I really have nothing so I am shooting from the hip again. Everything has been sort of on cruise control for a little while here. Days and weeks are going by fast, yet not much is happening.

Speaking of cruising, I checked in on a cruise today, because it is coming up on vacation time again already. The cruise lines now charge a "supplemental" gas fee, which is either $8 or $9 per person, PER DAY! Take a 5 day cruise, two people, you are looking at $90. Plus, to drive from where I am to the cruise terminal will cost me $165 in gas. That's $255 and I haven't even got a ticket yet! So now I am having to rethink my strategies. The cost of flying has increased as well. A lot of places are now charging a fee per checked bag, per way! So a round trip you have to pay the fee twice. My math shows that flying to Las Vegas is still the cheapest vacation. On a cruise you get all the free food you want, but in Vegas you get all the free liquor you want. Liquor is way more expensive than food, so advantage Vegas. Plus, the airport is all of 15 minutes away from my house. I'll probably settle for Vegas, if that is even considered settling.

Anyway, I have been thinking about the speed of business. I am working on a project at work. I am having to work with an outside vendor, and multiple teams within the company. There is a lot of pressure to get the project completed as soon as possible, since it is a new product that we are going to selling soon. So in really general terms, I have to build the server that the product runs on. Sounds simple enough.

I get scheduled for a call with the vendor for the configuration. I spend all day on the call, and it turns out there is one crucial missing piece, which someone else has to get. That person has to wait on another outside company to get the piece ready. This ends up taking over a week. In the interim, the vendor flies down to my site, to work on it some more, and we use a spare piece he has for testing purposes. We work literally all day on it and get it working finally at the very end of the day. Great. He leaves.

Three or four days later, we finally get the piece we need and hook it up and it doesn't work. Great. What the fuck? I jack with it for 2 more days and finally get it working, after a few emails with the vendor. Great now the piece is in place and the overall product still doesn't work! Now yet another team has to get involved to do their part, and the guy is on vacation for a couple of days. OK.

He gets back and does his part, and it still doesn't work. So yet another department gets involved for troubleshooting purposes, and they don't know anything at the end of the day. So the next day, another department has to fix the "tubes" between my junk and their junk. This takes another 2 days. Wow. Anyone notice how much time is getting wasted here?

The finally do their part and guess what. Broken still. Great. OK, so now another yet another department (how many fucking departments do we even have?) gets involved to troubleshoot their point in the pipe between the previously mentioned tubes. Amazing. Their shit works just fine, and they prove it, so now its back to my shit after all that.

So I email the vendor to schedule some time, which takes another day. Finally get back on a call with him and we work again all day and finally, FINALLY, we get it working. How in the hell are we supposed to sell this to other people, if we had such a hard time getting it going ourselves?

And this was all when we were in more or less a hurry panic mode. What is my point here with all this? Nothing. But it is an interesting peek into a typical process in today's modern business world. Its amazing that with all this bullshit technology that is everywhere in our connected hooked up blackberry email fucking whatever world, that shit can still move so slowly. It blows my mind that anything ever gets done at all.

Fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!