My job at Accuvant has been retooled a bit as far as the travel that will be required. Basically, I will be traveling to Dallas a bit more, maybe two days out of the week. Though I go up there quite a bit now, it is very ad hoc now. At least this way it will be on a more regular basis (hopefully). Any way, I made my first official trip under this new system on Monday. I went up Monday late afternoon for a couple of meetings on Tuesday, and I was going to come back home on Tuesday afternoon.
So I get a call from one of the sales guys on Friday saying the appointment we had setup had been canceled. Great. I already had a ticket. We needed to do something. No problem, says the sales guy. We have another client that wants to talk about SIEM. We can schedule a lunch appointment with him. OK, I will fly to Dallas for a lunch and a quick talk about SIEM. Oh well.
Then another sales guy calls who desperately needed an evaluation installation done. Should be really easy, but we want to hold the hand of the client a bit since it looks like it will be a big sale. OK, I’ll do lunch, then I’ll head out to the client site. I’ll move my flight if I need to. And I will get to sleep in a bit since I don;t have to be at the lunch until…well, lunch!
So I wake up around 7am (after going to bed after midnight since I couldn’t get to sleep after the Cowboys / Bills game). I start doing some work after getting cleaned up, and I get a call from the sales guy who I have the lunch appointment with. Looks like the client canceled lunch. Ooook. But they still want to have a con call about the project. So I get on the horn, and we have a good discussion. Of course, I am thinking the whole time that I could have done this from Houston.
So we finish up, and I call the client that needs the eval install so I can do a little discovery before I go onsite. And I wanted to find out if he was available a little earlier since my lunch had been canceled. So I start talking to the guy, and he goes deeper and deeper into what they need done and what they think the project is going to take. I start thinking, this is much bigger than the sales guy thought. So I get in touch with the vendor SE and do some discussion, and he agrees that these people need a lot more than an evaluation. And I am not the engineer that is going to be working this project because I was just covering for the Dallas engineer who is out of town on training. So it made no sense for me to go out and do the discovery and try to hand the info off second-hand. So that deal got nixed as well.
Sooooo, I flew to Dallas, rented a car, spent a night in a hotel, and all I did was talk to the clients on the phone. I flew home a LOT earlier than I planned. Oh well. Sometimes crap happens.
Vet
