Eat My Remote Once, Shame On You...

Eat my remote 5 times, just shame. All around. I know, I know, I should put it up higher. But that would require remembering to place it by the TV and then I'd have to remember to grab it before sitting down. And I'm lazy!

The funny thing is that I've been putting a shopping list together on Amazon of things we need to buy to help with Dash. Stuff like the maze food bowls and some additional toys. The remotes popped up as a suggestion so I threw them up there as a joke and Sadie chewed apart number four that night. This was on Monday and last night she got number five. Luckily two remotes is only 18 bucks so they are a fairly cheap dog toy.

I also don't have much spare brain capacity this week to do things like put a remote away. We recently got a new associate VP  for our group that has more construction experience that the other two VPs and he is making his presence known. Which is mostly a good thing, but stressful. Our group recently went to the...let's just call them money suppliers so I can maintain an illusion of confidentiality, for some more money on our project and were told no. Basically they said "You don't even know what you have left to do because you haven't had proper project management so why would we throw away money?" Which is annoying but absolutely the correct response.

So a group of us has been assigned the task to figure out every single task that is yet to be done in the project, both engineering and construction, put timelines to them all and then give them to the project managers. We also only have three weeks to do it, which is not enough time and everyone knows it. So it's full steam ahead and I am doing some work today at home despite it being my day off.

On the plus side I managed to swipe an iPad from work. It's not mine personally but carrying it around makes me look more important.....or is that impotent?

The real thing that frustrates me is that many of the issues we are having I had given solutions to and options for tracking months ago and have largely been met by my manager saying no. He's not an old school engineer that is pen and paper but he is stuck in the year 2000. Design documentation has jumped forward massive amounts in the last twenty years and if I could get that information to the crew above him, that would be awesome. It's too late for this project, but not the next ones.

But, the biggest issue with a lot of that is my communication. I'm not the kind of guy with the charisma to spearhead something like this. I'm pretty passionate about using the technology, especially since we are a company that is supposed to be a world premier research organization. I can do the work like that, but I don't know how to get other people to do it.

I would likely have to go over my managers head to the PM team, which I have no issues about. I don't like our manager but I also have a supervisor that I don't want to go around. He's a real good guy and does a really good job with the tools he has. It's tricky. It's frustrating. Most of all, it's bacon.

What was I talking about again?