You have to admire their powers of persuasion. The project that was trying to pressgang me a while back have finally managed to second me onto their team. Officially I’m on an 80/20 split, but both projects think they are the 80% so my workload has increased from “Ridiculously busy” to “Sleep, what’s that?”. The work itself is about the same (Change Management / Knowledge Management), but this new project is just starting out so it will be nice to be able to make the right decisions from the outset as opposed to coming in mid-project and trying to get them to re-do everything the way it should have been done in the first place (i.e., my way), which is what I’ve had to do on my last two projects.
My one caveat for joining this project was that I get to move my office up to the building the project is largely based out of (I know it seems obvious, but in this ‘virtual’ world, it’s far from guaranteed…). So this week I said goodbye to cubicle city and moved back into my own office. It has a window (and curtains!), its own thermostat (now set to toasty warm), and I can listen to my iPod via the dock (vs. headphones) again without worrying about offending anyone’s musical sensibilities every time Rage Against The Machine comes on. Life is once again wonderful.
The main reason for me moving, however, was not just to get my own office. This building is only 10 miles away from my house (vs. 22 at my previous office), which means that I can cycle in, and avoid the hell that is the I-10 construction (which is actually nearing completion – typical!). So this morning I dutifully donned the spandex, flipped on the halogens, and cycled into work.
Admittedly, this route is not quite the adrenaline rush of the route I had in Belgium, but most of it is off-road again (albeit on cycle paths, which I kind of feel is cheating, when you’re riding a mountain bike), along the side of various bayous (which sound much nicer than the storm drains they really are) and a reservoir, before I have to negotiate an eight-lane highway just before the office (it’s an accident just waiting to happen!). I’ve even seen a couple of shortcuts (somehow hidden on Google Maps) I can take to optimize my route, and may ultimately manage a good 90% of the ride off the roads (although my first few attempts just landed me on the wrong side of various bayous, adding some 3 miles to my journey home…).
So 40 minutes and 10 miles later I arrived at work, cursing the weight of my laptop, which I have to lug everywhere (at least it’s not an Osborne 1…), and got treated to a quick game of hunt-the-shower. No-one I asked seemed to know where it was (obviously underutilized) but I knew roughly where it should be, and eventually narrowed it down, by a process of elimination, to a single stretch of wall. But there was no door, and no sign. After a couple of minutes of groping for a secret switch and trying to remember Dwarf for “Friend”, I decided to try round the back, and eventually found the shower room – you have to go back out of the building, and then come back in through an unmarked door that leads to the showers and nowhere else. Clearly, access has been designed to shield Management from the offensive sight of sweaty employees. Unfortunately they have no choice with me, as Building Services refuse to allocate to me one of the many free lockers in the shower room because I’m a lowly contractor, so I have to leave my suit in the office on the next floor, and traipse all the way up and back down, leaving a sweaty odor trail in my wake.
Still, the main thing is that I’m back in the saddle. My daily commute may take me just as long, but at least this time it’s on my own terms, in my own time (not dictated by rush(-er) hour(s)), and I’m doing something to get fit, and sticking it to Big Oil, at the same time. Hopefully I can make this a daily occurrence, but we’ll see how that goes when the temperature climbs back into the high nineties…
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