Yeah, Day 10 is right, went to Hoboken on Monday. I find I lose track of what day of the week and what the actual numeric date is when I’m away from home like this….
The rumor is that things will be picking up in terms of damage assessments and write-ups after the New Year. I certainly hope so, because it’s been slower than slow here. I’ve never spent so much time trying to find busy work to do.
Figured it was worth a moment to talk about the demographics of the people I’ve been deployed with.
In California, everyone was my age or younger. Had common interests, hung out with some of these people after work, etc.
In Louisiana, everyone was my age or younger. Not so much social interaction in the evenings, but, didn’t feel crazily out of place.
Here? It’s an AARP meeting. Everyone is a retiree who is doing this PA work (and I believe that I’ll be in this position in 20 years as well). But there is no one, no one, within 10 years of my age on this team of 20 right now. This has led to a few early beliefs; One, that again social interaction outside of work will be limited and Two, sadly, technological challenges with FEMA equipment on the team will be invariably referred to me and Three, everyone here seems to be used to being the elder statesmen, so, everyone is jockeying to put their protocol, work process, stamp, whatever, on how we are doing things.
Sigh.
Part of my frustration with the protocol, work process, stuff stems from me being me…and it’s probably a good time to divert into a discussion of personalities, and conflicts. Maybe the most useful training I ever had at Golder wasn’t technical, it was a two-day training session to help us all get along better and plan for the future. It doesn’t particularly surprise me that all of the ideas for the future went for naught; it doesn’t particularly surprise me that you probably couldn’t point to better work relationships that developed because of those two days. But I still have the binders on personality types and interactions between them, and reread them every once in a while….
The two big takeaway, for me at least were:
1) I’m up there in the top left, ISTJ. Which wasn’t a big surprise. But the observation that people in those upper left four boxes have a hard time working with people in the lower right four boxes was a very interesting revelation to me. And this is happening a lot right now; most of the team is the carefully-assemble-every-single-bit-of-information that may-or-may-not be relevant and then when everything-is-place-then-we-will-talk-about-how-to-move-forward.
And I’m like let’s go!!!!! We could have been done hours ago!!!
2) And that everybody expects everyone else to be just like them. So if I can just admit that those bottom right corner people are who they are and that’s they way it’s going to be, my frustration level will be lower.
Home Front: Not as much contact this week; having Grandma and Gramps in the house will do that. Kevin had an orchestra concert, Cpher had a school-orchestra concert with Christmas songs, all of this tape is waiting for me to get home and copy to the computer (decided to shelf Operation Dropbox since I would be home tomorrow night).
I did finally upload this 20 second video that I’ve been carrying around for months:
It is Iphone video. It is isn’t the greatest, but, the subject only moves his lips. Matthew has spent hours (and hours) watching youtube videos recently (soccer goals, football plays, etc.) And also music videos….
