After two weeks of research, and 3 revisions of my slides, I am getting to the bare and bitter end before my IDR tomorrow. I almost have a complete presentation together and it still needs another look over, but I feel like my approach is set, and only polishing is left. Some 16 invites have been sent, nearly all accepted... and a whole extra meeting called to prelude the IDR.
So, this project was one of those, "It's all the same" type of deals. My mentor has instilled in me an alarm bell, now, that goes off whenever I hear that phrase. What started as a project that was just "the same" turned into a "We have real questions here", which turned into a "We have some real problems here", which turned into "We can't do it like it was proposed."
To make matters even more interesting, we have a rather unique customer (internal to Rockwell) who is a combination of "I am going to contradict what I just said because I forgot" and a "I am going to contradict what I said because I just changed my mind" kind of guy. This morning he was all set, just about, on calling for the IDR to be canceled, or at least pushed back, so we could look into an entirely new integration option, or two.
It's interesting to see how my coworkers and superiors react to situations like these... the colorful language that flows, the all-but-so-and-so's an idiot response. One can never know the joys of distributed talent until one sees the insides of a large engineering firm.
Between the chaos and confusion, I've been able to have some really interesting conversations with my mentor. He's kind of lost most of his faith in humanity and is constantly bemoaning the inefficiencies around him, but he's also a very decent person and open to talking about real issues of life, even of his own. I can only thank God that I have had the opportunity to discuss issues surrounding the meaning of life with him on more than one occasion.
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