No, no one replaced your Folger's Crystals with high-grade peyote -- that really is the fair and lovely Kristanne doing the dishes. This week's Odyssey will be replete with similar weird scenes as I take the almost unprecedented step of working onsite in Menlo Park for my employer while Kristanne faces the boredom back in San Francisco. Deadline pressure, as they say, has mounted. And for all of you out there muttering something along the lines of, "About time that durn wastrel actually did something," or maybe just, "Serves him right for goofing off all summer," or even the ever-popular, "Neener-neener-neener," well, it's just maybe possible that I deserve a teensy-weensy bit of that. So there. I guess I told you.
Oh, no. No. Does that really say 5:52? In the morning? He must have
staged that, right? Set the clock and then turned off the lights? Please?
No. I didn't. It really was 5:52 in the morning, and I really had already been
up since 5:30. For you regular Odyssey readers, I don't have to tell you that
this is somewhat out of the ordinary. You've grown accustomed to our comfortable
schedule, our accomodating ways. Well, slip your clutch, baby, 'cause this is
the new school. I was showered, shaved, and on the road to Menlo Park by 6:00 AM, ready
to write some full-on technical manuals!
| That's me at right, giving the "I'm ready to write some full-on technical manuals" pep-talk to myself in the mirror. Not shown are the dance steps that go with this talk, including the section where I pat myself on the back while chanting, "Go Sid, Go Sid, Go Sid, Go Ahead!" There are about a million reasons why I'm not showing those dance steps, most of which you can probably guess. |  |
Leaving at 6:00 enabled me to beat the rush-hour traffic that plagues the Bay Area in much the same way that damn "Riverdance" show plagued the public airwaves for for months on end. I pulled into the parking lot, alone, and headed into the office, resigned to my workaday fate. Tapped a coffee. Grabbed a bagel. Headed up to my soft-walled office. Well, actually not my soft-walled office. One of the slight pains in the tuckus about coming onsite is that you have to scavenge a place to work. I have no fixed office. What I do have is a little bulletin board that tells me who telecommutes on what days. Consulting this board tells me whose office I should steal for the day. Unfortunately, technical writers as a bunch are darn unreliable. They come in when they're not supposed to and stay home when they are. It's frustrating to someone like me who just wants to steal their office, their phone, and their network tap. Darn frustrating.
Coming in early afforded me at least two hours of uninterrupted work time, though, so I set to typing in an available cube. Deadline pressure, as I mentioned, has arrived. We are releasing some software to beta in two weeks. "Beta" is a testing stage where we send our software out to a relatively-small number of customers who agree to use it in their offices. This way, we get some real-world exposure for our software. It's a chance to track down problems that we might not be able to find in our own labs, simply because of the incredible heterogeneity of computer networks out there in the world. Kinda felt good to use that "heterogeneity" word there, didn't it? Yeah, I liked it too.
Anyway, to release to beta, we need to have help files, which means I need to write them. I've been writing them as the summer progresses, but I need a big push to get them out by this Friday. That's why we're onsite for a little dedicated network access with complete focus on the tasks at hand. Sometimes, it's easier to get a lot of work done onsite, where you have total access to the people and software that you need to do your job. Sometimes, as you'll see later this week, it's also not easier to work onsite where people are always wanting to ask you questions, tell you about their weekend, or go out to lunch. More on that later...
As it turned out, I pretty much had the office to myself. Everyone else was either at class, telecommuting, or ill. So, I worked in a bit of a demented fog, churning out text like a tech-writing machine. When I looked up, it was 8:00 PM. Phew. Time to go home. Wonder what Kristanne has been up to?
What indeed? When I'd left here, there had been grand plans of studying Renaissance sculpture, reading German language, cleaning the entire house. When I got back, there were four empty diet coke cans, a half-eaten bag of tortilla chips, and an entirely-read book. Sounds like heaven to me. Kristanne managed to get her teeth into Jon Krakauer's book about the Everest disaster, "Into Thin Air." Apparently, it's a fairly addictive read, as Kristanne had been completely unable to put the sucker down until she had consumed the entire thing. We ordered the cheesiest pizza known to man and talked about the book for an hour or so before going to bed.
See you next time on the Odyssey as we try to repeat this epic performance of working onsite!
Total Miles for 8/18 = 82