Day 1 Manages Without Me

I'd planned to get into work a bit early today. Today was "Day 1" of Alcatel-Lucent, and so they were promising a continental breakfast followed by a live video-conference with our beloved leaders.

That plan was fouled up by two things:

1. I was on that conference call about a problem (mentioned in yesterday's post) until 2:00am last night, plus a little wind-down time.


2. Eight inches of snow.

Despite my late bed-time, I set my alarm for a little after 7:00 am this morning. The usual sequence set with my clock radio is to turn on the radio first, then the alarm a minute or two later. Then I wake to the radio and turn off the alarm, unless I am really soundly asleep and wake a bit later to the alarm.

This morning, the radio came on, and I immediately hit the memory button for the local news station (rather than the usual NPR). Because I knew it was snowing when I went to bed, with a lot forcast for overnight.

Within a minute of the radio coming on, I heard what I wondered about: Lisle schools closed, Naperville District 203 closed, Naperville District 204 closed.

District 204 is our school district. Lisle is where I work. That did it, the roads were crap. So, I reset the alarm and went back to sleep for an hour or so.

I woke later and went downstairs to check my work e-mail and the conference call bridge. The call was still going. I got the summary of overnight thought from e-mail. Then I sent e-mail to the group saying that I was working from home today, no reason to mess with the roads. I think everyone in my group did the same.

Since they didn't need me for a while on the call, I dressed to check the snow situation, so I could get a jump on it so Ellen would be able to get out of the driveway in the afternoon (in case I later got stuck with work stuff). I cleared most of the driveway, and then headed into the shower. Then back to the conference call.

And that's really about it. I took one more whack at shoveling more of the driveway (cleaned off Ellen's car then got rid of the drift against the garage door and between our cars), that during a break in the call while a test driver drove to a different site.

And that's really about it for today. We're still on the conference call, but I think a lot more is understood and I think we'll be able to break for the day about midnight. Tomorrow, I don't know. I think we have a work-around for the problem, so we may be able to keep the customer happy (hey, the call doesn't drop -- you just can't hear for a bit :-) ). A temporary fix may suffice through the weekend.

And, as I mentioned to a colleague on IM earlier, there are probably a lot of uneaten bagels in the cafeteria, because I doubt very many people got in to our location for that free continental breakfast.