The Christmas season means a few things. In the business world, it means parties. “Parties?” you say. “Parties are fun! Especially parties thrown to impress clients and competitors. Especially when you get to go for free because your company has paid for you.”

I’m going to a cocktail party at the Docklands tonight. It’s being run by the Property Council of Australia for young professionals. A few of us at the environment group are going, while others are going to a Christmas party hosted by one of the environmental lab companies.

There is a reason why my boss paid for my ticket. It’s unstated but the hope is that I will charm my way into the inner circle of property lawyers, architects, developers and construction managers, throw my business card around, and one day, when these people need an environmental assessment of a property done, they’ll think of Joan.

*ka-ching!*

Good thing I’m extroverted.

I hope the function is populated by interesting and intelligent people. A good cocktail would go down all right, too.

A woman at work here was asked to help me with a project. It’s a project that has been giving me grief. I sense a week or two coming up where I will be slaving away at a computer to get the report out.

She’s come up to help me and I wish I could use her help but at the moment, I have everything, everything, under control. So thanks, but no thanks, not right now. But I didn’t say that, you see. I said, “Mmm, that’s good. Here’s what the project’s about. I’ll need your help when the data comes in. I’m also going to Brisbane in a week so you can champion the project then.” (“Champion” is corporate-speak for “progress” (verb), which is corporate speak for “do”.)

And she’s still trying to be helpful and I honestly don’t know what to do with her. I answer her questions, make encouraging noises but inside I’m thinking, “Please don’t spend too much time on this project yet. I don’t know how the budget is going!”

Look! She’s come back from lunch and, hesitant, has asked, “Joan, are you okay if I work on this project too? I’m not going to take over or anything.”

“Oh!” Somewhat flummoxed. “No, of course you’re not going to take over. You’re being helpful. No, I’m just waiting for more information to come back then we can get stuck into it.”

“Okay,” (looking uncertain) “I just wanted to make sure you were okay with it.”

I felt bad because despite my efforts, I must have been giving out “You’re annoying, go away” vibes.

This has caught me a few times in the past too. Here I am, thinking that I’m doing a good job of hiding my feelings, yet they seem to leak out and affect other people. People can tell. Either I’m not very good at pretending or people just understand human nature.

Edit 1:46PM: I sent her an email explaining what I’ve written here. It made me feel better.

The big weekend has begun.

This evening, I went to a swing dance social. I managed to get six work colleagues to come with me. One of them, Laura, is an engineer on secondment in Melbourne from our Dubai office (and she’s originally from Scotland). Another, Katsuki, is an exchange engineer from Japan.

(Aside: There is a myriad of cultures in our office. David was telling me about one of the Dutch engineers. “The Dutch,” he said, “they’re always mixing English and their own language. Have you met Franz? A really great guy. I was talking to him about getting some plans revised and he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do this arse up.’ He did a double take and, with a stricken look on his face, he said, ‘I’m sorry! That was in Dutch!’ Apparently, he meant ‘ASAP’!”)

Tomorrow night, I’m going to the Amnesty International Stand Up For Your Rights Comedy Gala to support a good cause, a good friend or two and to have a good laugh.

On Sunday, I will spend ten hours at a high school theatre because my dance studio is having its annual concert. I’m in six items and have at least that many sets of costumes to bring (including an afro). I have volunteered to shepherd the performers into order as each item is to be performed because I have a loud voice and I’m not afraid to use it. Besides, the disorganisation of last year nearly drove me nuts.

My cold is still lingering. The evolution of a cold seems to be:

1. Itchy throat
2. Sore throat
3. Runny nose
4. Coughing

I’m at the coughing stage. My dad is probably about to enter stage 4 and my mum has just finished stage 2.

Imagine a large major hazard facility with lots of pipes. Now imagine you have to do a environmental and health risk assessment on the site. Think of all the ways chemicals can enter the environment — groundwater, air, soil, marine, freshwater. Think of all the different effects it can have on ecosystems, people’s health, irrigation, animal drinking water, industrial water use.

Okay. Now draw a picture of these pathways and impacts.

This is what I’ve been doing for the past week. I’ve been doing conceptual modelling of one of the biggest chemical processing plants in the southern hemisphere. These flowcharts have taken up maybe 20 A3 pieces of paper.

The logic and breadth of the task has hurt my brain but finally I have settled on seven exposure pathways.

Now I have to translate my pencil scribblings into something pretty for a report. I called the IT department to ask if the company had any flowcharting software. “Well, some people use Microsoft Visio,” they told me, “but we’ve run out of licences for it.”

Oh.

I hopped on the internet to look for open source or freeware flowcharting programs. If someone had programmed The Gimp (graphics editor), Inkscape (vector drawing program) and Freemind (mind mapping software) — all of which are installed on my computer at work — surely someone had put together something that lets me connect boxes together, right?

Well, no. I spent two hours looking for something, anything that would help me avoid the hell of creating diagrams in Microsoft Word. It turns out any satisfactory software out requires purchase (the trials create advertising watermarks on the flowcharts). There is the open source Dia for Windows, which I was excited to discover. However, the program resizes text in unpredictable ways. The errors in the latest version was far more trouble that it was worth.

In the end, I bashed my way through Microsoft Word. It’s not the most efficient way to create flowcharts but at least I know how it behaves.

Sigh.

The irony is that because I’m charged out to clients at almost $100 an hour, the two hours I spent looking for efficient software was $200 that could have been spent on buying a Visio licence or other software, which I could have used in future risk assessments.

Apologies for the dull post.

I’ve always been a computer multitasker. Back when we were running unstable comupters at home (ie. Windows 95), my computer nerd brother Jason used to get so frustrated with me because he’d see eight programs sitting on my taskbar. At work, when Miriam briefly sat at my computer to open a file, she was boggled by the fifteen programs I had open. I alt-tab and control-T in my sleep.

I’m like an insatiable energy gorging monster alien. Every time humanity thinks it has defeated me by inventing more and more powerful computer processors, I just expand into the gap and add more programs to the taskbar. MUAHAHAHA!

However, now I have truly outdone myself. I’m at work running twelve, count ’em, twelve computers in parallel. I’m modelling all the little air particles sitting above Tasmania. All the computers are connected to one monitor, one keyboard and one mouse. I use a fancy black box to switch between computers. It’s awesome. It’s more than I can handle. I find myself trying to alt-tab between computers. I can barely remember what each computer is doing. It doesn’t help that I’m blogging 🙂