Thursday, July 02, 2009

Beats Working

Rochester, Minnesota came up in a conversation today. I've only been there twice, both on business when I worked for Big Construction. As I recalled these trips, I realize I was sent to Rochester for pretty bizarre reasons.

Trip #1: The company had finished a project in Rochester and needed a certain document related to the final payment to be picked up in person, the mail or FedEx wouldn't do. So I drove to Rochester on this errand, even though it wasn't a project my division had handled. I think I was asked to do this as my workload was a little light at the time and none of the accountants at the other office wanted to do it. (There may have been some office posturing at play here. The guy who asked me was a supervisor at another office and likely none of his accountants wanted to admit they had time to take a day to go to Rochester. Me? Toss me the keys!) Ah, the age before cell phones were prevalent: I had to call back to the company to confirm I had made the pickup. The pay phone wouldn't take my long distance credit card, so I called collect.

Trip #2: The company was bidding on a project in Rochester and the estimator needed somebody to go to the pre-bid meeting and ask one specific question to the guy running the meeting. I remember I had to write the question down as I had no idea what I was exactly asking. (Rebar this, concrete that, blah blah blah.) Again, I don't remember why I was exactly asked to run this errand. I do know that the estimators held me in high esteem due to the praises of my estimator buddy Turk and I may have been specifically requested. (In fact, this same estimator asked me to turn a bid for him on my last day on the job - he said he knew I'd do one last good thing for him. I did as he asked.)

In both cases, it didn't take much arm twisting to get me to volunteer. Sit in the office pushing paper or take a road trip on a nice spring day (I think both trips were in the May/June timeframe), charge all that mileage and a lunch to the company, report back to the other office with my findings
and then head for home rather than fighting traffic to downtown? Easy choice for this kid.