The News From Denver

Quotes of the day:

Reddy, the construction lead, on our participation in the NYC project:

“When I got hired here, I told them there were two places I never wanted to be assigned to: Iraq, and New York City.”

From Yellow, when he heard that I’d be heading up document controls for his new project in addition to the three or four others we discussed that day:

“Kameron, how many of you are there?”

My response: “I’m starting to wonder that, too.”

Denver is cold (about 2 degrees. A lot like Fairbanks in March, actually), with what I consider to be less than a mile of visibility, though the pilot insisted there’s 3. The roads are shit. I passed three car accidents, two ambulances, and a fire truck on the way out here. It’s a mixture of snow and crappy visibility – and the rich kids on vacation who have stopped their cars on the side of the roads and are whining to their parents on their cell phones.

I’m from a really, really small branch office of this company. We run a tight ship. We reuse paper and have to make lengthy petitions for office supplies. Our HR manager and the lead architect make sure of that. At most, we have 18 people working there, but nobody’s in all at once, and haven’t been for about six months. It’s relaxed, laid back, and they’ve been known to put the speakerphone on mute when corp. starts bitching during conference calls, so they can bitch back.

It’s a bit like working for a mom n’ pop operation. Only, more conference calls.

I expected that in Denver I’d walk up to the corporate office and find that it maybe took up a couple floors of a high rise. Maybe a whole building.

When I arrived, I found I’d been dropped off at the wrong building.

Oh, yes, this was XX Company, but the wrong building belonging to XX company.

Corporate Denver consists of three buildings.

They’ve got every single division of the company headed out of here, not just wireless.

They’ve got charts up on the wall for Iraq projects.

It’s like I sold my soul and woke up working for Halliburton.