F*ckwits

Yesterday I had to go into the city for a meeting with a prospective client. The client (hereby called L) insisted that they needed to have a meeting THIS WEEK, even though the Boss is out of town on vacation, and L specifically asked for me to be there since he couldn't. Fiiiiiine, I'll go, but totally under protest.

I toss and turn Wednesday night, wake up at 4 AM on Thursday, and can't get back into deep REM sleep. Fine. I get up at 6, do my hair & makeup (ugh), put on the clothes I spent half an hour deciding on the night before, and get Rugrat up to make sure he's ready to go in time. I fight the horrible traffic to WC, drop off Rugrat at daycare, park my car at Babydaddy's house, and walk to the BART station. In high heels. Because I am meeting a big client in the financial district in San Francisco.

I get there, an hour early (because I never go to the city and didn't know how long it was going to take on BART). Fine. I have a cup of coffee and a pastry, talk with Mr Wonderful on the phone for a while, and then head up for the meeting. I make it inside, up to the 36th floor, and I swear the office is practically deserted. It's 10 AM on a Thursday for crying out loud! Five or ten minutes later L, who coordinated the meeting & insisted on having it THIS WEEK, comes out and takes me to a tiny conference room, and says she's going to go try and find the other people who are supposed to be in the meeting. She comes back a few minutes later, alone, and says she can't find them, but she'll sit down and talk with me. As she's sitting there, going over what I already know about the project (which is that it essentially consists of migrating their Access DB to SQL and making some modifications to a few reports), the two guys come in. One of the guys is leaving the company and his last day is today (Friday) - he's the person who's been maintaining the database for all this time. And because he's leaving the company, L wanted to have the meeting THIS WEEK. OK, that makes sense...if the guy even really had anything to say to me about it, which he doesn't. He says, "She really just needs to get in and poke around and look at it" which is what I told them when we met two months ago. And the other guy says that he can set up Remote Desktop access for me, which is fabulous, and which we also talked about when we met two months ago. And they wanted to know when I could start on the project ("Could you start today? When you get back?" Um, no.), and I told them I'd have to check with the Boss, because I don't know what other projects/clients I might be committed to in the near future. And that was it. Meeting adjourned.

A ten minute meeting. A TEN MINUTE meeting!! Four hours round trip travel time to go to a TEN MINUTE meeting!!!!!!

Fucking fuckwits. I told the Boss that we need to bill them for all that travel time because THAT? Was completely fucking ridiculous. There was not a damn thing said in that meeting that couldn't have been said in email.

To add injury to insult, I got a big blister on my baby toe, and so I was limping a bit and I ended up pulling a muscle in my groin. Goddammit!