Virgil

It was a tough, exhausting week, but the bottom line (we’re taught to provide the bottom line up front in a presentation ) is everything worked well.

I was juggling three things this week, and living on caffeine to help me manage them. You know about my mother’s hip replacement. That is going great. On Thursday she was discharged from the hospital to a rehab facility. On the weekend I had to drive to my sister’s house in Ohio for my niece’s confirmation. And on Monday I had a quarterly presentation to upper management on my project’s status. Each one alone is enough to wear you out, but all three hitting me at once was a challenge.

Let’s start with the presentation. Certainly my project has warts. It’s not going perfectly but it’s not going badly either. The challenge on these presentations seems to be how much of the warts do you expose without painting a picture that the program is in shambles. The program is not in shambles, but we’re slightly behind schedule, slightly over budget, and slightly not achieving our technical goals. If you throw only the negatives at the managers, then they get it into their heads this is a problem program and they need to give you all sorts of direction that you don’t have the time for. Unrequested help is not usually something you want. So in between visiting and assisting my mother, coming home at night and refraining from lit net so I can put together the presentation, I completed most of it by Thursday knowing that I had to go to Ohio Friday. Information was missing but I had some of the guys working on it so I could get it early Monday morning and stick it in. I reviewed it late Thursday with the person who oversees my program for Vice President, and while she didn’t hate it, she thought it was too complicated and suggested I simplify. The sequence of topics seemed to step on each other, and when I told her this was the traditional sequence, she said to break it, and find a better way. OK, I delegated to my Systems Engineer late Thursday to improve the format and I decided to take it with me over the weekend and work on it in my free time. Fat chance.

With my mother in the hospital I would not normally have considered going to Ohio for the weekend. But both my sister and my mother urged me to go. My cousin was going to be my niece’s godmother, and my cousin doesn’t drive. They really wanted me to drive her over. So despite all I had going on I added this to the list. It’s a ten hour ride to Ohio if you stop for lunch. Weather looked nice on Friday. I got up early to go pick up my cousin, and we headed out, and were making good time. At the mid point mark, just after we had stopped for lunch, it started snowing. And it snowed, and it snowed. Traffic stalled, accidents were occurring, and we (my wife and I were switching off on the driving) were getting tired. A ten hour drive turned into fourteen grueling hours. And frankly it was dangerous. On the way back Sunday we could see lots of cars abandoned in the grass median and several tractor trailers flipped on their sides. But I’m glad I went. It was a nice time with family. But did I work on my briefing? No way. I was too tired, and the drive back Sunday we hit traffic getting into the city, and so it took twelve hours. Urrgh.

So Sunday night I start working the original brief. Luckily it’s a matter of rearrangement and cutting, not making new viewgraphs from scratch. I get into work early Monday morning, and what I see from my Systems Engineer was a brilliant new arrangement of the presentation. So I take his structure, put in the detailed charts and information it was missing, subtract out the superfluous stuff, and in three hours I’m ready to go. And without even a chance of practicing my presentation, it goes off spectacularly! I bowled them over. I was quick on my feet, knew the answer to every single question they threw at me, and presented a clear picture of where the program stands and why. The whole thing was so satisfying.

So satisfying and relieved that I took the next day off and spent it with my mother at rehab. She’s doing very well. In the morning they put her through all sorts of rehab exercises and then again in the afternoon have her walk (with a walker for now). She’s walking about a 100 feet round trip and she did it three times, with a rest in between each time. The staff thinks very highly of her orthopedist, and I spoke with a woman who also had her hip replaced by him and was ready to be discharged. She too said he was great. So I think we4 got lucky and found a really good doctor. I spent the day there taking her back and forth to rehab, the dining room, and her room. She introduced me to the few friends she’s made. She would say with a big smile, “This is my son.” I spoke with the staff (nurses, physical therapist, dietician, social coordinator, etc.) and they filled me in. My mother had been having constipation and stomach pain after the operation, and they called a gastro doctor. He came and scared me when he told me she had diverticulitis. I didn’t know what it was and he didn’t explain it to me right away. He proceeded to feel around her stomach and ask where it hurt. After he tells me it’s inflammation of the intestines (I thought it might be life threatening) but nothing serious and she appears to be over it. Hopefully in three week or so she should be coming home.

So, an unbelievable week, but on all accounts went very well. I hope you enjoyed this long blog.