I have not had the opportunity to post about the orientation session for this new project, and I feel like I should do that now. Fortunately, I took notes, because it was awesome. First of all, this project is like a blast from the past -- it is huge, with 300 temps on it. The last project I was on that was this big was the one that gave birth to this blog. Go to the early posts on this blog and you'll see what I'm talking about. It was a flat-out goat-roping. Given that this project involves the same client and the same firms, it appears that they are determined to avoid the goat-roping this time around. It remains to be seen whether they can, but they're trying really hard. More on that in other posts.
For right now, I want to talk about the orientation session. It was so huge, it was held in a hotel near the review site, since no single room at the review site could even come close to holding everybody on the project, plus the folks from the agency and the firms involved. Nice hotel, half a block away.
Surprisingly, I saw very few people I actually knew, although I did see Ruther Bader Ginsburg. I was kind of surprised to see her, but I figured she was augmenting her salary from the Supreme Court while they are out of session. I was later told that it was not actually Ginsburg, but just some old goat temp who looks like her. Damn.
I am told the population of Temp Town is roughly 3,000 attorneys in D.C. -- I have no way of evaluating this number. If it is accurate, though, it would mean that at least 10 percent of the population of Temp Town was in that room. I would have expected to recognize more people. Maybe I just didn't see the ones I knew.
But I definitely saw some that I knew. The Penguin was there -- a woman who looks and, alas, sounds pretty much like an angry penguin -- as was The Hippy, a woman formerly known as the Hippy Dippy Clickin' Chick. She just looks like she came straight from Haight-Ashbury, 1969, except the time machine she took did not protect her from aging. At all.
Also saw the Garden Gnome. The Garden Gnome, who looks a lot like Mr. Magoo, if Mr. Magoo had been on "Miami Vice," came by to see the attractive young lady he was stalking on the project where he first appeared on this blog. Oddly enough, he came by to ask her to let her know that an older, married friend of hers was his new target, asking the hot young thing to let the other woman know he came looking for her. Yes, he was wearing a linen jacket and a pastel T-shirt -- odd choices for someone who was supposed to be dressed business formal, meaning in a suit.
Of course, he wasn't the only under-dressed person there by any stretch. Tell a group of temps including more than two people to wear suits, and at least one of them won't. Tell the same to dress business casual -- nice pants, shirt with a collar -- and at least one will show up in jeans and a T-shirt. Guaranteed.
During the orientation session, the temps there continued to provide evidence that temps aren't trusted for a reason. The three rows directly behind me at the session were reserved for the staff attorneys and associates from the three firms who would be supervising the project, a euphemism for serving as prison guards, as we learned later. Anyway, the temps who showed up late -- and there are always temps who show up late -- walked into a room full of people, saw dozens of rows of seats mostly filled and three rows of seats completely empty, and assumed that those seats were empty by chance. At least three times, people from the agency chased temps out of the reserved seats directly behind me. I am told it happened frequently in other parts of the reserved section where I couldn't hear it happening. Only in Temp Town. "Oh, look, somebody left me a seat in a section all by myself. Cool."
As expected, the session was boring in a way that would be dismissed as not plausible if a screenwriter tried to include it in a movie script. Among other things, we spent an hour on the "project orientation manual," a double-sided work that the person going over it with us informed us was "two pages." At least half the people in the room counted the pages. Some of them still are, baffled by the fact that it is nearly four pages, technically, but on two sheets of paper. Help me, Jesus.
Unfortunately, at the end of it all, the firm attorneys did what you should never do when facing a roomful of temps, especially that big of a room. They asked if there were any questions. Dear God, I can't count how many people got up to prove that there is, indeed, such a thing as a stupid question. In this case, all of them were. Pretty much everybody who asked a question sounded like they were on their first project ever. And that they were stupid people on their first project ever. But two stand out.
The first came from a woman who was on the 18-month project I just left. Every time the firm attorneys came by -- used to be about once a month, but later it was almost never, since I think they wanted to avoid her -- she would ask at least one incomprehensible question that they would be unable to answer. They didn't even try. The project lasted three years -- she had been on it 18 months when I joined at the mid-point. If she didn't understand shit then, she was never going to. So Wednesday she asked something about "rain attenuation" or some such shit and I realized she just can't help herself. She has to ask a stupid question. These folks couldn't answer (or understand) her question, either.
If possible, the other stand-out question was worse. It wasn't even a question. The dude stepped up and said, "This isn't really a question, it's more of a comment," and proceded to say something about something that has happened on previous projects he has been on, then closed by saying, "I know it can happen. I've seen it." The firm attorneys, thank God, realized what they were up against and closed the Q&A session at that point.
I'm sure I drew the wrong conclusions from the orientation session and that the entire project will be an intellectually fulfilling exercise surrounded by bright, inquisitive minds. Or not.
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