It was to be a wasteful day. The client decided to have a two hour, Friday afternoon meeting in the Chicago downown headquarters. With his team of developers left in Milwaukee office, Dominique knew that very little will get accomplished today. The project was already in the red, the practice eating up the costs of the software development after the project manager and the senior developer left without the knowledge transfer.
Dominique got up late, very late. Somehow he managed to shower, shave and be in the car 8 minutes before the Metra train to downtown left at 7:13. The silver Audi Quattro complained in -2C temperature without the proper warm-up of the turbo, which needs a warm, thin, synthetic oil to spin happily, but still it managed delivered him to the station in a record time, with 15 seconds to spare.
He always looked forward to an hour of the train ride when he could read. Books, popular science and financial magazines were his passion which is somewhat of a rariry in the computer community raised on PS2 and Nintendo. He could not walk out of the bookstore without a book or a magazine. Today, Dominique was finishing the new Michael Crichton's bestselller "Next" he has picked up in the Wallgreens just a couple days before, while waiting for the prescription. Dominique loved Crichton's writing style and the subject. He nearly finished this 500-plus-page thriller in only couple of evenings. Genetics, morality and the law. Without any formal education the field of genetics was too difficult for any in-depth understanding, yet he has read most of the popular books on the subject that were published. His 5 years of biology classes and anthropology college education made him ideal target reader for this kind of books.
The train ride ended all too soon, but his butt and all bones hurt from the benches that were probably designed by a sadist in the medieval ages. What a difference, he thought, from the ultra-comfortable, airplane like, trains he rode in Germany.
Chicago in winter is awful, just miserable. The seven-block walk from the Union Station to the red brick clock tower of the Encyclopedia Brittanica building felt like an arctic wind tunnel test -- he could barely pass. The the dress shoes and thin dress pants did not help the situation, he did not like to wear the warm undies. Actually, he did not like to wear much at all, office life was a punishment for him. His athletic body made him look good all dressed up, especially in a good european suit, but he would rather wear his Brazilian Havaiana flip-flops and loose shorts on the subtropical beach. Year-after-year he has promised himself to move out to San Francisco, Tampa, Denver, Seattle, Portland, anywhere really, where there was climate that made any sense, the ocean, or mountains, but then again, the his current position was too good to quit.
He got to the office before 9 am, the office was already packed and most of the cubicles were taken. Dominique, a principal, did not have a desk in Chicago, even his boss, the vice president and the global practice leader did not have an office, the company did not care about such things. Dominique thought the Chicago headquarters is a nightmare to work at, he preffered an hour and an half drive to the Milwaukee where he and three other developers could work in his spacious, quiet and cozy office as a team. The were no teams in Chicago, the environment did not allow for that. People came in, took any open cubes and spent days slouching over their computers, occasionally they got up and talked to coworkers.
His company hired a lot of very attractive young women, probably to offset the look of geeky software engineers. I was important to make an impression on the big-fish client CEOs and VPs visiting the headquarters.
Today, it was about the cute, sexy, black dress. It went for most of the morning, and for Dominique it was quite enjoyable. One of the ladies was unsure if it was appropriate to wear the dress she bought to the tonight's company's party. She showed the Web pictures of the dress to what seemed like all of the girls in the office -- there were about four of them at the time, right in front of Dominique's cube, giggling and analyzing it's length. The curiosity took over, Dominique got up went around to take a look at the picture. More giggling. The dress was fabulous and the owner a good looking girl, Dominique approved. At 34 he was acutely aware that twenties pass all too quickly to waste even a minute on false modesty.
The emails, most of them meaningless, usually took couple of hours a day to read and answer, they provided little value to the company, or the client. He had a love-hate relationship with emails. They could be essential, but he also knew that things get solved much more efficiently by person-to-person conversation. Except when you cannot understand a word of what other person is saying, which in today's global economy happened often, then, the emails saved the day. Most people could read and write in English. After the chore of going thru million of emails, he did some programming, he knew he has got on the morning, the afternoon would be all meetings.
Since he was alone he could quickly write a lot code. He really enjoyed programming. In fact he was somewhat a fanatic when it came to writing. He liked the code to be clean, easy to read and to follow. To him, it was a beautiful combination of writing and logic. Well, sometimes at least. He truly believed in beauty of the well-written software, which he equated to writing of poetry, which he also did.
However, Dominique knew that it is a very bad practice to write code alone. He just has lost a senior developer who has worked for a whole year on the essential part of the project without sharing any of the knowledge. At the rate they charged, that lost year equated to a nice, big house, mortgage-free. However, what the developer left to Dominique, was a whole bunch of complicated code that did not work. Also, because the developer worked alone, the architectural solutions he used were of the dubious quality.
There is something almost magical when you talked to another person and tried to explain what you are doing, Dominique believed. All suddenly the ideas were more clear, code cleaner, and the architecture better. It was also faster. Unfortunately for Dominique that was not the climate in his company. His bosses still operated in 1980s mode - lock up a geek in a room for a year with a minimum requirements and hope that what he creates will work. Things don't work well this way. Now, Dominique's team had to make up for the loss.
As he got up the get another glass of water, Dominique has run into on of the VPs, Chibu-san. Chibu, a Japanese, came from the parent company, his job is to make deals with the Japanese companies operating in USA. He has lived in Chicago for a while now and seemed to enjoy the freedom away of the rigid structure of corporate NTT. Dominique like Japanese and their culture and he liked Chibu-san.
"Hi, Chibu-san, how are you, long time..", said Dominique.
"Oh, Dominique, hello, where are you working now?" Chibu-san politely smiled and stopped to talk.
"Same client, WIO Industries, mostly in Milwaukee office, or their North Brook location.", Dominique said, " Listen, what are you doing for lunch?"
"I got a conference call at noon until 12:30.. it this OK?", Chibu straggled with words, but looked sincere.
"Of course, I sit over there..", pointed Dominique, ".. just come a grab me."
Few minutes later Chibu-san came back, and said apologetically: "Is it OK, to bring another Japanese?"
"Of course", smiled Uki, hoping that it will be for the better.
Dominique could hardly wait, his normal lunch time was at 11:30, so by 12:25 he was starved, already dressed and pacing around the hallway.
TBC...
