It’s been an atypical week.   Wednesday I had to conduct an assessment of a county jail in central Pennsylvania.   I always thought it very strange that my employer never did any work in the Keystone State, while we have a presence in neighboring West Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana.  As it turned out a colleague in our Virginia office has been “ ( Read more... )

Day One of working from home ( Read more... )

On the way to work this morning, listening to a local station on the car radio. First they play "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police, then, to drive the point home, immediately follow it with "It's the End of the World As We Know It" (REM). Not even making this up ( Read more... )

...When the robins start gobbling up the fruits of the hawthorn just outside my studio window.

( Read more... )

So I forgot to mention a piece of pretty good news I got at work (for once).  Attentive readers will recall my rant concerning the office renovation my colleagues and I were going to be subjected to, and how I stuck up for the common engineer and inveighed vociferously against the open office environment that has been all the rage for over a decade ( Read more... )

And now, a little work story i've been saving up... Recently my employer announced a special "3 Year Plan for Growth". Amongst the forthcoming changes is a complete renovation of the office. This put me in a sour mood because I just relocated my cubicle last year, and I have a lot of shit, but whatever.  So we engaged an architecture firm ( Read more... )

Me: "...So you're telling me you've never heard of Pink Floyd?"

30 year old Bridge Engineer (BE): "No."

Me: "Really. Seriously?"

BE: "I don't know who they are."...

Me: "How is that even possible? I'm trying to think of some kind of justifiable excuse that doesn't reflect badly on you...were you brought up in another country? Were your parents ( Read more... )

I have been meaning to post a quick update for a few weeks now, and it just hasn’t happened.  The last 5 weeks I have been more busy at work than at any point in the last DECADE. I am looking at the calendar and a quick tally tells me that I have now worked for the last 20 days in a row - and I am looking at another 6 or 7 added to that before the ( Read more... )

In less than an hour my "Outlook Calendar" informs me I have to participate in a conference call with my supervisor and three project managers about the "best way to use my time" over the next few months, since one of them just agreed to give his client an early foundation and structural package, effectively depriving me of 4 to 6 weeks of time I ( Read more... )

Part I ( Read more... )