Finally in New York

It's odd that I've only been to New York once, but arriving felt like coming home. I have found that I really enjoy the east coast, and I am very optimistic about getting into business school out here.

We flew with Buddy Passes on Jet Blue. The interesting thing about Jet Blue is the only flight to New York from my area is a red eye. I've done a few red eye flights, and boy do they leave you worn out. Because we were flying stand by, initially my wife and I didn't get to sit together, but the flight attendant talked another passenger into switching me places so I could sit by her. It was a good move because she isn't a big fan of flying in the first place, and it really helps her if I'm near to lend support.

We showed up at the Holiday Inn Express at 6 am in the morning to see about an early check in. I expected them to tell us we could leave our bags but that we needed to come back at 2 or 3 pm. Instead of turning the weary travelers away, they told us they would check us in as soon as a room was clean, but that the cleaning staff didn't come in until 7 am. So we crashed on the couch in the lobby and waited for them to get us into a room. Finally by about 8:30 am, we got into our room and headed straight for sleepyville.

Around 3 pm we got up and headed into Manhattan for dinner. We ate at Sardis which is just off of times square. It was a great meal, but at the cost something we won't be repeating frequently. It wasn't quite as expensive as our dinner at Blues in Philly though.

The plan is to hang out in New York until sunday, and then head up to Boston to check out primarily Harvard, and secondarily Babson. I don't plan to apply to Babson at this point, but since they are so consistently rated highly in entrepreneurship, I want to check it out.

After Harvard we are going to visit Tuck, then we are headed down to Philadelphia for a couple of days. It will be nice to see Wharton while classes are going. It was very impressive to see it during the summer, but I don't think you can really get a feel for a place without anything going on.

Watching a co-worker self destruct

About six months ago we were looking for someone to handle the DBA role at our company. They would also be reponsible for doing night time deployments to our live site. Because of the industry we are in, it is very critical that we get our deployments out precisely when they are scheduled. Any kind of screw up in this process can have dire consequences for our company, so we took a long time looking through the applicants. As usual we didn't have a shortage of applicants, just a shortage of qualified ones. We had devised a rather rigorous test to give to people, and my boss was comparing all of the applicant scores to my score and to another co-worker's score. Both of us scored extremely high, and we were having difficulty finding someone that scored even half as well as we did on that test. If someone scored reasonably well on the test we would bring them in for an interview. Interviewing with my company is sort of a juggernaut, each person usually gets interviewed by five different groups of people. If you are lucky you then get to come back for three more interviews. We had been doing this process for several months when we finally found the guy we were going to hire. He scored reasonably well on the test, so we brought him in.

He was the type of guy who marches to his own drum. Very unique, but he was pretty sharp. I had some concerns about hiring him, and discussed them with my boss, but ultimately we hired him anyway. Over the next few months he got into the job, and largely my concerns were born out. I won't belabor the details. He was on probation for previous screw ups, when friday morning my boss comes in and says to me, "You know how wednesday you mentioned we should start a pool for when X will get himself fired? I want to bet $100 on today"

My boss then explained to me how this employee who was supposed to work a night shift, went and got completely smashed before coming to work. So instead of doing the nightly deployments, that are critical, he never came into work. He never called anyone or said anything. My boss called him friday morning and asked about a different problem, and while he was on the phone with him he noticed none of the deployments were done. So when X came into the office, he was fired on the spot.

It surprises me that anyone would take this type of self destructive behavior to that level. This was by far the best job the guy had ever had, he was making more money than ever before and he had a really lax schedule. To see someone throw that all away for one night of drunkeness is a terrible waste in my opinion.

Finalizing trip plans

It's hard to believe I will be heading back east again for a week of visiting schools. I'm heading out on the 24th of this month, and I'll be coming back on the 2nd of October. I'm a little nervous about flying stand-by on Jet Blue, but it's hard to beat $250 round trip for two. We have been looking for places to stay, we are looking to do this trip on the cheap, but hopefully not stay in an area that will get us killed. ;) If you have any recommendations for decent cheap accomodations in Boston, New York (Manhatten), or Philadelphia please let me know.

I probably won't be blogging too much between now and the deadlines, but I'll see if I can squeeze in a few more posts than I have this last little while.

Thinking about Essays

As I have been struggling to pour the essence of myself into 500 and 1000 word increments I have struggled with finding the right words. Yesterday I was listening to an interview with an author on NPR. They were discussing the impact that certain words made on the overall feeling of the story, and he quoted Mark Twain, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug,". It's a herculean effort to get the right words down, words that properly convey the tone and meaning that you intend in a clear and concise way. In the end it's worth all of the effort though, because if you nail the essays you maximize your chances of getting in.