Some Cleveland Moments

1) While waiting for my flight on Thursday, I hit the airport pub, and was joined by one of my consultants. Richard and I have always traded a few French phrases in passing, since I saw on his resume that he had studied in France. So he walks up, sits down, and starts speaking French. I replied likewise, and we spent the next hour having a few p'tit coups and speaking French. We didn't slip into English but once, and we took a brief detour to German. It was pure geeky joy for me, and easily a highlight of the week.

2) Our new offices are in a suburban office park, but our building is fortunate to be surrounded by some large-ish trees: I think the building dates from the 1980s, which would have given these trees at least 20-25 years to grow up. Anyway, my window overlooks a grassy area with a lot of trees, and in the past couple of weeks I've seen a large brown bird swooping past - sort of eagle-ish. Last week I felt a presence behind me at the desk, and looked out my window to find a grand brown bird with an ugly pink head using my windowsill as a perch. My brown bomber is a turkey vulture, and for the afternoon, he was my pet.

3) You may remember a post from 3 weeks ago in which I talked about sorting through 40 resumes... well it became over 50 resumes, and I've interviewed almost half of them, and so far I have only found 5 people of the 11 I need. Some people were gone to other jobs before I ever got to them, some were incredibly unqualified for the positions offered, and of the ones I am bringing in, I have to wait for 3-4 weeks for them to exit their current clients. It is painful.

But not as painful as the aftermath of the other thing I noted in the July 13 post about me trying to stand up and boldly ask about actually getting people to commit in a meeting to a requirement. Yes, I got the commitment. And in the intervening weeks, I have had that commitment changed, retracted, enhanced, replaced, mangled, and ignored. There was no requirement, actually.

Just another week of treading water I suppose.

4) But at least I'm back at Marriott Marriott (or "Capital M Marriott"). Comfy comfy. Makes it all better.

Can I just mention - less than two weeks to vacation?