a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
We did our thing all day in several one-hour work sessions with the effort to win the contract for a big gas utility. All told, we pulled together 31 hours of presentation material last week and last weekend – no mean feat. We packed it in at 5.30 pm and made it into Toronto shortly before 9 pm. My colleague and I will stay over and go to the PwC Toronto office tomorrow. We have to send out an updated set of documents to the prospective client.
It was quite a journey from Denver to Detroit and into Canada. I got into Detroit at 10.00 pm, and had to navigate to the city and the Ambassador Bridge into Canada and on to the little town of Chatham where I’m meeting my USA colleagues and PwC Canada colleagues tomorrow. I pulled up at the Holiday Inn Express at exactly midnight local time in my rented white Chevy Impala.
Our project office is on Sherman street in a bland office building in downtown Denver (it is modern inside, and I am not complaining about that) .. but check out this spectacular building in the Moorish Revival style right across from it. (Confession : I had to look up the building’s style on line, I’m not that smart about architecture). I guess the days of building in red brick and in the Moorish Revival style are gone for good? All the more reason these buildings should be protected from the wrecking ball.
I walk by the Africa lounge in terminal A at Seattle-Tacoma airport every Monday morning these days. The lounge is just an ordinary airport bar with a bar counter, and some tables and chairs, but still makes me smile. Why? It makes me think of Africa, and the one time I saw a real lion up close on my grandfather’s property he owned in Botswana. I have a close-up picture of the beast glaring at us on the open Jeep(!), and I will have to look for it the next time I get home in Seattle, and post it on here.
So fall* is officially here! It was supposed to rain on Saturday in the city but it didn’t .. we did get some rain on Sunday. When it stopped, I was ready to get out of the house for a bit, and went for a walk on 19th Ave. *We say fall in the USA and Canada, elsewhere it is autumn!
I was ‘Switzerland’ this week, and I do not mean I ate a lot of chocolate*! No : I stayed neutral and did not involve myself in a battle. I was needed in two places at the same time next week (Denver and Toronto). So I stayed out of it and let the matter get resolved at a higher level. The final resolution is that I will go to Denver until Wednesday, and then on to Toronto to help out there.
*The Swiss eats the most chocolate in the world per capita!
DIA stands for Denver International Airport. Back in the ’90s when the newly opened airport had trouble with the baggage carousels, a sarcastic newspaper heading read : ‘DIA is DOA’. I did not get a rental car for this trip – so it was great to just sit back in the taxi. It’s been a blue sky and cool weather week; a welcome respite for the Boulder residents that have to clean up after the flooding.
So I see the US stock market jumped up today at the unexpected announcement from the Fed that there will be ‘no taper’. (The Federal Reserve Bank will continue to buy assets to stimulate the economy, and not scale down their efforts for now). But the giddiness might not last long. Seems that the Tea Party- controlled Republicans are planning to shut down the US government to ‘defund’ Obama-care. (What does defund even mean? And psst. That’s not going to happen, Republicans – defunding the President’s signature legislation that has already gone before the Supreme Court, and was upheld). And then what? Another debt ceiling fight? The stock market will definitely not like that.
The ‘Wild Bangkok’ Thai restaurant
here in downtown Denver is nicely decorated inside .. and they serve up frosty Singha beers in Singha mugs. I was on my own : a welcome moment of respite after a long day of talking to lots of people. I enjoy the cold beer while the summer is still lingering before its final goodbye. It was a day of sunshine here, welcome weather after the historic 100-year flood in the Boulder area that destroyed some 120 homes. The roads around Boulder are extensively damaged, so much so that people have to be airlifted out.
I had to get up with the early birds (or even before them) for my early flight out to Denver. At least I got some sympathy from my project manager here in Denver when he learnt I took the 5.15 am flight. ‘Whoah! There should be a law against that – for flights to leave that early’, he said.
In summer, I have to watch for spider webs as I walk from my back door to the garage. This one was in the main walkway between the garage and the shrubs six feet away.
The world champ for spinning webs is Darwin’s bark spider, discovered only in 2009 in Madagascar in the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park in 2009. From Wikipedia : ‘Its silk is the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times tougher than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar. The web of Darwin’s bark spider is remarkable in that it is not only the longest spanning web ever observed, but is among the largest orb webs ever seen, at an area of up to 2.8 square metres (30 sq ft). Nephila komaci, discovered in 2009, and some other Nephila species also make webs that can exceed 1 m (3 ft 3 in) across’.
I know it’s still ‘officially’ summer but I went out on Friday and got my flu shot anyway. It looks as if it’s an uphill battle for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to convince people to get a flu shot. I guess people are too busy, or think they don’t need it. And then there are conspiracy theorists out there that say it’s just a money-making scheme from the drug companies.
We had Seattle weather all week in Denver (rain), and Colorado weather in Seattle, I think. (Wednesday’s high in Seattle of 93° F/ 34°C was a record high for this time of year).
On the drive out to Denver airport this afternoon, some off ramps from the freeway were closed due to standing water, or flash flood water. The flooding is worst in Boulder, not too far northwest from the city of Denver.
I am still catching up as quickly as I can with all the team members and all the work that had been completed so far on the project, so that I can make a contribution.
There were no special announcements in remembrance of the 9.11 events 12 years ago here at the office, but I am sure it was on everyone’s mind. It is a day in the USA that is going to be very hard to forget, for a very long time.
It’s cool and rainy here in the mile-high city. I went for a quick walkabout here in the 16th Street Mall in downtown : a very nice mix of restaurants, bars and shops. It was only Day 2 on my new gig, so I’m still learning a lot about what has happened on the project so far – and who my PwC colleagues are and who my client colleagues are. It’s important to know! I can commiserate with my own firm’s colleagues, or ask them dumb questions .. but not so when I converse with the client team members !
I made my very early start, waiting at 4 am for the TSA to open their security lines, boarded at 4.40 am, and arrived at Denver airport 9 am local time. Got the rental car (you have to wait for a shuttle bus that goes to the rental car lot), and drove into the city. It’s a good 40 min drive to the offices, and my Google Map’s turn-by-turn directions led me astray. So by now it was 11 am. Our project manager introduced me to about 30 people, and I sat in four meetings, which made for a very long day – but it’s very nice to have the whole Denver downtown to explore. And hey, I have a shared office and they had my computer all set up.
My ‘Thinking in Numbers’ book has arrived, and I think I will like it a lot from what I have read so far. I have to make it an early night because the flight leaves frightfully early (5.15 am) in the morning. I am going to Denver – and yes, I know I was just there for my stopover back from Toronto! My new project is at an oil company headquartered in the city. The last time I helped an oil company convert their information systems to SAP in was in 1999. The crude oil price at the time dipped down to $18 a barrel. These days it sits at $110 per barrel and is heading higher.
When traveling back to the USA from Canada, all the customs formalities are done in the Canadian airport, before one even sets foot in the USA. My Global Entry accreditation that I did for my trips to China is still valid (it is $100 for 5 years), and it came in handy today. I could bypass a very long line at the passport control by scanning my passport, looking into the camera, and providing four fingerprints. I was very tired, and the flights felt very long : one to Denver (3 hrs) and one to Seattle (3 hrs).
So there we were Friday, seated up in front facing a panel of about fifteen client team people listening and looking at to our presentation for 45 minutes (I only did 4 of the 26 slides). Then there was an Q & A for the next hour and 15 mins. We were not perfect (who is?) but we think we did well. We stumbled on one question, and was a little too vague on one or two others. So we shook some hands, and piled into the van back to Toronto. We felt good about our effort .. but for now it is out of our hands. I stayed over, only going out to Seattle on Saturday morning.
The floor which we were in on Thursday for our preparation had even fancier technology in the meeting rooms : big screen projectors descending from the ceiling at the touch of a button; and little microphones on the table to speak into for those conference calls where someone is always too far from the phone or speaking too softly. Andrè our presentation coach was at it again, and we went through several dry runs. We also went through a list of anticipated questions, and practiced who would answer, and what we would say. By 5.30 pm, the five of us that were going to present to the client on Friday, piled into a van with our luggage and all. We had to pick up our 6th team member at Toronto airport, and then headed out to the town of Chatham where the gas utility company’s headquarters are. No fancy hotels there; we stayed in a Comfort Inn (which was very comfortable given that I only got 5 and 6 hours of sleep the previous two nights). Friday was going to be a big day.