The Letter

Has it really been more than a month?  The TatVeg has been a busy guy lately.  At some point in July the people I have been forced to work beside for the last 16 months realized that my part of the project was actually somewhat critical and needed attention.  It only required three meetings and a snarky email -one which threw multiple people and companies directly under the bus- to get us there.  According to their logic their failure to understand what I do or to take my warnings seriously for more than a year is my fault.  This was made clear to me when a project manager got in my face a few days after he'd begged on the phone for me to send my email to him and said, "If you ever send another email like that, I will personally fuck you up." He then went on to explain that emails like mine were "unprofessional."  He also told me that he would have me fired. I resisted the desire to explain that threatening a colleague with physical violence over an email was considerably more unprofessional than sending an email consisting of facts and dates chronicling a year of missed opportunities and failures to act.  I also resisted telling him that since we work for different companies it would be difficult for him to get me fired, especially since I hadn't done anything but my job.  Unfortunately for him, my job was exposing his incompetence.  The lesson here is that even though a person might have tattoos, dress badly, have a questionable haircut and diet does not mean that guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

So it was on that note I boarded a plane for Orlando on August 20th for a little R & R.  America was pleasant and not nearly as bizarre the second time back.  I pretty much knew what to expect this time.  Toilets that flush with almost frightening force and efficiency and an hour of hot water in the shower.  I enjoyed seeing the family, but it also brought up a small amount of depression.  You miss so much when you live abroad.  When it takes 30 hours to get home by plane, and you live on an 11-12 hour time difference you don't get home enough.  No one made me feel bad about or anything, it was just on my mind a lot.

The day before I was scheduled to fly back I got a panicked email from the head of my office.  Apparently things that were my responsibility had been installed on the project and looked bad.  A meeting was thusly called by the guys that had threatened to "fuck me up" in order to yell, point fingers and assign blame.  The meeting was scheduled for the evening of the same day I was to return to Vietnam.  I declined the email meeting invitation citing that I wouldn't have time to get home and make it to the meeting with a fully functional brain.  I was told this was not an option because it was an emergency situation.  Attend the meeting or else.

So I arrived home at 2am, tried to sleep, then boarded a car at 2pm that same afternoon for the three hour ride to site.  When I arrived for the meeting I was shown a photo someone had taken of the offending installation.  It was taken outdoors, at night with a camera phone.  No less than three people looked me in the eye and said, "this thing looks like shit." I had to agree.  The photo looked like shit.

So I waited for dark.

Even though the meeting was not scheduled to begin until 7pm, it gets dark at the job site at about 6:15.  So I walked myself out to the offending installation to have a look.  It looked fine.  I quickly arrived at the conclusion that the freak outs over the past four days had been in response to the photo.  Not one person had actually waited until dark, walked the 75 yards out to the installation and looked at it.  You see the work day ends at 5:00, and to stick around until dark would mean sitting at the job site for a whole extra hour.  Instead they waited for me to board a plane, travel more than thirty hours, take a three hour car ride and walk with them to look at what was actually a non-issue.  While they were waiting for me to arrive, they took the time to call everyone associated with the project to tell them how badly I'd screwed up.  As we stood and looked at the non-screw-up they had a brief, but comical, conversation where they discussed who would make the phone call to the owner to let him know how the catastrophic problem they'd spent the last four days blaming me for was, in fact, not a problem at all.  I managed to sleep a little on the car ride home.

When I got into the office the next day I was informed by a coworker* that the company accountant and human resources manager had resigned.  No one told our office.  She had been gone for more than two weeks before I found out.  One would think that it would be a good idea to let the employees of a company know when the human resources department quits.  Perhaps I'm naive on this point.  Once I learned this information, I hastened to my desk to find that I had not been paid.  My paycheck is now a week late, which is why you have the pleasure of reading this post today.  I have lots of work to do, but am refusing to do it.  I would have left the office already, but I rode my bike this morning and I just stopped sweating from the ride in.  Plus our AC is broken at home.

*Not the office head.  Not by email from my boss.  I learned from an assistant designer that is over here from Vegas to help out for a couple weeks.

I've already raised my hand about this issue and was told that we're awaiting payment from the project and they expect it any minute.  I suppose that's the good news.  The frightening thought is that the company that employs me is functioning paycheck to paycheck.  I also try not to think about what kind of anarchy would go down in the home office if paychecks came a week late.  Our office appears pretty quiet, but I don't see a lot of people working.  It's been five months since I was switched from being paid twice a month to once a month.  In those five months I have received an on-time paycheck once.  It was nice that they paid me on time on my birthday.

Can I go back on vacation?  Night sailing was considerably more enjoyable than this.

That was a pretty bitter post, so here's a photo of a Hello Kitty plane I took in the airport in Tokyo for your amusement:

Would you feel safe flying in this aircraft?  That's what I thought.