Traveling out of state to a client site is always an adventure for a consultant. Some say you have reached a new plateau in your career and or skill level when clients from far and wide are asking to bring you in for a project. If they are offering a decent billing rate, this is true. More often than not they are looking to find someone with absolutely no knowledge of how expensive it is to live in their area so they can get that person at well below the local rate. I routinely get calls from agencies wanting me to work in Orange County California for $40.00/hr. What most of the people they rope in don’t know is that $40.00/hr is just enough money to get by out there if you sleep in your car five nights per week. Not my cup of tea, nor anyone else’s for that matter, which explains the routine nature of the calls.

When you are young, traveling out of state for a two to four month project is exciting. You are getting paid to see another part of the country and your skills are finally being recognized. Some consultants look garner repeat business with the client every couple of years. It gives them a chance to see friends they made and get yet another rate increase. Those consultants tend to be the older consultants. The young consultants usually end up getting really drunk one night near the end of the project and are looking to avoid seeing certain individuals ever again. You don’t have to ask how things went, just watch for them to quickly change their email address when they get back home.

In the case of this story I was an old consultant, not that I’ve gotten any younger since going there. I have even been asked back more times than I went back.
This story takes place during the drizzly days of fall at this particular client site. One of the employees I worked with was on a “swing” type schedule. The joke was he arrived at work about the time I stumbled out of a bar in the morning. It was nothing for him to arrive at 4:30 in the morning. Sometimes he even got in earlier. This particular morning he had overslept and got in shortly before I did that morning.

I pulled into the parking lot and saw all of the landscapers working around the trees in the parking lot. They were piling compost and other materials around the base of the trees in the drizzle. I made a mental note that no matter how stressful my job was and how forlorn I could feel between contracts, that I was glad I went to college instead of going into landscaping.

This was a multi-company office building. My client occupied roughly one third of one floor with other companies scattered about the building. The entry way was your typical marble tile with a carpeted hallway running back past the first floor bathrooms to the mailbox and vending machines.

I bring up the floor because when I walked in I noticed a heel sized puddle of some brown substance just inside the door, and a compost type smell in the air. At first I wrote off the smell as part of what was going on outside, then I saw the second heel mark about two feet in front of the first. Then another one about three feet farther out. I made my way to the elevators trying to ignore it only to see a trail of much larger heel marks going down the carpeted hallway. Carpet that had just been put down the week before.

Everybody has a slightly twisted side. It is the side of you that looks at the expiration date on a carton of milk, sees that it is way past good, and still has to open it up and smell to be sure. I gave into my twisted side and walked to the mens room carefully avoiding the ever larger piles with a heel mark in the middle of them. When I pushed the door partway open, there was all of the evidence one could ever need. It was everywhere. At first I thought he must have fell down and it squished out in all directions. Then I thought I was glad I didn’t get a drive up window breakfast from where ever he ate.

When I got into the office I noticed the early arrival programmer was sitting in his cube frantically keying away. Since this was normally a sign something fell over I asked what was up. He said nothing, that he had just gotten in after oversleeping. Unpacking my briefcase I casually asked if he noticed anything in the hallway downstairs. He thought for a second and responded that he thought one of the landscapers must have tracked something in with them. I sat down, logged in, and said it wasn’t compost.

He continued typing frantically for a while, then stopped, popped his head over the cube wall and said “What?” I responded “That wasn’t compost”. He sat back down and saying “No Way.” After he started typing I responded with “Don’t believe me, see if I care. It wasn’t compost.” The typing from his cube didn’t last 10 minutes. Admittedly I baited the hook pretty hard. I could have just told him outright, but I hadn’t finished my breakfast Mt. Dew yet.
When the employee came back up, shaking his head in disbelief, I said “and you thought you had it rough oversleeping. How about having your morning start out like that?”

No, you haven’t been short changed, our story doesn’t end there. I just need to take a small detour.
Building management provided their own maintenance people for this building. One of the cleaning staff was a woman who’s name I never knew. She didn’t speak a lot of English, but she was a treasure. Close to six feet tall, of Hispanic descent, and a habit of wearing blue jeans that looked like they were sprayed on. A guy couldn’t help thinking that those jeans should thank her for buying them each and every day of their existence. She had a look in her eye which said “I can be your every fantasy, or end your life now, the choice is mine.” She was always talking on her cell phone it seemed. Even when you couldn’t understand what she was saying, you could tell from her tone that she could just as easily command 50 guys on a loading dock and have them all actually working at the same time, even when there weren’t any trucks.

Hopefully the picture I paint of her won’t sound too sexist, it is the only way I can describe her. Some women just wear streetwise beauty, she was the living embodiment of it.

There was something of a culture at this client that the most disposable person at the time in IT went to get lunch for the others. During my first two months I would be working nearly 7 days per week, so the other guys would always fetch my lunch for me. During the last couple of months of my contract with them I was in support mode, therefore, the most disposable, so I would go.

A little after 11 I had gathered up the orders for that days drive up choice and headed downstairs. I noticed that all of the tiles had been cleaned. I couldn’t help but look down the carpeted hallway. There, on his hands and knees scrubbing, was this white haired old man. Standing not one foot behind him was the maintenance lady. Hands on her hips and glaring down at him. I couldn’t wait to get back upstairs.

Once I had handed out lunch I told what I saw. Everybody who knew the story was in dumbed silence. Then came the question on everyone’s mind. “Who could come back to the office after your morning started like THAT! Even if you did come back, who would ever admit it?”
Would you?