A World of Irony

It really is!

I spent the week in the DC Metro area working on a large scale project. It is a major deal. We have been working on it for sometime. Let's just say when the project roll out is over we'll have touched over 4000 employees (give or take a few).

Anyway, on with the irony. Our office is located underground, so any chance to work in the field offices is a chance to see daylight. This is ALWAYS a good thing. Any chance to get away from the office is also a good thing. Here's where the irony starts to come in.

Let's take a look at the facts:

• I work underground.
• We have no windows because the walls are rock and there is 200+ feet of rock over our heads.
• In the early stages, we made up a schedule for this project and for whatever reason the powers that be shortened by half or more.
• To save money, the company had us book all our travel through 'brand x' travel site. It took me 5 hours to find flights and hotels and get everything booked. I even had to call to have a live agent help find flights that fit company policy.
• We had wanted to wait until the end to do the DC area in case there was some kind of issue with setting the project up. It has the most highly concentrated group of employees that will be affected. This way we would do a few people, then a few more until we worked our way up to the DC area. This allows us to make changes to our procedures and things like that, 'Fine tuning' one might say.

Let's take a look at the irony:

• You need to remember that most hotels start their room numbers on the first floor (ie: Room 123). We get to our hotel, they have all our rooms together, 033, 035, 039, 041 and so on. Yes, I said 035. The hotel is built on a hillside and we are staying below the lobby in the part of the hotel cut back into the hillside, hence we are BELOW ground!
• We go to the location to set up. The primary location we end up working in is a conference room with NO Windows. The secondary location is down in a dip and has windows, but its so foggy in the morning that you can't even see the parking lot until after lunch.
• The squashed schedule didn't work. We are reworking the schedule to be very similar to the original 12 week schedule we produced at the beginning of the project.
• When the schedule started to change, it only took 2 phone calls on 3 minutes to cancel 5 hours worth of travel planning.
• Well, they had us start in the DC area. We found out that the average home DSL or cable connection has more bandwidth than either of the DC offices, thus we slowed the network to a snail's pace. As noted above, anything that gets changed in the process, now only adds time to it. We are now running extremely slow. The irony here is that, if we had done our original schedule and ramped up to this level, we would have known that the network resources had a large affect and would have changed the way the District Managers brought in employee' s equipment to be converted. We changed our process on the fly and got done what was on-site but have to go back now to get the rest.

So you see life does have ironies all around it. Some ironic situations we create for ourselves, some our created by others and/or our surroundings. All in all it made for an 'interesting' week.

Weary eyed and tired, I am home for the weekend.