Scribbles

Less than two weeks left on my project here in Atlanta, just me and my trusty Russian colleague.  Our project leader left for a 2-week vacation in Mexico last Friday.  We’re not mad at him for chilling on the beach while we slave away here, after all he had it planned for ages and the project received an unexpected extension.  In many ways, I prefer it this way because I have the freedom to run things my way.

Last Thursday we held the major meeting of the project, what we call the Steering Committee meeting.  Think of it as finals for consultants.  A group of senior level executives, the CEO, COO, CFO, and all divisional VPs in our case, get together to hear about our progress and our suggestions.  Under this kind of scrutiny, the true personalities of partners, project leaders, and consultants reveal themselves.  Our project leader frantically modified and added content to the presentation according to individual meetings with these executives, trying to satisfy all the constituents ahead of the meeting.  The downside of this is that we don’t do the actual presenting; the client team leader here presents to the committee while we provide the support.  And changing slides 5 minutes before the meeting can make any presenter nervous.  The overwhelming workload leading up
to that meeting drained us for sure.  I counted out of the 16 week nights since February leading up to the meeting, we’ve left the office past 11pm 11 times, 7 of which past midnight.  I have been told that the typical projects here are not as demanding from the work lack-of-life perspective, so this would be an aberration.  My first project would confirm this.  Nonetheless, the non-stop work set us up to expect a bit of slowdown.

Originally we thought the remaining two weeks would run out rather calmly, mostly focusing on hand-off to the client so they can continue to run things smoothly after our departure.  Then the funny thing happened, we find ourselves saddled with additional work.  In the past few weeks in my interactions with clients, I’ve noticed an increased number of remarks on how adept we are at making slides.  Lo and behold, in the past two days we’ve been asked to help work on various presentations to the real higher ups back in the German HQ.  All this on top of our existing tasks.  I suppose it’s natural for the clients who pay the big bucks for our services to expect this, even if it goes beyond the scope of our original project.  And they’ve gotten used to seeing us work at all hours, so they figure dumping more on us shouldn’t be a problem.  The sad truth is we slide monkeys on the lower rung have no real say into this, leaving it to the partners to stick up for us.  In all fairness, we’ve been instructed not to push ourselves too hard for the extra work.  And in full disclosure, I somehow managed to get out of the office at 7:30 last night.  Walking out into the parking lot and seeing a few more cars other than mine, breathing in the fresh air, and the realization of having a full night of my own ahead almost brought a tear to my eye.  Good times.