My Greek Olympics: Living and Working

Aegina trip:

With our small group in Athens, we decide to go one of the nearby islands for the day, Aegina. So we met at the annex for coffee on a Saturday then take the train to the port and we buy round trip ticket on the next boat to which ever island we can get to. It coast 18 Euros, it is one of the high speed hydrofoils not the slow old ferries. The boats are fast and it only takes 30 minutes and we are there. First thing is food, we eat at a place on the harbor which had a nice view and the food was ok. By this time it is getting warm, but we decide to walk around a bit and see the island. Vic leads us out of town around the harbor and we walk into the surrounding hills, it is hot and dry. We eventually call this the Baton Death March of Vic, we all complain of the heat as we are just walking around a Pistachio grove.

We eventually decide to head back down to the water, we are all complaining about the heat, except Vic since he liked it. We find a small bar and drinks are the order of the day. After we cool off, we walk back to the town and find a place to eat again, Aigina is famous for Octopus and squid, so that's what we have, and more drinks of course. The harbor is nice with many small boats. This is where the boats have the produce that is from the mainland and it is displayed in a colorful way. Many colorful fruits and vegetables, plus nuts and fish, each boat is different. We take the next boat back and soon find ourselves on the train back to the Metropol.

Meeting with the Committee:

Jay, Vic, David, Vegelis the interpreter and I went to a meeting with the committee at DAOA. This was the new facility that was built by the organizing committee and the Police would get it after the Olympics. Since it was being built by the Organizing Committee, it was on schedule. This was my first meeting with the committee and seeing what was happening and how things work, Vegelis would translate for Jay and I would lean in to listen. It wasn't as important for me to hear, but I wanted to know what was going on. It was a back and forth that didn't seem to accomplish much.

After about an hour of this, Vic and I left to go to Siemens. There was an endless line of meetings we had to go to. We still were dealing with getting all the systems up and get a place to work so we could show the government what they were getting. We had an ETeam running on a laptop so the others in the office could look at it and get an idea of how that system works, no one did.

Rotating Project Managers:

Even though Jay was the brains behind the project, she was not the project manager. At first, during the bid and proposal phase, we had a Greek guy named Cosanettis. He went by "Coz" and was an American/Greek. This is important since most Greeks hate American Greeks (they feel they are not Greek). Coz was an idiot and he did lots of back-door stuff. He made really bad dirty jokes in Greek that the Greeks thought was stupid. After the first month in Greece, we had Coz removed and brought in Paul Williams then he was replaced by Paul Shifler who was the ports project program manager.

Shifler was working on the ports part of the project and he seemed to be an OK guy at first. I didn't know him, but David said he was better than Coz or Paul Williams. So Shifler took over and the power went to his head. Instead of listening to us as to what was going on, he fell in line with the corporate shits and caused the project to get off on a rocky start. It never recovered and the mentality was that they would fight with the customer the whole way.