Whoa, what a Monday! Not only was I pretty busy, but one of my team mates was out so I had to do a few things for her (nothing too strenous thankfully, just answer some questions from the floor) and then I had to move. I’ve only moved once before this, and as always – it was a fun hour of my time. The last time I moved, IT moved my computer (as if I don’t know how to set up a computer, but it was nice to have someone else doing some lifting) and maintenance moved the drawers from my old cube to my new cube. Not this time. I moved it all. Ohh, the fun.

It was better then the 1.5 hour meeting I got suckered into going to. Gah. How could it be at once interesting and meaningful and at the same time be painful? Oh well, such is the way of meetings.

I was going thru some stuff at home and found a card from Mom that she dated the day I started my current job:

She would always leave me notes around like on my pillow when I lived at home, or sneak one into my back pack I carried to school or my lunch box when I was a kid.

I’m going to have to do a blog entry with Mom’s different hair cuts: she was always getting a new one. I like this one she had at my first birthday:

Yesterday I was tied up with a customer all day. Well, not literally tied up, but so busy that everything sat on my desk and the only thing that moved was what I gave to a coworker to work on. So I spent 10 hours, minus the 1/2 hour working lunch, dealing with just this one part.

But today? I come in this morning a bit early to a pile of stuff sitting on my desk, on my chair, a message flashing, and an inbox fill of emails. By noon I had cleared my inbox, moved all but one job and was doing pretty good.It was a good productive feeling to get all that stuff moved, take care of all those tasks and answer all those questions.

Now I just need to try to stay above the wave of incoming stuff while taking care of all the action items from the customer visit. That was part of my morning: typing up a review of the audit, a two page list of things discussed and action items.

I’m soooo tired still. The past couple days I’ve awoken to the alarm clock. Usually I’ll wake up before it goes off. Like I did today. Thanks to the cat I as up about 5:30 am or so (it was light out at least). And in the evening I become exhausted – like need to drink some coffee at 6pm to stay awake to 10pm. . .

::raises fist:: damn you jet lag!

or perhaps it was my lack of sleep during SDCC. . .or perhaps it is the busy busy day at work, digging out from the pile of stuff left for me. . .though the girls and guys at work did pick up a lot of my vacation slack, there was stuff a great amount of stuff to do when I got back.

::yawn::

It can’t be only Tuesday?!? It feels like Friday.

Actually, it feels like how I felt after a huge ChemE test: totally drained of all knowledge, ran over with a steam roller, and then left out in the sun for waaaaay too long.  And that is why it feels like Friday: the turmoil I’ve experience feels like an entire week’s turmoil squeezed down to the size of a softball and aimed at my nose.

One of my machines is down at work: line down situation which I’m trying to fix. Another customer had issues with our response to their corrective action response. And my bike went in for the spa treatment and needed a liver transplant.  Just all kinds of “fun” stuff popping up. To top it off, if we have to work this weekend, guess whose week it is to come in and supervisor engineering?

Yeah, this girl.

::sigh::

Hopefully by Sunday I’ll be sleeping in and then going for a ride on my newly tuned up motorcycle.

Man oh man. It was one of those days that a shitstorm was left for me last night and it just never let up. A constant swirl of non-compliance reports, questions, issues and headaches. All dealing with the same customer! Seesh.

One of the techs on a piece of equipment I’m the engineer for stopped me some time after noon and said you’re running around today aren’t you? And even when I was headed to 2nd break (oh, I made sure to get to break. It was about the only time I was sitting down), I was hustling arse to get there. The woman I was walking to break with said she couldn’t keep up ’cause her legs were shorter then mine. I said nah, it ain’t that – it’s just that I’ve been zipping around all day and I just haven’t let up.

::sigh::

Then to top off my crazy day – we head out to my car to go to lunch and my rear passenger tire was completely flat. I mean, not just a little soft – but completely flat. Like someone took a knife to it. It was a bit soft this morning, at least enough that I thought I should get some air it after work. But damn. I didn’t think it would go that flat that quick.

So I called up triple A with the card that said it was good to 2010.

Yeah, not so good. The account, which was actually my mom’s had been canceled.  So either I fix the flat myself (in the cold cold weather with a crappy small jack), pay $25 for the triple A guy to fix it, or join triple A for like $50 or something. I took the membership. Almost paid for itself, and lord knows when it’d come in handy again.

After my crazy day I went to get a new tire and ended up getting two new ones for the rear. A busy hectic no rest for the weary day and then a bill for $300 for new tires and an alignment.

::sigh::

This week at work we had an vendor in to work on the machine for which I’m the process engineer. Since I was out sick on Monday, 3/4 of my 4 day week were spent with the field engineer going over the machine. Basically just tweaking it to keep it going. The machine is getting old, and as I like to say, as a personality all her own. When something happens with it, I try to troubleshoot it as best I can, but there are bits and pieces in it that I have no clue how it works.

So when the field engineer comes in to tweak it, I stand back and take notes. I can learn some ins and outs of the machine that aren’t in the manual. At the end of every day I wrote the more interesting bits and posted them in an email to my boss, the manager of the area, and the VP of the area and CC’ed the head of maintenance. Little did I know what the VP was forwarding my emails to another VP and the President of the company.

I hadn’t gotten any feedback on the emails, they were going out more as an FYI to everyone, and so I’d have a written log of what transpired (as all my sent mail is saved in my sent mail folder).

Then today, I sent the last one out pretty late, about 4:35pm or so.

About  10 minutes later I get an email from the President of the company with a thanks and a kudos in it.

Wah? Sure he has given me compliments, but they are few and far between. I would say I could prolly count the number on one hand, if I could remember them. So it was pretty nice, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

. . .ass.

So my trip to Mexico was . . .good except the flights. Anything that could go wrong with a flight did. Well, almost everything: at least my flight didn’t crash on the Lost island and at least the landing gear was okay unlike that other American Airlines flight (though that pilot did an amazing job landing it).

The flight from Boston to Dallas was late, and by the time we arrived our flight to Chihuahua had already left 2 minutes prior. The crew of the flight we were on prolly didn’t know this as they told us that they would do a special announcement so everyone would stay seated so the people that had “tight connections” could leave quicker to get to those flights. It was the two of us and then three elderly people on a different flight. We got off the plane with the elderly people in the lead, they were talking about how their flight had already left so there was no point rushing. . .my thought? Get the fuck out of the way then so we could try making our way to our flight on time.

If we had only know the flight had already left, then we wouldn’t have run up to the “skylink” train and run down the concourse to an empty gate. At the ticket counter we found the only good thing about American Airlines: Susie and Andrew. You see, Susie helped get us a flight to Chihuahua, thought we would have to fly down to Mexico City that night and then to Chihuahua in the morning, better then leaving Dallas at noon to get into Chihuahua about 1:30 or so only to miss the majority of the conference. . .And Andrew was her supervisor who actually walked down to the concourse to look for our luggage. He didn’t find it during that trip, but somehow with the both of them on their bat-phones they managed to round up our luggage and we found it on the baggage claim in Mexico City.

Ahh, Mexico City. Capital of Mexico. And it was huge. Flying over it to land at the airport, it seemed to go on forever. Lights in every direction. Just amazing the vastness of it all. At the airport we were on our own to find a hotel, so we were walking around looking for signs or anything and my traveling companion decided to ask some kid in an uniform for help. The kid spoke muy poquito English. He walks us over to this guy who says he’ll take us to a hotel. We ask if there is one in the airport, he says yes, but it is full. My scam sense is going off, but nothing more . . .insidious then that. So he takes us to his taxi and off we go speeding down these winding curving highways at 100 kph. He was just whizzing around the corners not paying attention to the white lane markers just handling the corners like some racing game. We got there super quick, and the place (Hotel Century in the Zona Rosa) was actually pretty nice looking. There was a clerk behind the desk, a security guard and a door hop for the bags. Other then some shady dealings at the start and the loud sirens going off outside our hotel room (we were on the main road side), the room was nice and clean (if not a bit small) and the bed was comfortable.

We got our four hours of sleep and off we went back to the Mexico City airport to go to Chihuahua on an AeroMexico for the best flight of our entire trip. As we walked up the airplane at the gate, standing in line waiting to board, there was a table with newspapers (yes, all in spanish) and candies. I grab some candies, which turned out to look like mini-tic tacs and tasted like a cross between sweet tarts and Flintstones vitamins. On the flight, which was about 2 hours or so, they served us a free “contentinal breakfast” which consisted of a small muffin (which was more like a vanilla cupcake, pretty tasty) and some fresh melon and grapes (again, very tasty!). We also had coffee and our choice of juices (I got apple). The stewardesses all spoke english pretty well, and the flight was pretty good overall.

Chihuahua City was like if they took a small section of Panama City and dropped it down in the desert of New Mexico or southern Colorado by the rockies. It was dry, it was brown, there was almost no vegetation, and there were these little hills which looked like the remains of an old mountain range. I felt like I was in a Clint Eastwood movie, perhaps The Man With No Name. . .It was pretty neat looking. Though the disparity between the haves and have nots was pretty incredible: from these guys working at the plant with their fancy cars and cloths to the bums on the street begging for a couple pesos – I know every city has its homeless population, but even some of the houses looked a bit run down. . .made of old cracking cement, with weeds everywhere. . .it looked . . .unkempt.

The view from my hotel wasn’t much either:

But the hotel we stayed at was great: the Hampton Inn in Chihuahua. They upgraded our rooms for free to suites, which were amazing: just huge, nice large comfortable bed and free wifi so I could check my email in my room if I wanted. They also had free internet downstairs in this little room for guests.

The conference was okay. A review of some stuff we already knew. Questions from other suppliers that I thought they should’ve asked a lot earlier. Answers from their engineers that didn’t really answer my question. . .but I did get to see their process, which was interesting. I’ve some tasty tidbits to report on to the bosses on Monday, some stuff that will interest them.

We stayed the night in Chihuahua and left the next morning for Dallas. The Chihuahua Airport isn’t very large. One terminal with one actual “gate” and then a door that takes you outside so you can get to your small plane by way of stairs. So we were thinking there shouldn’t be any lines. . .

Well, there prolly wouldn’t be except all the flights were due to leave at pretty much the same time. And security didn’t have any metal detectors. So we walked in and got in line for ticketing and the first security check: they hand searched all our baggage: checked and carry on. I walked up to the ticket counter to be told by the person there that my connecting flight to Boston. No other information then to pick up my bag in Dallas and go to the ticket agent there. Umm. Okay.

So at Dallas, no problems through customs, all pretty quick and no problems. We pick up our bags and head over to the ticket counter. Where there are three agents and tons of people standing around. Well, okay – the tons of people was a large group of 10 kids and their guide, and then two other guys and another woman, plus the line of people. Everyone seemed to be taking their sweet time deciding what the heck they wanted to do. Turns out there was a snowstorm and all flights to the eastern corridor, including Logan Airport, were canceled, so we conceded that I would have to spend the night and leave in the morning.

When we finally got to talk to a ticket agent, she first said there was nothing available until Monday afternoon. She started clicking away at her computer and bammo: Sunday afternoon popped open. So I took it. She gave me a number that I could call that night or early the next morning to see what else freed up. So I called that night (after a very tasty dinner of herb encrusted pork tenderloin on a rice dish) and a flight was open that went to Chicago and then connected to a Boston flight. So I took it. Waking up at 3:30 am was no fun, but I was just happy to be on my way home.

Until I got back to Boston. I head downstairs to the baggage claim, found out that the bags were coming in on conveyor B and stood there waiting for my bag. And waiting. I had noticed all these bags when I came down there originally, but figured they were missing bags from people who had missed their flights but their luggage had made it ahead of them or something. Finally I see some luggage coming off conveyor A – and an annoucement is made that some bags would be on that conveyor. When only 10 bags came out of it and none of them were mine, I started poking around the bags that were spread out amongst the rest of the area.

There were 4 or 5 American Airlines people there tossing around bags, trying to get them organized by flight number. Not one offered to help me find my bag. I was getting a bit steamed. I asked if there were any more bags coming off the Chicago flight. They said did you check your bag at Dallas or Chicago. Dallas I said. The guy points at some bags and said check in there. Umm. Yeah, thanks. I looked at every bag twice. I didn’t see it. I asked one of the people that I didn’t see my bag, could I get some help? They said go fill out a claim and point at the this desk. I was so mad I couldn’t even talk, I just handed my baggage claim ticket to the girl behind the counter. She asked me when the last time I saw my bag was. At Dallas I told her. She clicks away at her computer, asks for an address that they could deliver the bag to and a number to get ahold of me. She then hands me an envelope with my claim ticket inside and a claim number on it.

Thanks for nothing. She didn’t even apologize for my missing bag. Nothing from any of them. No ETA on when they would find my bag. Nothing.

So I took the shuttle the blue line of the T, then transferred to the orange line and then transferred to the red line. I had parked my car on the red line outside the city at the overnight parking place for the T. It only cost me $20 to park my car there since Wednesday afternoon. That was the only expense I had all trip, as my compadre paid for all of it on the company credit card.

To summerize:

• American Airlines sucks ass (and I’ll dive more into that in a later post as well, I just wanted a trip overview post now)
• AeroMexico is excellent
• If someone offers you hot sauce, take and it and try it: the food in Mexico was pretty tasty.
• Don’t brush your teeth with the water (and just say no to ice cubes as well)
• 1 dollar is more then 10 pesos but that conversion was pretty handy and automatically gave the person a tip (real conversion last I checked was 12 something)

So work was again one of those ‘turn around next thing you know it’s 5pm’ type days. Not that I don’t mind being on the get go from the start, but (and you knew that was coming right?) on the day before I’m due to go to on a trip to visit a customer (in a foreign country nevertheless) I would like to ensure I was as prepared for the trip as possible.

::sigh::

But that was not to be. Another couple parts on non-compliance reports, another job to check before releasing the tooling to the floor, a meeting with the President of the company, the VP of operations (basically the 2nd in charge), my boss and the sales manager. Going out to the floor to answer multiple questions on multiple parts (why is it that my parts have been pretty low noise until the two days before my trip?), getting called to a VP’s office to look at packaging for a job, working on a test sheet on the floor for my boss not 30 minutes before aforementioned big meeting for that big meeting, etc.

One of those  days.

I woke up with a headache ~ took three aspirin with my morning coffee. The headache vanished only to rear its ugly head later in the day. My shoulder didn’t hurt though like it did yesterday.

I’ve finished backing my “personal bag” as the TSA is apt to call it. I had to double check all these security procedures. Usually when I fly (only recent out to Columbus for my SPACE trip) I check my luggage and carry on a book and my iPod. For this trip I’m carrying on my luggage as I don’t want to get to Mexico and be without business clothes. At least in Columbus I could just walk across the street to the local Target and pick up a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt, but in Chihuahua City? I’m not too sure where I’d go or what to do. Best to play it safe and have my stuff with me.  Having only small toiletries is kinda. . .odd as I usually take my full stuff in my checked luggage. This time little ones and then put them in a 1 quart bag and put them in an easy to get to location so I can take them out and hand them to TSA personnel.

We’ll see how it goes.

Ohhhh. I had one of those days at work. I was hoping to have some free time to get ready for my trip to Mexico, but nope. . .my major account took over from the start: all the parts that I have to review and retool before releasing to manufacturing, the three jobs on non-compliance reports (one in a rush-rush work router jacket and the other two had to ship today), the other two manufacturing lots sitting on my desk for review before releasing the tooling to production, not to mention the calls I get on other lots around the plant. . .

::sigh::

Not a particularly fun day.

So this entire week was one “event” after another. Starting out with the process issues at the start of the week, with some part issues at the middle and ending the week with a mixture of both: only one part that was giving me issues due to a process issue. . .

GAH!

I felt like I was beating my head repeatedly against the wall all week, and it never let up. So of course, on my day off, what do I do to help ease my unsettle mind? Clean.

Yes, cleaning is the tums for my brainmeats. I cleaned out my closet, rearranged how stuff was crammed in there to make room for more crap from the living room. Vacuumed the living room, and thanks to a friend, whose steam cleaner I borrowed, it got a good steam cleaning as well. I rearrange some of my Cerebus collection: putting the 300 individual issues, the 81 biweekly issues, and all those other Cerebus single issue comic appearances over my by wall of Cerebus.

In my cleaning I found my camera cable – while I love my little Sony DSC-W50 camera, the only thing wrong with it is the cable that is needed to connect to the computer. It is some sort of Sony interface so a standard (or even mini) USB cable won’t work. Other then that it is pretty close to perfect. But I digress.

I also managed to do a couple hours worth of work on the Cerebus Wiki, adding the “charnav” template to about 10 issues in Mothers & Daughters.  Doesn’t sound like much, but those issues of Flight and Women are jammed packed with characters, so sitting there with a phonebook in my lap, the excel conversion sheet open (so I know what page in the phonebook is what issue, a very handy dandy spreadsheet, you can find it here on the CFG site) and about three different Firefox tabs open with the CerebusWiki on each one so I could look at which articles a particular character’s article was linked to.  I’d like to get the charnav template added to all the M&D issues, but it will take a while.

A headlight in my car went out the other day, so I changed those out this morning as well. I got a two pack and replaced them both: as I didn’t want to have to replace the other one in a month or two (as it was older then one that went out). Now at work I’m the process engineer for equipment that uses lights that are 8 kilowatts, so replacing these little bulbs is something that I figured I could do right? I mean, I’m an engineer: how hard can it be to replace the headlights in my car? I’ve done it before with my Toyota, so lets give it a go with the Mustang.

And it wasn’t that hard at all. Hats off to the Ford engineers who designed such a headlight: pull two clips out which releases the body of the headlight from the frame of the hood. Unplug the bulb, twist off a plastic retainer and remove the bulb. Simple. The headlight assembly pulled back from the hood about 6″ to give me plenty of room to take out the old bulb and put the new one in. My one complain? There are three little notches on the light bulb, and on the inside of the lightbulb housing there are three prongs, so you have to fit the notches in the prongs:

I don’t think the bulb was directional, but the back of the bulb is directional: only one way to plug that wire in. I guess Ford rather make it easier for us to put the bulb in rather then worrying about twisting the cord to plug it in.  Meh.

But it was super easy to get the old bulb out and put the new one in. The only way it’d be easier? If someone else did it for me. . .

And now? After my week of crap, my weekend of getting everything in order and being able to check stuff off the “to do” list: it is snowing. A beautiful small flaked white coming down. Once again, I feel like I’m in a Gerhard painting. . .

That and the Patriots are headed down to Arizona this morning – Foxboro is only 20 minutes away from me by car, I could head over to watch them go, but just watching the snow coming down and knowing they are headed down there, is enough.