Tania in China

Mon-Fri, Nov 27-Dec 1: Work, Work, and More Work

Nothing but work, work, work this week. I did walk to the center of town to have Dairy Queen for dinner on Tuesday (calories eaten in a foreign country don't count, didn't you know?), but other than that I have barely left the hotel complex.

Things are going smoothly on our side with the install, but we are having things drop on the Dearborn side. I had a 9pm conference call setup thats main purpose was for me to talk to a particular guy so that we could confirm our system was ok over the phone, and we could move on to the next steps in the morning. That guy never joined the call, and it was 11:20pm when I got my first contact from him. After sending emails back and forth with huge delays in between, we were finally able to confirm the status of our system at 1:30am. Along the way I found out this guy had never been told he was doing this with me this day! It had been on my schedule for weeks - I had asked over and over that people had confirmed that he was available and knew about this - the basic response had been "Yes, you silly girl. Of course he knows!" and then this happened. I was one very unhappy camper when I finally left here Thursday night. I mean Friday morning. This is why I have trouble delegating anything.

I was dog-tired Friday morning with a headache and upset stomach, but felt that I really had to go in this morning to do the steps needed for the day - if we had any problems I wanted the whole day to figure out the problems before the phone meeting at 9pm again. Our steps went fine, but we were not able to connect because it appears the Dearborn side of the connection has not been opened. I had been promised it would be opened by close-of-business Thursday, but again things didn't go as planned. Friday's phone meeting went smoothly, but it was decided by the
group that I should continue on with the install while everybody was on the phone. Another late, late night for me. At 11:45pm, somebody finally went off and asked the expert to find out how long this thing should run, and he told us 4 to 6 hours!
Luckily it was decided that I can finish on Monday morning. I should have bought my train ticket for noon, not 10am!

posted by Tania @ 10:02 PM