My trip to Dallas is over already and I might as well have been in Moscow for all I've seen of it. Now all that remains is the three hour flight home. I still have another hour of waiting before that.

I woke up early on Thursday, shortly after a hazy sunrise. By 9.00, I was at my company's office just a few blocks away. It's housed in an incredibly ugly monstrosity supposedly modeled after London's famous "Crystal Palace" which showed off the fruits of English Empire briefly during its highest point, under Queen Victoria, before being destroyed by fire. It's called the "Infomart" and no doubt houses the builders of Texas' technology empire of the nineties.

The Infomart - an ugly office building modeled after England's "Crystal Palace"

I finally got to meet the two people I'll be working with on my new project, and they both seemed like friendly, competent guys. David, the project manager, is around forty and is highly organized, and soft-spoken. If he was gay, I'd be tempted to call him a bit of a "control queen". He was sharing a rental car with Lonny, the sweet-smiling 25 year-old tech-lead on the project, and insisted on always being the one to drive.

The afternoon was spent at our customer's site, meeting their project staffers, and beginning the planning of the project. Our customer is a brand-name manufacturer of food products. Looking around their massive headquarters you wonder how a food company ends up with so many thousands of people typing at computer keyboards. It was a boring afternoon - I'm beginning to realize that this job will entail many periods of boredom. Perhaps the boredom was the reason I felt so deathly tired when I got back to the hotel. It was literally painful for me to keep my eyes open. I snuggled up to a room-service dinner in bed while watching "The General's Daughter" before falling asleep around 10.00.

I slept all the way through to a heart-stopping arousal from the over-loud clock-radio at 6.51 a.m. Time to pack, have my protein-bar breakfast and don my daily business casual wear for another day at our customer's site.

Business casual again

Today I was supposed to follow David's car in my own, so that I wouldn't get lost en route (which was a real possibility since I have such a wretched sense of direction). But once on the Tollway I felt sure of the route and took off at my own pace since David was driving more slowly than I could restrain myself from going. No sooner was I past him, than I sensed a car acelerating past the driver's side, and it was David, of course. He seemingly couldn't bear to have me in the lead.

The day at our customer's site was a little more interesting than on the previous day since I was more involved, yet I'm beginning to identify an aspect of this job that is yet another reason I question whether it's the right one for me. Being a consultant, I'm pretty much obliged to spend social time with either fellow consultants or customers, leaving little choice in my lunch and dinner associates. Maybe ... no, definitely!, I've been spoiled by formerly always having a job not dictating how I spend my lunchhours. Now I'm obliged to listen to people like the customer's project liasion, and his endlessly self-fascinated chit-chat. To here this horribly out-of-shape, married, beer-swilling, young, suburban computer hack (who, like him or not, I'll have to work closely with) boast about his extremely unlikely football feats and girl conquests, not to mention his "intriguing" insights into the software industry, was an extreme test of my patience. Not generous of me, I know, to think like this, and not, probably, a cross to bear that will make many pity me. But I never claimed to be noble, did I? :) At any rate, I did make some trumpery excuse and got out of lunch early to spend a while in the very center of the headquarters, where the landscaping includes very tall trees and a beautiful waterfall.

The customer's expensively landscaped corporate Headquarters

Now I'm on my way home. I'm irked because I'm going to have to spend much of this weekend working. If there's one thing I hate it's working on a weekend, but the internal project on which I've been working needs to be completed. It's a website which will be used for a new internal training course starting Monday, so I've little choice. But it sucks, particularly since the weather in San Francisco is so nice right now.