Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Moving to the conference room

Jack, our networking partner in Dallas, rode the elevator up to the offices and then walked down the hall to the conference room on the sixty-second floor. He strolled past the CEO’s office where his secretary was boxing up his personal belongings, and his successor was already moving in.

There was a soft knock on the door. hiili

Ten minutes later, the new CEO was stepping smartly in front of the crowd and snapping his fingers, urging his employees to move rapidly to the meeting room. The new boss was wired on the greatest intoxication known to man: success in business and life.

Our client threw open the double doors and entered the conference room, a considerable space occupied by forty  people.

“Ladies and Gentlemen!”

The room fell silent and all the eyes turned to him.

“You guys haven’t closed this deal yet. What is holding you up?”

The CEO was smiling. No need to get worried.

“We’re still having different opinions about the environmental impact.”

They all knew he wasn’t really mad, but his easy going attitude still bothered some of the participants.

“Do you think we can resolve it?”

“It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.”

“Winning the deal isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. Winners reap the rewards; loosers loose.”

The problem is with the contamination from the power plant. We’ve been struggling with the problem for years.

“The EPA will be all over that land if we don’t find a solution.”

We may have to tell the seller to call off that deal unless the environmental issues aren’t resolved.

HVK: Testing how to embed Google Maps to my short stories

Dallas is a city of 1,2 million residents. Now, only 39 percent white, while Highland Park, a town of  about nine thousand residents, remains 98 percent white, with not a single home owned by a black person. It’s and island of wealth. On a given day over a hundred homes in Highland Park will be listed for sale at prices exceeding $1 million.

DALLAS Town of Highland Park

While most downtown workers commuted to their homes in the distant suburbs via the Dallas North Tollway or the North Central Expressway, hopelessly stuck in bumper to bumper traffic for hours and suppressing the road rage that left a number of drivers dead each year on Dallas highways, Jack drove leisurely up Cedar Spring Road and Turtle Creek Boulevard and Lakeside Drive and then past Robert E. Lee Park, homeward bound over the same route important people of Dallas had traveled for a hundred years. 

Four o’clock. The end of another day of crisis, conflict, and confrontation. A problem solver’s life. If you don’t get up itching for fighting the evil, if you shy away from personal confrontation, if you’re not the competitive type, if you don’t possess the creativity required to beat the challenges you’re facing, then the job of technical problem solving isn’t for you.

Most important, you’ve to possess the right attitude. It’s a though job, requires a though person with the right knowledge, an individual, or a team who doesn’t quit, who can handle the pressure, who can take the hard hit and still get up and continue to work out a solution.

Someone mentioned the tobacco companies, They kept all that evidence about nicotine being addictive secret for forty years – because their lawyers hired the scientists who conducted the studies. So the studies were protected from subpoenas by the attorney-client privilege. No one knew that the evidence was out there, because their lawyers hid it behind the privilege.

Yeah, this could mean a lot of publicity for the firm – and not all the wrong kind.

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