Hey,
I'm writing this post from a hotel in Hesperia, CA. If you want to look that up on a map, it's going to have to be a pretty detailed one, because the cities just keep getting smaller and smaller. First I flew into Ontario, CA, which is east about 1 or 2 hours from LA. Then I drove an hour north out towards the desert to Hesperia, which is even smaller. And then I've been working about an hour away from here, and on friday we're going to do a test which about an hour away from there. I will literally be in the middle of nowhere.
I don't get to say too much about the work, but for the most part it's been pretty mind-numbing. I'm out here to help with some testing that was supposed to take place once on thursday and once on friday. Well, due to some poor planning on the part of the people we're working with, it's only going to happen once, on friday. And if a different test today doesn't go well, even friday won't happen at all.
Which leads to an interesting business ethics dilemma. If my company sends me on travel, and then the travel location doesn't have anything for me to do...but I can't leave yet...do I just not get to work? This seems, somehow, unethical to me. If I've given of my time in order to go off into parts unknown, I should get to charge my time appropriately. If I were home, I'd either go off and do something else at work or just sit around and wait until the work situation changed, charging my time because the waiting is now part of the work.
But when you've only got one thing to do, work/not work line becomes pretty sketchy. We spend a lot of time out here waiting for other people to get stuff done. Sometimes that means we just don't show up until later, but other times it means we just have to wait. Some of the guys I work with have other things they can work on, but often I don't. At what point does 'not doing work on the job' translate to 'not doing work off the job', and should I be allowed to charge my time here where I don't have anything to do? I've been wondering this for a while.
Fortunately, it's not really an important point. I brought along a work laptop with Matlab and some data that I've been looking at. So today I've pretty much just been sitting in my hotel room and looking at data in Matlab all day. I also brought mine, for goofing off, which means I've got two computers to use. Shiny.
I'll be back in Austin on Saturday, and tooling around here until then.
-N
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2 comments:
Sounds like thrilling work you do, Noel. Glad you made it back home to your family.
How did you get this post to time/date stamp to mid last week? I've been using the time/date to schedule posts in advance, but never into the past.
Oh, I actually wrote a draft of it a few days before I posted it. There may be a more clever way, but I haven't figured it out yet. I didn't even know about the 'future posts' thing.
-N
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