It has been a while now after the official 2 years mark in the consulting business. And, it has been roughly half a year since my boss, who hired me, left the company.
With the corona virus, things had changed drastically. No air travel, not much client onsite travel. Although it saves a lot of time, the distance between bed and the work table is so short, that I am always appearing asleep in the my first meeting when the camera is turned on (which I usually am).
Even though there is no face-to-face meetings, there were some characters that I got to know. So there are those 2 German colleagues, who claim to be the experts, keep praising themselves until there is no time left to do actual work. Before them, I have not encountered that many people that were like this, but they are now the pinnacle of the self-praise machines. Everytime, they would happily dial-in and also happily take some tasks on their own table. After a long day, where those 2 of course are not able to just sit on their own and type down some words, they need to always discuss it in groups and “deliver” the results together. And the result? Well, the much self-appraised top quality work sometimes are just repeating words, and with no real content from the meeting that we just had with the client. Finally good to get to know some of those people, and I am sure they will not be the last ones.
And then there were this internal auditor who worked in our company a few years ago. At the first meeting, he did not talk much and had a frowning face. The second time we talked, he started to make jokes and laughs a bit, too. The third time we talked, he overthrown his own plans within 15 mins and in the end, put his hands on the table saying he does not know how to proceed. Somehow he just does not know how to bring things clearly together and decide on one outcome. And of course our own colleague was not helping. He never aligned with us internally and then had alignment meetings with this guy and promised stuff that we never agreed upon. In the end, results turned out to be fine, but the nerves those 2 cost us (me and my boss) were the ones that I could have saved to deal with other things.
Now I just realized the blog posts tend just to be me complaining about the shit that is going on. What about the positive things? I guess it is a good confirmation for myself to keep doing what I consider the right thing to do. The results mostly look good and sometimes, it gets political in the end. But that is just how the game is played on the management level. This will be the next things to learn since the new project is now also within a rather higher level of the organization.
Beside, I was compensating my overtime with on and off World of Warcraft. It is a game that you can just keep playing and bridge your time when you don’t want to anything else. Once started, and with friends, it is difficult to stop. But luckily, once you had to break the routine for a couple days, you are not that tempted to revert back.
On weekends, cooking is mostly on the things-to-do list. Don’t ask me how I got there but in the end it is not a bad thing if you don’t just cook for yourself. Additionally, when people are helping out, and you don’t feel left alone is what makes it more valuable.
[pictures will be uploaded later]
I guess I will write so much as of now to just for the sake push it out, just some quick words to fill up the empty activity log on this blog.
