Thursday, February 15, 2007

Luncheteria

The 11 degree weather was a deterrent to eating out for lunch again.  I was grabbing my coat and Rakesh, whom I call Rocky, said it's too cold, let's just eat in the cafeteria.  I tried not to roll my eyes.  In the cafeteria The Comfort Zone had Swedish meatballs and various veggies, including some fried okra and green beans, which I snagged for my side items.  It really is hit or miss.  Decent today.  I passed on the mac-n-cheez and the brussel sprouts.  I went to the grill area and got a deep fried pre-breaded IQF chicken tender, which they slathered in buffalo sauce to hide the freezer burn and put on ciabatta halves, to dress it up.  I beat the weather and lost at lunch.  If lunch weren't socially important around the office, I would have bailed.  Everyone huddles around the cafeteria tables and ventilates the frustrations of the job.  Today it was a group of all contractors cussing and discussing the (mis)management in the network department.  The sharing of pain was worth tolerating the bad food and the heartburn which followed.

On the other hand, for Valentine's Day, I grabbed a single friend and we had barbecue at Big T's, the new BBQ place just south of LC's, which has really good food and better prices than LC's.  And it has plenty of parking.  And it's clean.  I had the double-decker combo sandwich with sliced beef and turkey.  I also had some collard greens and barbecue beans.  The greens were the best.  The beans weren't as good as LC's.  The whole meal and a beer to wash it down was $10.  I packaged the leftovers and took them home.  I have a new favorite barbecue place.  And I should have packed the leftovers for lunch today.

Later last night we went to Bar Natasha to meet up with his friends and hear an artist known as Vi Tran.  He's pretty good.  His buddy who played bass guitar, while he strummed and sang, looked terribly bored.  The apple crisp item with ice cream on top, which someone shared with me was excellent.  I never knew they had such good food in there.

On a non-food topic, I am working on the firewall which protects the customer to whose account I'm assigned.  While I was away doing site surveys at the various facilities, a fellow consultant named Pradeep, who is either too good or too Hindu to tour a meat packing facility, who obviously has little firewall experience, has been putting incorrect rules in the configuration.   One of the server guys grabbed me yesterday and said they can't work with him any more.  I think I told the guy managing our contract the same thing.  They need to replace him sooner than later.  I had to go through the configuration and find the bad parts, remove them, correct them, then basically redo all of it. 
Now, I'm writing this while i wait for the server guy to finish testing everything.  Rework is a huge waste of time.  I would rather be asked to do all of the firewall work than have to do all this clean up.  I pointed out a typo, and asked Rocky to verify that it was indeed a typo.  He laughed and said Pradeep spent an entire day trying to get that to work.  He obviously failed.  <sigh>  At this level of the game, you can't spend an entire day overlooking something like that, then leave it broken.  The words of my parents echo in my brain 20 some-odd years later, "Don't step over that clutter; pick it up!"  An ethic that permeates my professional life, despite the clutter on my floors at home and on my desk.

1 comment:

  1. Did I say that?  LOL  One of my "echoes" from Nanny and PaPa is, "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing right."  I still hold to the values they taught me....still miss them after all these years without them.  I was so blessed to be born into my family.  

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