Child's-eye view of project management

Every time I go to Wal-Mart, I hear the voices of my friends who play the role as my liberal conscience. I know that they make their own economic weather, that their workers at home and abroad receive low wages and depressed benefits. The aisles in the stores are too narrow and they have too few people staffing the registers. (Sam's Club is even worse.)

So, why do I go there? There are two:

1. Convenience. I can get what I need in one place at a time when I can do my shopping. Sunday I bought a circuit tester, peanut butter, and cough syrup. Wal-Mart even has a sense of humor. They had a display for Advil at the end of the toy aisle.
   
   Spag's was great in its day, but they weren't open on Sundays until quite late in their reign.
   
   
2. Anthropology. The people who shop and work there are fascinating. Just one brief story - A young couple was shopping with their toddler. The toddler was screaming as though his favorite toy was being carried away by wolves. The couple , meanwhile, was trying to decide which condoms to buy.

Another week crawling toward a deadline that keeps moving and morphing. Friday afternoon I learned that the sales manager for the account agreed that I didn't have to deliver my 12 books by 5PM that day, but I would have until Wednesday. Oh, but instead of 12 books, it's now 13.

Concluding a month of good fortune, I learned that my car needed some important (and expensive) repairs. The service manager called me in the afternoon to tell me that I need repairs on one thing for $260, replacement of another for $280, and yet another for $380. My tires need replacing before winter and my windshield wipers were gone. I thanked him while doing the mental calculations.

"There's more," he said. The electronics associated with the vehicle dynamics control needed replacement. "About $1100." They did some work and we postponed the rest until next week or the week after.

I like my car very much. It's fun to drive, on-road and kind-of-off. I also like the fact that it has a few dings and scrapes, that the back of the car has dog hair on the carpet and nose prints on the window. It has 135,000 miles on it now and has a good chance of going past 200K. Or, maybe not. These expenses could be the first stones that presage a landslide.

When I can, I am picking the routes that have the least amount of tree cover. Satellite radio requires a good view of the sky. The leaves on the trees can shield the signal. I bought the radio in November, when foliage wasn't an issue. On my trips to New York now, I'm more apt to chose I-84 instead of the Wilbur Cross/Merritt Parkway, because of the trees. One route from home to the camp has worse roads, but more sky.

There are times, however, when you want to park your car under a tree, in a garage, with a metal roof. Michael Bolton will be playing his favorites on the SIRIUS love channel this Thursday.

A bunch of years ago, the VP of engineering at our small company chastised me for using the phrase "tar baby" to describe a particularly bothersome project. He believed that it was a racist slur which, indeed, it has become. I was using it in the context of a child watching Song of the South on TV in the 50s. It was, to me, a white kid in an all-white rural community in central New England, a charming tale of wit defeating guile, in the same vein as Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd or Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote. The tar baby, in my view, was black because tar was black. Sure, there are legitimate reasons for criticizing the movie for being naively racist, but I don't think that such criticism applies to the goings-on in the briar patch. Nevertheless, "tar baby" probably deserves to be retired from our lexicon. For example, see what happens when our governor uses the phrase "tar baby" to describe the Big Dig.