Goodbye Hello

It isn't that interesting things aren't happening every day. They are. When KJ was here, we would check each other's blogs every morning. I had to get my thoughts up quick or my Karens (Jennings and Campbell) would be asking what happened. Then Nahum and Sophie came and KJ left. These two aren't bloggers. They are eaters. We were constantly out in the afternoon looking for food that they would eat. Nahum isn't as picky, but Sophie is pickiness champ. That took a lot of our time and energy and isn't very interesting to blog about.

On the work side of life:

The LA team is constantly improving and feeling more confident. Harriet came up with the brilliant idea to ask for phone number instead of name. Most times the phone number in our ticketing system is right. If you put a %last 4 number (%2591) you will get just a few listings and you can find the person very quickly. Brava, Harriet. This saves so much time in getting to the right person. We are making sure that all teams do this. We have had such complaints about this part of the call taking forever. But we have been able to cut down our average time per call from 11 minutes to 5 minutes. This will make for much happier callers. Well, that's a little optimistic, but that should be happier.

They should also be happier because I don't ever remember seeing a more collaborative group. They know they don't know as much as old-timers do, so they pore/pour (they both seem right to me) through every reference document they can find. Poor Ratish has been scouring the Right Answers knowledge base through TechLynx. He found that users could have a lot of profiles in Outlook. He came over to me and asked why someone would do that. How the helk would I know? People do weird things. But he was just interested and really wanted to know. Poor Ratish, he went away with just that type of answer.

We had one call from Duke Helfand, an education writer, asking about an Outlook issue. There were 5 people researching every aspect of the problem. It's sometimes difficult to get to the whole answer because you don't know the chain of events that lead up to the problem. But they were looking at every resource and trying all solutions to come up with a good answer for Duke. The folks in LA have experiences that they can rely on to give them quick answers. The folks in Bangalore will get that experience over time, but they have a great team to rely on.

On the traveler side of life:

Sophie left last Saturday early in the morning. Just before she left, Nancy Carey joined us from Newsday. The Newsday team was very happy to see her. Other than a delightful but brief visit from Rob, they haven't seen any of the people they support. So Nancy has been a welcome addition. Nahum and I took her down to the local food store and pool area at the apartments. There are a lot of families here. They have a children's playground, a basketball court and swimming pool by the store. The pool looks so inviting. I don't wear bathing suits for good reason, but I am so tempted to slip in one night in my tank top and shorts. Very late when no one is around. The big lock on the gate was pointed out to me. Nahum said I could climb the wall. Funny guy. I'm just now getting better at stairs!

We have cut back on our searching for food and have just gone out to restaurants a couple of times. We went to Citrus at the Sophie, er, Leela Palace for their Sunday brunch. I have to say that going there so often has completely taken the shine off that place for me. We enjoyed it, but I may try something a little different for Laura's first weekend. Nahum, Nancy and I had found a good Indian place in the Forum Mall around the corner. That was really fun. We got into a three wheeler and went around the block. Nancy is very game for this type of adventure. It was just her first day here. What a trooper! Nahum had wanted to go to a movie, but the show was sold out. Spiderman III. Someone up there was answering my prayers. So we went to this Indian place instead.

It was modeled after a train's dining car in the old Raj days. Totally beautiful. And very inexpensive. We all enjoyed our food. It was prepared and presented beautifully. And my camera was at home. Sorry, Lynda. We tried to negotiate our normal price for going home and the drivers all said no, there was no place to turn around. Who knew that Bangalore was such a hopping place on Saturday night? Not me, even after 7 weeks. We met 3 of the guys from the Chicago team and they negotiated a 30 rupee drive. Then we kept going on forever because, you guessed it, there was no place to turn around. I gave him 50, which is what the first driver said. Considering how much money I've spent here, you'd think I wouldn't fight over 50 cents. Shame on me.

I did have my camera for our trip to Sunny's. Nahum is counting down the days until he leaves. We are visiting some of his and Sophie's old haunts. This was a real favorite. He got his lamb chops, Nancy got a delicious looking pizza and I got tempura vegetables and shrimp. A little eclectic, non? Nancy took the pizza to work. It was huge.

Nancy is having problems with the wifi in her room. None of us remember KJ having this issue. However, it just came to me that she connected directly to her laptop from the modem a lot of the time. I hope that solves the problem. It is hard to be without connectivity when you are so far from home. And she is having problems with the phone and no clock. Talk about being adrift! Actually, it sounds like my first week. Except I have a Blackberry that has a clock and instant email access. Rob and I were in touch throughout the early part of his visit, thanks to our Blackberrys. I don't know how one can survive on a business trip without one.

I'm having problems downloading pictures after that first one. Maybe another day you can see the great picture I took of Nancy and Nahum. I should ask the LAT team why this is happening. There would be 10 bodies all over this laptop.