We Have Visitors

Teena and Suresh will be in our office for 7 weeks. They are one of three teams that are blanketing the US, visiting every Tribune property. Their goal is to learn what we do and how we do it. I think this is pretty daunting. We/I have never been good at documenting this process. The team who went to Chicago were handed a BIG book of everything the do there. Chicago has very high turnover. We don't have any. I keep telling people that they have to lay us off to get us to leave.

Suresh was working with Dean on Friday. Dean is our Mac expert, among many other expertise. He is also our proud grandpa. He could not resist sharing his two girls. Dean won't be able to join us in Bangalore, due to his bad back. He will be spending the next 5 weeks making sure that Suresh and Teena know everything about Macs and how we use them to solve our employee's problems.

The idea was to schedule IBM for 7 weeks with us, but travel to other sites if those guys needed more time. The other teams are staying at Tribune and Newsday for 3 weeks, Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinal for 2 weeks and the smaller newspapers for 1 week each. I can't imagine how they will get that done, so learning everything at The Times quickly is critical. They need to move out of here to help at the other Business Units (BU BU BU.) Learn and document. Glad that's not my job.

Teena has been working with Clif. Clif and Dean arrive very early each morning and check out all our systems. They do this before the other employees arrive so the 2nd tier people can be fixing problems before they are really problems. Clif has been at The Times nearly as long as I have. Unlike me, he started when he was a kid, so he isn't doing a happy dance about leaving. For a myriad of reasons approved by the lawyers, he will be staying. I've got to say, he was a little tempted to take the package, but he is a lot younger than me, so he decided to stay.

Clif is our Blackberry expert as well as being the go-to guy for all our exectives. Blackberrys have become as common as laptops and more common than Macs. We have over 550 of them. I'm sure Clif and Gernard (he is our first contact for Blackberrys, we call him BB King) would say that they are constantly having problems. Clif's hair was black before we got Blackberrys.

Suresh and Teena went to Disneyland on Saturday with my son, Adrian, and his friend, Emily. Adrian says they had a good time. I can't wait to hear what Teena and Suresh have to say. There is nothing like your first visit to Disneyland. Suresh said he would buy a throw away camera so we can see pictures. It was a lot of fun on our weekly conference call with ALL the people from IBM who are visiting the US. It is freezing in New York and Chicago. I got Suresh to tell them that they were going to Disneyland this weekend. Ha.