Phoenix Day 3: Work & Grassroots

Monday, January 21, 2019

I am up and awake at 6:00 am, and I hit the shower straight away. As I’m standing in the shower, thinking of course, I come to the conclusion that I’m good & ready for this trip to be over now that the reality of work is on the table. But alas, I need to pay for the free weekend and here I am early Monday morning getting ready to head over to the office and start the workshop.

I head to breakfast solo with my book and read a bit while consuming terrible oatmeal. I know hotel breakfast is never great, but this is exceptionally bad. D joins me shortly after and we sit and talk for a bit before I have to go for the day. She’s going to be working from the hotel room for the next 2 days before she flies back on the redeye Tuesday night. I do not envy her that.

I meet Tommy in the lounge at 7:20 and we’re at the office by 7:30. After brief introductions we endure a corporate hour-long kickoff that isn’t especially useful to the overall agenda. Around 9:00 we get things going for real, and we dive into the meat of what we’re supposed to be doing here. Rather, what Professional Services is supposed to be doing here. We are merely here for reference & observation.

View from the conference room is pretty sweet

For the second workshop in a row, the client has provided us with no coffee and no snacks. I find this hard to believe, especially when these orgs are paying so much for these implementations. I guess at the end of the day you just never know. BYOC.

I’m soon bored out of my mind as this workshop thing has gotten old, and we’ve both moved on to larger elements of the structure of the product. I’ve enjoyed workshops before, but I think maybe these free-form sessions are not the best way to go about it. So I clean up my email, do my last expense report, and start writing documentation.

And I find free coffee. Yay!

A view from the kitchen where the free coffee has been located. Killer day out.

I tie up some more product documentation and Tommy & I split for lunch, heading across the street and going to Chipotle. I’m not the biggest fan of this place but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. You can get your load of food on top of a salad, which is something most Mexican places don’t do. Food is good enough, but conversation is always enjoyable between us. We’re both at a bit of a loss at how aimless the workshop is going. On the way back we stop at a small coffee place for espresso. It’s ok, not great.

Chipotle overachieves at lunch today.

In the afternoon I do more documentation and tie up other questions the Dev team has. We break at 4:00 pm, and we’re back in the hotel by 4:15. I let D pick dinner and she ends up picking a place across the street from where we had the workshop, Grassroots Kitchen & Tap. Place is excellent.

We typically like to order a bunch of little things which is what we did again tonight. Soup, salad, salmon spread, pork appetizer, and a baked potato. All in all it was an excellent meal and the total was $53 after tax & tip. One thing I notice about Phoenix is that it’s pretty inexpensive here.

Rocking the food at Grassroots.

After dinner we decide to take a ride to Taliesin West, which is where Frank Lloyd Wright did something or other. You can read about it in the Wikipedia link but the takeaway is that we drove there, it was dark and hard to see anything at all, then we left. Maybe if we come back to Phoenix we’ll take a tour of the place ,but we really didn’t have the time and forcing the issue was questionable as the entry cost was a tad steep.

In any event, it got us out of the hotel room for a bit and when we got back, we both crashed pretty hard. It was a tiring weekend and we were both exhausted. While the day was not amazing by any stretch, I’m happy to have D out here with me as opposed to the usual overly-structured loner routine I adopt on these trips.

Taliesin West. You Shall Not Pass.