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Telecons are my business...
Dec. 19th, 2000 08:24 pmWell, the day got off to a good start when I misread the room number of my assigned telecon. I showed up at a room 616A, and - fortunately - ran across a gentleman inside that room at the early hour of 6:45 am who informed me that his telecon had been canceled.
A momentary thrill passed through me, as the general rule is that you get paid a minimum of one hour's time for a telecon, as long as you show up. If the telecon is canceled, you get paid. If the Russian side doesn't show up, you get paid. If the phone call can't go through, you get paid.
Out of curiosity, I asked "When did it cancel?"
"Around Thanksgiving," came the reply. "We now have our telecons on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."
Perplexed, I asked him what telecon he was talking about, and found out he wasn't the person I was supposed to be supporting. My telecon was, it turns out, in a different room. When I looked at my work authorization a few moments later, I realized I'd misread the form.
I sure am glad he was there, else I might have settled down to wait for someone who wasn't coming, at least not to do a telecon. I'm also glad I followed up with those questions. There are few things more embarrassing than to blow off a telecon, and to do so by misreading the room number just compounds the embarrassment.
The telecon itself was chaos.
Some of the Russians understood and spoke some English; some of the Americans understood and spoke some Russian. On the Russian side, the speakerphone is apparently located in an office with other phones; I say this because people used them to place calls and converse while my telecon was going on. To add a little spice to the mix, some technical glitch occasionally caused the speakerphone to emit a ring tone while it was being used.
The effect, while someone was speaking, was pretty impressive. Something like a person talking while gargling while standing on a busy city street corner at rush hour. Only the inherent redundancy of the language - that feature that lets you miss the occasional word and still understand what's being said - kept me in the loop, most of the time.
It got really interesting when some of the Russians and Americans started talking to each other, in English and Russian, respectively, without the aid of yours truly. At one point, I figuratively threw up my hands and announced that, with the approval of the telecon lead and for the benefit of the monolingual participants, I would sum up the previous five minutes of discussion. The lead nodded and I did my thing.
One thing I really detest among telecon participants is having to deal with the occasional yo-yo who, on the one hand, agrees to move the discussion of some issue - which had been beaten to death over the phone - to the fax machine, but nevertheless insists on going around the barn one more time and beat the carcass some more. Had one of those, today. The pseudocode looks something like:
Cheers...
A momentary thrill passed through me, as the general rule is that you get paid a minimum of one hour's time for a telecon, as long as you show up. If the telecon is canceled, you get paid. If the Russian side doesn't show up, you get paid. If the phone call can't go through, you get paid.
Out of curiosity, I asked "When did it cancel?"
"Around Thanksgiving," came the reply. "We now have our telecons on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."
Perplexed, I asked him what telecon he was talking about, and found out he wasn't the person I was supposed to be supporting. My telecon was, it turns out, in a different room. When I looked at my work authorization a few moments later, I realized I'd misread the form.
I sure am glad he was there, else I might have settled down to wait for someone who wasn't coming, at least not to do a telecon. I'm also glad I followed up with those questions. There are few things more embarrassing than to blow off a telecon, and to do so by misreading the room number just compounds the embarrassment.
The telecon itself was chaos.
Some of the Russians understood and spoke some English; some of the Americans understood and spoke some Russian. On the Russian side, the speakerphone is apparently located in an office with other phones; I say this because people used them to place calls and converse while my telecon was going on. To add a little spice to the mix, some technical glitch occasionally caused the speakerphone to emit a ring tone while it was being used.
The effect, while someone was speaking, was pretty impressive. Something like a person talking while gargling while standing on a busy city street corner at rush hour. Only the inherent redundancy of the language - that feature that lets you miss the occasional word and still understand what's being said - kept me in the loop, most of the time.
It got really interesting when some of the Russians and Americans started talking to each other, in English and Russian, respectively, without the aid of yours truly. At one point, I figuratively threw up my hands and announced that, with the approval of the telecon lead and for the benefit of the monolingual participants, I would sum up the previous five minutes of discussion. The lead nodded and I did my thing.
One thing I really detest among telecon participants is having to deal with the occasional yo-yo who, on the one hand, agrees to move the discussion of some issue - which had been beaten to death over the phone - to the fax machine, but nevertheless insists on going around the barn one more time and beat the carcass some more. Had one of those, today. The pseudocode looks something like:
10 Russian side: "Please send summary in fax" 20 U.S. side "Ok, will do. I just have this concern..." 30 GOSUB 999 ' long-winded summary of issue 40 GOTO 10 UNLESS TELECON LEAD INTERRUPTS 50 END OF TELECONThe only thing worse than having such an individual participate in a telecon is one who loves to hear himself talk. I deal with him tomorrow.
Cheers...
