Land of Windmills

Well, I'm not going back to Chicago, since we finished the tasks we needed to do by the time I left, and they don't have things set up for phase II yet. They figure they'll "call me back" when they are ready. It always amazes me how many clients seem to think that ourservices are "on-call" -- that we will work 2 hours here and a day there and a few hours next week on the same contract, so they don't have to pay for full days of work. I have had the strangest conversations with clients:

"So, we don't have a meeting until 10am tomorrow, so you won't be billing us until then, right?" Um. No.

"We aren't going to need you here next week, since the primary developer is on vacation, so you can come back the week after that instead." Um. No.

"We'll need about six hour of your time between now and Friday." Um...no.

If that's what they work out in the contract beforehand, fine. But otherwise? Sorry. We're not an escort service, despite our joking about our company "pimping us out" to clients. Sigh. They were very happy with the work (happier than I would have been, considering the speed at which we did it!), but I'll be out in Cheyenne, WY, for a few weeks.

It's almost close enough to drive (if you're used to LA traffic, I imagine), which is what our salesperson initially suggested. But it's actually about 1 1/2 hours north. So, I'll probably be driving up and staying there for a few days, and working the rest of the time remotely. That should be nice.

Of course, the new gig is to do a migration from Informix to Oracle -- it's a bad sign when every Informix database book I can find (to try to get up to speed) is OUT OF PRINT!