Hello, India?

So at 6:50AM this morning I'm sitting in my underwear at my desk (try not to picture this!), swilling my second cup of coffee, pulling on my headset, adjusting the microphone arm, logging in to the company network, pulling up the internal IM program to ask the meeting moderator what the dial-in number is today... and...

presto! Some guy in New Delhi or wherever is on the line and sharing his screen. Weird. Kind of gave me the creeps.

I mean this is soooooo technologically advanced from when I saw my first computer printout on paper with green and white bars chunked out from a tractor-fed dot matrix printer running on a Univac mainframe (all before the internet and wireless were invented), that I thought for a minute I was inside a Philip K. Dick short-story-turned-movie. Blue pill or red pill, Bob?

I haven't mastered the accents yet, either. The India dude was pretty faint in the headphones, but if I muted myself I could hear. Hmmm.. maybe it was because I had a fan running in the background, since it's still about 100 degrees in this darn house! Luckily the furnace people come today and I can get the A/C back on this afternoon, and cool it off & dry it out in here.

So whatever it was he said, I caught about half of it. Maybe I can work with him by email instead. I'm sure there's no accent in his typing. ;) And how peculiar the time zone difference. It was 7AM here, and 5:30PM there. Five *thirty*! What's up with that? Half a time zone? How does that happen?

Ooh! Ooh! He just answered my email. And yay! No accent! ;) Plus, he works noon to 8PM their time, so thats.. um.. gosh this is awkward.. um.. 10:30PM to 6:30AM my time. No, wait.. uhh.. it's.. 1:30AM to 9:30AM my time. Yeah. That's it. Oh, that's better. :) I don't have to have 7AM calls with him. Whew.

So week four begins with a lurching cough and a sputter. Two of the first three weeks were not spent at home. But no travel plans on the horizon now, except for a little vacation. :) Not that I've worked hard enough to need it, yet, but.. I get 5 days for the rest of this year, and.. I'm taking it! :)