...aaahhhh...home at last...

It has been brought to my attention that I ran out of Aruba so quickly that I haven’t updated the blog. I ‘escaped’ Saturday morning in spite of all the hysteria about my leaving…but it got to the point where I actually had to stand firm and tell my boss and the client that my departure on Saturday morning was absolutely, positively not negotiable. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For some reason, I figured that when the boss got to Aruba things would smooth out and some of the distractions would go away. Actually, it was just the opposite. We wound up sharing my office and all the issues he was working on (and even some issues from other projects around the company) just came pouring into my bubble. On top of that, the union decided they were going to ‘audit’ our work and started ‘lawyering’ every word we have written or presented or spoken.

Then the two guys that I was spending a great deal of time training to be trainers ‘spit the bit’ Thursday afternoon. They just walked in to their boss’s office and told her they weren’t ready for presenting the classes that were scheduled for this week. Over the past two weeks, as we worked on getting them up to speed, they assured me that everything was fine and that we were on track and would be ready to do the training beginning on June 23. The truth was that they didn’t want to do it at all. The plan had been all along to say they weren’t ready at the last minute with the idea that I would stay and teach their classes. They had no regard for the damage it would do to our company or me personally. Either they didn’t care or were too dense to ‘get it’.

Great panic ensued throughout the land when those guys started whining. I was in a ringer trying to cover my ass and not throw rocks directly at them. So now we had to call their bluff and work out a plan to fill the gaps. I forced them to tell us what part of the process they needed ‘help’ on and then showed them where they signed the training plan stating that they were trained in that area and understood what they were seeing. That didn’t do much good, believe it or not…other than the fact that their boss told them that if they failed they would be fired.

It was at that time that they asked me to stay. But since my 30-day clock was almost run out, I would have had to fly to another country and re-enter Aruba to restart my clock. I just flat out refused. So far this year, I have missed every holiday and family birthday and I wasn’t going to miss Father’s Day. Then the plan was for me to go home for the weekend and come back on Monday. Later on, though, cooler heads prevailed and I am returning on July 13 for a couple of weeks.

Oh…and those mangy cunucu dogs did just fine teaching their classes.

BTW…the boss is a terrible roommate. He doesn’t sleep. One night our agent in the Middle East called about midnight to tell us we have been awarded a contract over there [a 3-year project]. So the boss and me were up the rest of the night trying to figure out how we're going to ramp that project up with 11 people by the end of the year. The main reason I participated was so that I wouldn’t wind up over there living off of camel (the guy we sent to Algeria a couple of weeks ago wound up living off of camel and monkey). It appears that I'm going to move to a project in Utah at the end of the summer. One that won’t take so much travel.

Any way, I have been privy to some pretty blatant, high level corruption here that my naiveté would not let me believe 3 months ago. I really don’t know how they run this place. This bunch of keystone cops can't use computers, can't 'read' a spreadsheet, and get in a panic when a consultant leaves (I’ve checked it out with other consultants…they see the same thing when they get ready to leave…meaning, it ain’t just me).

As my departure date closed in, people started coming in to my office and saying 'we need to go do this before you leave'...yada, yada, yada. Meanwhile, I'm just giving them my best dumb blonde look. If they need me to come back, I'll do that on a separate purchase order against a different project. Every dollar and every hour that I have left in my budget is already spoken for about twice and there is no more milk in the cow.

But let’s not forget that they are shutting this refinery down in a few days until the economy improves. I have my doubts that Valero will ever start it back up. My guess is that someone like Petrobraz (Brazil) or PetroChina (China) or Ecopetrol (Colombia) will buy the place cheap and bring it up…later in the year. Or the government will nationalize it and hire a company to come in and manage it until Valero can sell it.

I’m so glad to be home I can’t stand it. I think I'm going to talk a friend into getting into the cheese business. Maybe I can make a meager living making meager cheese.


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