart to post one's thoughts about where one's currently working, I'll set the wayback machine to 3 months ago - a contract from hell at BelliCom, a giant telco in west Dallas. The commute was far worse than I could imagine. The first week it took 2 hours one way to get home. But the wearying drive was the least of it. The place had a weird mojo. If you were a contractor, you couldn't get a badge for the building, even if you'd been there for years. So you'd wait 10 minutes at the parking garage to get in, then wait up to an hour every morning (standing in a chairless lobby with your laptop digging into your shoulder) for a lifer to come down and get you. God forbid you'd go to lunch--you might never get back in. Between the commute and the lousy access I spent 4 hours a day just trying to get to my "office", which was not a cube, not a desk, but 20 guys around a conference table with 2 hot routers. It was a nice group of smart Indian and Pakistani dudes and me, and it could be a real extreme programming fish market, what with 3 concurrent conversations in Hindi, Farsi, and English going all the time. What's not to like? They said the building was that way about badges because the police shut it down once for overcrowding and they couldn't show more than X employees in the building. There's one less body to worry about now...

Posted at 10:09 PM     Read More   |

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