October 18, 2019: Crazy Call Day

Friday. I got up, showered, and had my usual nine o’clock Friday meeting to start off the day. That went until about a quarter till ten. Then I had a two hour gap to get all of my morning work done before I had a noon meeting scheduled. It was a busy two hours.

At noon, we had a meeting that we thought was going to be ridiculously simple and straightforward. It was anything but that. It was a sales call that we had requested. So there was really nothing to do here. Just tell us about the feature (we are already big customers), give us a price, and tell us when we can try it out. But it didn’t go well, at all. It was a train wreck of terrible pricing, caused by non-obvious design decisions that led us to sticker shock and wondering why it would cost a large vendor ten to twenty times more to implement a feature than it currently takes us to do it ourselves. Trying to sell us on a twenty times increase in cost seemed ridiculous. When we questioned how this made sense, we got some made up, clearly fictionalized story that was really insulting. When we questioned further, it was clear that we hit a panicked fight or flight response from the guy trying to pull one over on us and he totally lost it on the call.

We ended up spending the entire afternoon dealing with the fall out. There were two follow up calls immediately following that one. Then about an hour break where our teams were discussing the calls. Then I spent nearly three hours on the phone with the CEO of the company! We ended up having a great meeting and got a lot of things worked out. It went really well. But what a crazy day.

Then I had about two hours to work and get caught up as much as I could given that I had lost nearly the entire day to meetings that I had not planned and a little to a meeting that was planned.

Around seven I managed to get “done” with work and had some dinner, Dominica’s pasta with veggie “meatballs” and we watched two episodes of Star Trek: Voyages. Then Dominica and I watched some Brooklyn Nine Nine.

Around ten or eleven, the girls and I settled in for an evening of playing Nancy Drew: The Trail of the Twister. We played until after one in the morning! We played through about half of the game. Got through a lot of tough puzzles. We had a good time. Going to try to play more tomorrow.