interrobang (‽)

As Training Lead, one of my responsibilities is to provide User Procedures for the system we’re implementing. Because users have a nasty habit of taking my official global User Procedures and changing them to match what they want to do, I publish them in Adobe PDF format. And because I generate all of the User Procedures out of OnDemand, I just get OnDemand to publish directly to PDF, which it will happily do if you have the full version of Adobe Suite installed.
In order to meet licensing requirements, here at my current client if you need a piece of software […]

I’m two weeks into an eight-week residency in ‘beautiful’ Port Allen, Louisiana. For those not up to speed on their American cities and states, Port Allen is on the other side of the Mississippi from ‘beautiful’ Baton Rouge (and about an hour up the coast from New Orleans - you’ve heard of that, right?). Both Baton Rouge and Port Allen pretty much exist only for the petroleum industry (hence my being here), and both sides of the river are chock full of refineries, tank farms, and barge moorings. Both cities tend to prepend ‘beautiful’ to any mention of their names […]

As a contractor, I’ve been fortunate to work for the same client for some 16 years. Admittedly this has actually been for six different legal entities, and via four different agencies / consulting companies, but always for the same corporation. During those years, I like to think that I’ve built up a good reputation as a solid, reliable worker. So I was somewhat miffed recently to find out that I was now - after 16 years - to be subject to a full background check and drug test.
It turns out that this is an annual check, and was brought in as part of […]

Given that I was flying out of Chicago in December, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my flight back home to Houston was cancelled due to snow. What was a surprise was that the snow was in Houston, not Chicago.  Apparently Houston had been hit by a freak cold snap, resulting in an inch or so of snow.  This may not sound like a lot, but for a city that has no real need of snow plans, it is almost on par with a disaster.  (Hurricanes we can cope with, but itty-bitty snowflakes?  Whoa!)  So schools were let […]

Earlier this year I managed to commit all sorts of social and business faux pas by going over to Japan without a stack of business cards. Over there, everyone you meet - from business people to the concierge at the hotel - hands you their business card and expects the same in return. I was blithely unaware of this and subsequently appeared even ruder and more antisocial than usual through my perceived unwillingness to be contacted. I’m due back in Japan in December, and this time I’m determined to be prepared.
I do actually have several business cards (one for my […]

After 18 months of development, my current project is finally being implemented at the first of ten scheduled sites.  This being a Warehouse Management project, the site is - obviously - a warehouse. Which means that most of our users are forklift drivers, plus a handful of ‘office-based’ supervisors, and a few gatekeepers.
My training team (three including myself) has been here conducting training for the past month, and this week the developers arrived in force, deposing us from our training room, and generally riding roughshod over everything we’ve had organized since we got here.  Despite having managed to navigate our way around the warehouse […]

For U.S. bands, the traditional way they would know they had ‘made it’ was when they were featured on the cover of Rolling Stone (witness Cover of the Rolling Stone, by Dr. Hook - yes, I’m embarrassed I know it, too…). For UK bands, it was when they performed on the now defunct Top Of The Pops. For me, I always thought that the pinnacle of achievement was getting a book published. Or, more specifically, getting a real book with an actual ISBN published. Many years ago, I worked on the Torchum Never Stops books, but these were self-published [by […]

My current project is implementing a new SAP system at some of our warehouses in the U.S, Japan, and Europe. When I joined the project I relished the possibility of going to Japan - I’d only been here once before, for a mere 24 hours, in transit from Singapore to Houston, so the possibility of a longer stay was enticing. Six months into the project I managed to wrangle my first trip.  I’d originally conceived of this as a Change Management dog and pony show for myself and my immediate supervisor, but by the time I’d floated it past management, several other members […]

Today, I attended the mandatory hour-and-a-half ‘newcomer’ safety training for my current work location.  I’ve actually been here at this location for three months already, but I wasn’t able to attend the last quarterly conduct because I was too busy actually doing my damn job (I was on a site visit at another location).  I also learned this week that my project team is being moved back to my old location next month.  So learning how to ‘be safe’ at this location at this stage in the game seems like a bit of a waste of time - hell, I’ve managed to […]

We’re pretty tight on security in this company.  Not quite Pentagon tight, but tight to the point where some buildings have X-ray machines and walk-thru metal detectors (although thankfully they don’t make you take your shoes off…).  Even so, every so often some bright spark in upper management decides to tighten things up a notch, seemingly just for their own perverse pleasure.  For quite some years now we have had electronic badge-access to most of our buildings (at least in the United States).  So now you can’t get into the car-park, let alone the actual building, without your badge.  Hell, […]