Life and dams

In life you can choose to let things happen as they will, attempt to affect change, or run from it all. I am a dam. I build a strong wall and only try to let the water spill when necessary. When I feel it will have the most impact. I am a planner and designer of the route one should take. I watch and wait atop my dam. This has worked for me for the majority of my life although I will acknowledge that I have let a few things slip through the cracks and I have dammed up plenty of things that should have been addressed.
In mid October I finally decided it was time to start taking a different path. To be more proactive and dam far less. The timing of that decision could not have been worse. Emotionally I started to be introspective and make changes to my life while my world started to shift. This has had an odd affect on me where I desperately want to dam everything back up and try to continue as things have gone. Although I can see the cracks in my dam and understand that I need to be more balanced or it will not last. So I am choosing amongst the chaos of my life to continue with the original plan.
Perhaps it is a good thing to feel broken and without course. Perhaps it is a good thing to feel the weight of everything at once. Perhaps it is not. I do not know but I wont know until I try. So I am moving forward. I am sure that many of you haven noticed changes in me that last few years...these are mainly caused by me deciding it was time to change. We can not remain the same while the world around us changes.
At the same time I recognize the pure youth of the battle. The fact that there is a battle is a clear example of that youth and how far I have not gone on my course of life. Hopefully choosing to make those changes will result in me growing and letting this part of my youth wash away.
I think the largest battle I have been wadging in my mind has been over the changes that have already occurred. The David I was is not who I am today. That which once was a definition of who I am is no longer. I have changed while attempting to remain the same. I still can't decide which me is the better me but honestly I almost feel like the current me is the lesser of the two. This alone has been hard for me to accept because who I was could not have survived.
I am planning to be even more active in photography so make sure you check out my gallery if you want to see the latest pictures. I updated it last night with five new albums. For access to my pictures, please visit Sorin's Rain Drop.

Training

Well I am in the full swing of things in regards to training. My first day was from 4:30 pm until 7:15 am the next day. My second day was from 8:30 pm until 7:00am the next day. The hours suck but I feel the content is still important. I am getting enough sleep but not much else. My sleep schedule is also a complete mess because of the hours worked and such. I am eating 1 meal a day by choice which is confusing me and I usually only eat about half of that meal but I am feeling pretty good.

I am not nearly so nervous this time around. It is the weekend here approach 3 am on Sunday. I slept most of Saturday after I got back. I plan to go to sleep in a few hours then get up and finish my training modules off for the week.

I have done more reading in my free time than anything else as the internet connection here sucks. I usually can't get any more than 5k and it is barely that.

I am really looking forward to the end of the week when I am going to get to go to Jaipur. I just have to survive all of the trainings until then. The agents definitely need the help. I can't believe all of the bad practices agents have gotten into and the things that "always" resolve their calls...but they aren't. Like deleting the Cache(eh).db file; this is the cure to all evils. Sigh.

I continue to struggle with the why of my work. In so many ways my job is setup for failure and yet I stay and persist. Maybe someday I will understand that self destructive behavior.

I am forming a new opinion about how things should be done though this time around. It is obvious that regardless of the amount of training people are going to do what they think will work best. In the case of how agents are handling cases there they are doing things like deleting the cache.db file because it worked really well in this one certain circumstance. I feel like we should be spending less time going over individual case issues and find the root cause to things like this and then driving a solution. I mean think about it. Agent spend all of this time creating this ideas about how to quickly fix issues and actually start creating a lot of extra work for themselves. Why don't we have someone to look into the broader issues and drive down the root cause of agents misconceptions and issues. In a way that is the root concept behind my current job but somehow people seem to think that magically knowledge will come from an escalation. When even if it does you have to generate significant volume behind an issue to get any real action taken. Which is very hard to do of of a single issue, and finding a broader view on the issue requires time and research. Sigh again.

Wow there is a bit of my brain directly dumped to the screen. For those who know me well have fun. For those who don't...well I am sorry that I may be worrying you. My drive to care about my job is continuing to build in the middle of all of this though. Can someone explain that to me? I don't understand it.

You would think in the middle of this chaos I would feel like all of my efforts are for not as the installation training was probably some of the best training we put out and obviously it failed...which means I failed...which is why I am back. I guess trying to fix the problems that have already occurred. The funny thing is I am feeling like it really wasn't the material that was the problem it was the context of the training as a whole. The problem I originally presented that you can not expect and agent to be able to troubleshoot all products in 1 month seems to be the real root cause. Although I completely agree the perhaps a new approach to the training module needs to be tried. I will spend today and tomorrow trying to make that exact thing happen. I will find a way to make it a better experience for the agents and help them to truely understand.

Sorin out.

Planes again

Well I am back in India. I arrived about 1 hour ago. I got a little more sleep on the plane but I am still very tired. I will be taking a nap soon after I eat some food. It seems I left my battery for my camera in Seattle. I need to figure out how to either get it to Aanchal before she leaves or buy one.

I will be using this blog to update people again during my stay. Happy reading.

Sorin

Planes oh the games

Well this is going to be a short post as I am tired and it has been a long day. I am back. 28 hours later I am back. I am sleepy. I actually made myself sick from the rich food here in America. Had to take numerous things to settle things down. Crazy how things change and how quickly.

I have lots of stories so let me know what you would like to hear about and I will tell. :) Oh and gifts. I have them a plenty. (They even got me held up in customs.) Until I see you....you will not see them.

Sorin out

To Agra and back again

Well I visited the Agra on Sunday, and it was a great day. Although I spent way to much money, but let me back up a minute and describe the day leading up to my visit to Agra.

I finally was a able to go into a fitful sleep at 11pm on Sat. At 1:46 am I woke up and was very ready to go (I was suppose to get up at 2.) I got ready for the day and sat in my room until 2:43am waiting for the car. I went down stairs (waited a little bit longer,) then got in the car and started for Noida to pick up Aanchal and Rajdeep. (Although I thought we were picking up 3 people but oh well.) The driver was padding his bill a little bit and took the long way to Noida. Through the hills at 3 in the morning. Sigh. The road in India suck. The back roads in India suck badly. It was a very painful drive filled with lots of sudden stops and near misses with pot holes like lakes. But 1.5 hours later I arrived in Noida. We then spent the end of the drive, going to the Adobe office, going through a residential area (I hadn't seen one yet.) Anyone with any kid of money had a 10' wall. Everyone else slept in make shift shelters or anywhere they could find on the side of the road. I saw a few people sleeping on top of a metal carts which food would be served out of later (it was explained to me later than although those get extremely hot during the day, and don't really cool off, they have to sleep on them so people don't steal their goods. :(

At 4:45 am we picked up Aanchal and Rajdeep from the Adobe Sector 25A office and started off. It was a great car ride down. About 4 hours in the car but the four of us just talked, laughed at things on the road, and enjoyed the trip. We stopped at a side market and bought a bag of chips at around 6am for Rajdeep as she was threating to eat the seats. What I found interesting here is that we looked at around 10 of these before we decided one of them was safe enough to purchase from. The driver included did not want ot stop at any with trucks out front. They were looking for tourist buses and families. :( We stopped at a small "resort" for breakfast and I had a great India breakfast with panata and tea. We bought a few items there (I should have gotten more. Even though they were over priced,) and continued on our way. The only other really exciting thing that happened on the way down is a truck that was overloaded (this overloaded thing is not new) tipped and block the road ahead of us. We sat for 20 minutes and then decided to find another way. The car to the left of us tried to cross a ditch thing and ended up stuck. We decided to jump the merdian and go into on coming traffic. (Something that happens way to often in India.) We were going great until a few officers showed up and we had to quickly merge back onto our own side or get a hefty ticket (20 rubies. Ha, hefty.)

We arrived at some tomb in Agra and Aanchal arranged for a guide. The man spoke almost no English but I had a translator. About the time we arrived at the tomb our driver showed up with another guide an Aanchal and he argued for about 30 minutes before deciding to take the new person as he was going to be our guide for the next 3 stops. Ha. The tomb was beautiful and I have many pictures. One of the things I found interesting, and Aanchal and Rajdeep got quite mad about, was we were not allowed to wear our shoes into the kings tomb. We "rented" booties. The queens tomb on the other hand we were allowed shoes. There were monkies at this tomb as well. BEWARE the monkies (semi quote from Michael Jantzen.) Some person was trying to convince us to pet the monkies because they were nice. We didn't buy it. :)

So we loaded back up in the car and found out our tour guide was going to drop off and his son would be joining us later. My ha from eariler was because of this, double ha. So we drove some more picked up his son and went to the Taj. We rented a horse drawn carriage to take us there. I ended up riding in the front cause I am too fat. I had a hard time with the ride because the horses there are sooo malnurshied. I was literally waiting for our horse to fall over.

We then got into the courtyard and had all of the gates explained and went through the gate to the Taj. I am going to keep my descriptions of the Taj short but here we go. WOW! and not World of Warcraft wow. I have a lot of pictures. We had a great time there and stayed for almost 2 hours. On the hottest recorded day ever at the Taj. Ug. Oh I did better in the heat than the Indians. (/pride)

We went and had an India lunch after the Taj. Then went to a marble smith who was working on pieces of the marble used to construct the Taj. They they explained how the Taj's inlay was done and we watched these young men working on their craft with bloodie hand from a grinding wheel. My heart skips beating remembering that. I ended up buying an item or two there. I will say not more though. You will have to wait to see.

We then visited a jewerly store (this was the third I had been too on my trip,) and they told us about the star of India. I ended up buy the jewerly from people here as they had the best deals I had seen so far. I also ended up getting star rubies as they were far cheaper than any other gem stones I had seen in the country.

We then called it a day having spent far to much money. We packed up and started back to Noida. It was an uneventful drive as we were all tired. Rajdeep slept, Aanchal and I chatted, and the driver drove. We arrived in Noida at 8:30 pm and grabbed some dinner. It was western food with an Indian twist. Odd but good.

I was finally dropped off at 10:30 pm and paid the driver 8,550 rubies. All and all it was a very good day. Oh then I called some people and said hi, followed by sleep. I slept for many hours. I probably wont post much until I get back maybe once on Thursday or Friday. I need to do a little more shopping and I probably wont have as many suviners as I would like as I may not get back to a normal market were things are cheaper but I am working on it.

Sorin out

Teleperformance

Well this week is very dry. More mundane than my previous weeks but that is ok. It just means I have virtually nothing to write about. Well I have plenty but I can't in this forum. In any case it basically is work at unusual, sleeping weird hours during the day, playing games on my laptop, and back to work. Since I have no pictures from TP I thought I would share a picture of the parliment building from Saturday. All I can say to that is this is 1/4 roughly of the parliment building. I have more I am just not uploading them here. Maybe this gives you an idea of size.

I am ready to come home by the way but I have 1.2 weeks. I do have a visit to Agra (Taj) on Satruday though...then shopping on Sunday. I have sent out T2's to looks for cheap prices on Jewelry for me but I have discovered those prices really aren't much better.

Sorin

Out on the town

Well Saturday was incredible. I had a lot of fun with Sachin and company. Although I got very little sleep the night before. My day started at 7:15 am. I packed and check out of my room around 8:45am to meet the driver for the day.

During the day we visited:

• The Museum of Modern Art (no pictures)
• The Parliament building (makes ours look small.)
• India Gate (just wow)
• CP (center of Delhi and a ton of markets.
• Bercos (Chinese food)
• Tombs (can't remember the names of the people...hehe)
• Lucents Temple (didn't get up close....to many people)
• Delhi Hut (another market)

The city is huge and very different from a lot of US cities. At the center of Dehli every single corner was coated in poo. There were people everywhere and although I could have bought things I was too overwhelmed. Street merchants weren't constantly trying to get you to buy and refused to listen to no. Shops were small enclosed spaces with plenty of gift items from India and textiles. (Again I didn't buy anything.) Sachin did purchase two purses for Kirsten. Originally the merchant wanted 450 rubies per bag. (Sachin was after 3 in total.) He managed to work her down to 600 rubies for all three. This took around 20 minutes though. I was till amazed. The longer we stood there though the more street merchants began to cluster and take the opportunity to try and sell us the little things in their hands. In normal stores prices are comparable to the US. On those streets though you could have gotten some good deals.

The architecture here is amazing. I have a lot of pictures i can show on that. Although I don't like taking pictures of people without there knowledge I did get some of the shops and such. The other places we visited were huge and incredible. The steps at the tombs were almost too big for me to make though. If they would have been 4 or 5 iches higher I would have had a hard time just getting my legs up high enough and they were steep.

The entire day was excellent though. We ended at Delhi Hut which is a little higher priced but merchants are showing their wares more freely and no street merchants were hounding you. I was extremely tired at the end of the day but I had a great time.

Oh one thing I did want to mention is at India Gate a crazy person had a cobra which he had drained the posion out of in a basket and was encouraging it to strike him. I took a few photos from a ways off. I had no desire to go near. He also chased us down for money later cause we took his picture. Sigh. I saw a lot though. I wish I could have overcome my fear to buy items but it was still a great experience.

David

T2 Mentoring and Training

Well this week has pretty much been the same everyday. Get up, shower, get dressed, read for 30 minutes, work on training, go to work (for 11-12 hours,) come back, strip, and sleeep. Although when I am at work has shifted slightly the day has been the same. Nothing really exciting is going on. I have arranged to join Kirsten and Sachin this weekend for a tour of Delhi (co-workers.) My plan is to get a tour of the bigger sights arrange for my last weekend in Delhi.

Well off to read, work on training, and go to work.

Sorin

Cab rides

Well an update. I decided to join some of my co-workers for a movie on Saturday. The Adobe office here was providing the movie for employees at 11am. I got up early and got ready to go. I was a little nervous as this involved going out into the great streets of India which are overwhelming to say the least. (I will try to take more pictures. I feel akward taking them from the car.)
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I got my cab at 10:15am and I had to be there at 11am. This is about a 20 minute drive. I took a cab rather than a air conditioned car to save time. Well save time was the last thing to occur. I actually tried to get a cab at 10am but it took 15 minutes for them to decide that a cab was the only way to make the trip happen. Although it is only a 20 minute drive it goes through a tax zone. The air conditioned rental car would go around the tax zone and the 20 minute drive would become an hour and fifteen minute drive. So I took the cab. The only problems with the cab was it wasn't air condition and I was waiting for the floor to drop out. Oh the tax was 20 rubies and I actually paid that out of my own pocket. Sigh.

Well it turns out that the driver had no clue where he was going. He drove to Greater Noida. Which is almost 1.5 hours away from the hotel. There he tried to drop me but my gut was screaming this was the wrong place. So I asked a few times if this was the place and he finally asked and was told it was the next mall. 10 minutes later he asked someone on the street and found out we were an hour away. :( So we drove back. Needless to say I didn't make the movie but I got to see a lot of the country side. I am wishing I had taken pictures but I was too nervous. The main reason I didn't want to be dropped at he wrong place is a car was suppose to pick me up at 3. If it didn't know where to go I would have had to tried to get another way. One of the main rules when traveling here is not to just get a cab but to have a car called for you. :( So I got to the mall where the theather was very late. The cab driver gave me his number and offered to give me a lift back when I was ready. Normally I would have just used the car at 3 but since I was frustered I decided to keep his number and take him up on the offer.

I walked around the mall for an hour looking at shops and discovering that prices are about the same as the US. They currency may be 43 rubies to 1 dollar but items cost a lot of rubies. For example a plain shirt was selling for 1500 rubies, at this one store, which is about $30.00. I finally decided just to go back to the hotel and calm down.

Of couse on the way the driver got rearended and couldn't get his car to start. After almost 20 minutes of trying he finally got it going and we went back to the hotel. That was Saturday. I spent the rest of my weekend in the hotel. I find the streets here very intimadating. Shops are right off of the road and there really isn't a sidewalk. (Malls we actually Malls just like in the US though.) I think i have seen 2 sidewalks and no one uses them. Everyone is in the streets. I did see a lot during the weekend though. I will start getting more pictures of what I see so you can understand.

Oh I have a few pictures but they are on my iphone. Unforunately I will have to get some software installed to get access to them. I might now get that done until later into the week.

David

Cows

I know your going to find this odd but I am loving the cows here. They are small and skinny but there is a humor about them. They seem to be aware that people move around them and don't really care. In the interest of pictures I have taken a picture of a few now but unfortunately I did not get pictures of the coolest cow ever.

So to set the stage...

I tried to go into the office. I went to the wrong office and had to get another taxi to a different office (also in Noida.) On the way there we passed a cow walking down the middle of the road. (That is not the strange part.) So the cow had a cart tied to its back pulling fruit. Which at first I was like, "oh the cow is pulling the cart for its master." Then I noticed there was no master. Just a cow walking down the middle of the road with a cart full of fruit.

This took me back. I had to wonder if this was common. Do people's respect for cows prevent theaft of goods? Does the cow know the way so well that he can be hooked up and he is off? We had to go onto the side of the road to pass the cow as our horn did not encourage him to move. I was busy trying to get my iphone out to take a picture but we rounded a corner and I saw him no more. So I figured I would just be ready for the next cow.

When I got into the office I asked about this event. People had a good laugh because they thought I was joking about the cow. I quickly found out this was not a common occurance. People do hook carts up but they guide them, protecting their wears. This lead to a lot of speculation about where the master was. The best one we came up with was the cow got hooked up, didn't like the weight, so it ran off leaving the human to chase after it, and only slowed down when the human was left far behind. Ah the cows.

Next...

I know, I know, more cow pictures less cow typing.

Sorin

Time zone adjustments

I think my friend Michael said this best, "It is going to be the middle of the day and you are going to have a hard time keeping your eyes open." Yup. That is exactly what happened to me yesterday. I fought it for almost 4 hours and finally took a nap. Naps for me always seem to turn into sleep until the next day and this was no exception. So at 2:30 am on Weds I finally decided to get up. My current plan is to lay down right now and get a little sleep before I go into the office. (I am not actually tired but I am pretty good at encouraging myself to sleep.) Hopefully this will get me more on track. If not, well, I will deal.

I pretty much hid in my room yesterday trying to adjust to the time zone and overcome apprehensions. I did take a few pictures though. The weirdest thing I have seen yet is cows just wandering through the middle of a parking lot. I was told that this was common but seeing is believing (of course I didn't take pictures of that.)

David

Planes can suck brains

Well I have never been on a flight that long before and I am not looking forward to it again. The flight to India was one of the slowest periods of my life. I can't really sleep on a plane (even when I am complete exhausted; only nap.) so the 14 hours of flight went by incredibly slowly. As the restrooms on the plane are big enough for me to walk into, shut the door, circle, and try to make the half toilet work I didn't use them often (did I mention I have confidened space issues.) Thankfully though nothing really eventful happened on the plane. I even had movies to watch on the India flight. (Although trying to watch a movie when you can't keep you eyes open is very hard.)

Customs here sucks. 3 hours of mainly standing in lines. First the swine flu line. (oh yes) where you fill out a questionayre which I don't think they could even read. If you asked questions you got this blank look in return. (blank...this is common. Then off to the customs line (again questions are meet with blank looks.) Next is the baggage line. Finally is the exiting customs line. Sigh. I hate lines. Finally I met up with the cab to take me to the hotel and roughly 1.5 hours later I got to go to sleep.

In the interest of time here is a quick summary of the werid things I have seen.

• Speed is controlled by speed bumps in the old city of Delhi. The bigger the bump the slower they want you to go.
• No one cares about traffic rules. In the words of my driver. They are to help guide you, not restrict you. (In America we are silly.)
• Everyone is looking for a way around any rule. (Including everyone one the plane who are getting up as the plane is taking off to get into the bathroom.)
• Male children are raised much differently here.
• No one in India should be heavy as they would sweet it off. :)
• In general people are very kind.
• There are lots of people here.
• Deoderant is very optional. (very sigh)
  

Well until next time.

Sorin - David off to play wowcrack.

Contacts vs Glasses

Sorry it has been a while since I posted. On Friday of last week I noticed my right contact had started to tare. This isn't a huge problem it just means it is time for a new pair of contacts. Well I was out.

So I called my optometrist and they informed me I couldn't get new lenses until I had an appointment. Apparently it has been three years. >.> Go me! So I scheduled an appointment for today (Tues at 11:30am.) I just had to hope that my contact lens would last until then and be very careful not to tare it in two. Well that lasted all of one day; Friday night as I was cleaning them and putting them away the lens disintegrated. As you probably know I can't really see without glasses and I had to last until today. So I dug up the lenses to my old glasses (mind you the frame broke years ago and I threw them away. So I had to find a way to put the old lenses in to new frames. Well at first I just put the right one, using tape, into a pair of sunglasses behind the lens. This was a royal pain in the butt. I could go into public but inside everything was dark. So I finally popped out the sun glass lens and let the glass lens hang. This looked stupid but temporarily fixed my problem until today. Today I put the other lens in my frame so I could get my eye appointment without having to take a contact out.

The lessons learned: a) contact problems = massive headache (literally) b) I need a backup pair of glasses (grumble grumble...at least until I get lasiks) and c) I guess I can still reconnect with my roots cause I would have worn these to work once upon a time.

Sorin out

Woodland Park Zoo

I went to the Woodland Park Zoo on Saturday and had a lot of fun. I got my annual membership renewed and spent the day at the zoo with Bobby's family and Michael. I also got a chance to take a lot of pictures with my new lens. I thought a few of them turned out pretty well so I will post a few below.

I discovered the disadvantage to a telephoto lens quickly when I had to stand back 20 feet or more to get a picture.
I took a lot of pictures of the animals at the zoo and I think the quality turned out extremely well. Aynjel informed me that you could make a fence disappear when done right when taking a picture. My first attempt didn't go so well. After trying the first time though Michael set me straight. I will need a lot of practice but I think I can get there.
For me there were two highlights for this trip. I got to see the cats (all of them) and the elephants were out. We have been to the zoo a few times and the Snow Leopard and Bengal Tiger haven't been out yet. The elephants are just such incredible creatures so it was a real treat to be able to photograph them.

I actually have well hundreds of pictures. I know I am crazy with a camera. These are just a few and I wouldn't say the best.

What I learned about blogging while doing just this little post is that I will not be uploading a lot of pictures. I will have to work not posting so many pictures. Maybe I will just have to install blogging software on my server so I am not so limited.

Sorin switching to gaming

Addendum....I have uploaded all of the photos from the zoo to photoshop.com while I work on my own site. If you wish to view them the address is: https://sorien.photoshop.com

New directions

We all have times in our lives when it is time to take a new approach. I have reached on of those in mine. To facilitate communication while I am in India and perhaps beyond I am going to start blogging. I know I am wordy so try not to get bored. I know I will have thousands of typos and sentences that don't make sentence (sense silly me) cause I didn't re-read them right but you will have to forgive me.

For those of you who are confused about the blog name. Well, I wanted Sorin, but the universe seems to love that name so I needed something else. Sorin's Workshop, Bedroom, Closet, and everything else I thought of just didn't sound original or true to me. So I thought long and hard. I will try not to make this leap seem as big as it was for me but the internet is a cloud. Clouds are composed of water which when condensed enough creates rain. I love rain and this blog is just one tiny part of the internet, as a single rain drop is a tiny part of a cloud; so.....Sorin's Rain drop. Okay you can wake up now.

Sorin out