MyGreek Olympics: Problems continue and eating.

Plate of meat:

Another restaurant that we would go to once in a while was in the Plakia Palaias Agora. This was just around the corner from the Metropol and it was livelier than the Metropol Square, though it was a bit on the touristy side. There are a few good restaurants around the square and some shops selling different things. We went once and ate at a place that had what was called a mixed grill plate which we called the 'plate of meat'. 

It was way cheep, something like 15 Euro and it was enough to feed 4 people. Basically it was two each of chicken breasts, sausages, hamburgers, steaks, lamb chops, plus potatoes and onions. It was a massive pile of meat that taxed all who tried to eat it. I ordered it once and that was enough for me. Rob ordered it once and finished it all off, then complained that it wasn't that great.

The restaurant was kind of hip inside and the out door seating was in the square. Other places also had seating in the square so you had to know which seats belonged to which place. This restaurant had a disco inside and it would fill up with people on most nights. The other restaurants had similar food, but no the plate of meat or entertainment.

Dinner at Tryphon's and the rabbit:

David and I were invited to Tryphon's for dinner one night. We took the train to the port and Tryphon picked us up. We drove out of Piraeus and worked our way to his house. We each had a bottle of wine and Tryphon was so happy to have us coming to dinner. The route was through the shipping area and lots of ships were in different states of repair or construction, plus the shipping containers being loaded and off loaded. Tryphon's wife was happy to see us and we went in and had a few drinks.

Elena could speak very good English and we chatted for a while. She worked for the Commodore at the MMM and was well connected. She was almost as important as Tryphon, but he wouldn't admit it. We were having a big spread of food, lots of traditional food from Crete.

One main dish was stewed rabbit. It was made with tomatoes and olives, very good. Then we had salads and greens, plus some lamb. David talked on and on about how great everything was, I liked it as well. We had a good time and Tryphon was all smiles. After dinner we had a few more drinks and talked, but Tryphon wanted to go out so he said we had to go.

On the way back to town, we stopped at a Russian place and had a beer. It was pretty seedy and I really didn't want to stay there. David didn't seem to care. We left and drove back to town, Tryphon wanted to play and I think he was expecting to stay out all night. I wanted to sleep and wasn't into the all night party that Tryphon liked to do. He dropped us off and we walked to Mie Tie for one drink. It was fun and the food was good, but I just couldn't deal with Tryphon's urge to stay out all night.

CATS Install:

In addition to all the other stuff, I was going to install the CATS software at the regional command posts. I had to deal with Fene's bullshit and interference. He talked the Vampire and Jesus into have an "engineer" to do the install. They asked Elvis to do it, he wasn't happy and asked me why he had to do it, I said it was Fene's bullshit and I couldn't do anything to stop it. So I turned everything over to them to install, and they lost the stuff they needed to install everything, oh well.

I know for a fact that the only installs of CATS were the ones I did. No one used the software during the Olympics and as far as the Greeks were concerned, it never would be used because of the contract dispute. The C4I system was just collecting dust for the entire time it was there, half the time the system was shut off because of power and cooling issues. No one trained in the use of CATS knew anything about modeling or how to use it and when.

Data meeting with Siemens, Epsilon and SAIC:

I was having trouble with the quality of data from Siemens relating to the placement of the CCTV cameras. I was to get the plotted locations of the cameras and a list of their locations, but the locations were mostly wrong. I was trying to work this out, but I had Jesus and the Vampire, slack-jaw Kost and a few other shits get involved. I had been looking at the data and saw that some of the cameras that I would see in the street on the way to work were in the wrong place.

The Marousi area of Eastern Athens.

So Jesus came into my office one day and we talked about the CCTV issues. He said they were going to have a telecom with a SAIC division that had a system that we may use to deal with the position problem. He said I had to sit in on the call, so when the time came, I went out in the bull pen and the shits were all there. Kost and a couple other stupid's, the Vampire and Jesus rounded out the group. My perspective was that Siemens needed to give us better data and it wasn’t our responsibility to fix it.

So they called and they talked to some people in Virginia, I didn't know who they were at first. They introduced everyone and then the meat heads started to talk. This was the GeoRover group, I had seen the system and we even considered it at the start of the program, but I axed the idea since the system wasn't of use to us. GeoRover is basically a bunch of ESRI tools and capabilities that have been tied up into a ‘user friendly’ system and called it GeoRover. What it is for is collecting data as you move, like a GPS does, and showing it in the ESRI software.

This is a basic capability in the ESRI GIS software, but they just made it look like something new. So the call went on, the rover people said all these wonderful things about their system and it could do everything we needed. The problem was that we didn't need anything the system could do unless we were going to start from scratch and digitize everything ourselves. Since the sub-contractors were supposed to give us the data, we had no need for GeoRover. But the call went on and I had to sit there and listen to the crap that was spewing from the phone.

When it was over I pointed out the specifics of the problem, the locations we were given were not accurate, and that we didn't have the time or resources to deal with the problem in the way they were suggesting. Siemens was supposed to give us the data and they failed to deliver, it wasn't our responsibility to do it for them. Jesus and the Vampire decided to have me do a meeting with Siemens and work things out, I had the un-pleasure of having to preside over the meeting.

The meeting was at the Marousi office and I had Siemens, Epsilon, Wackenhut, the CCTV guys and the SAIC shits all in one room. I tried to keep it nice but some of the shit-heads said stupid things, it was like herding cats. In the first two minutes one SAIC guy accused Siemens of trying to steal data from one of the other subs, I was dismayed. I had prepared by going to a few of the CCTV location and collecting the GPS data with a hand-held GPS then I plotted it on the map and displayed it with the Epsilon data.

The locations matched up nice to Epsilon GIS data, but the Siemens data was really bad. I was able to show that the Epsilon data was a good match and that the data comparison to the Siemens locations was the problem. This shut everyone up and I was able to get Siemens to agree on correcting the location by working with Epsilon. Problem was basically resolved and I had made the Epsilon data look good and proved that Siemens didn't do their job. Kost slept through most of the meeting, which I was glad, but he did manage to get one of his ‘that dog don’t hunt’ remarks in.

In the end it didn’t even matter, the CCTV cameras were up and the government put restrictions on there use. Then they began to be damaged and stolen so the government lifted the restrictions. In reality, the cops used the cameras to look at girls walking down the street or try to look in people window, it was like second grade children playing with a toy.

Baby sitting:

One day I went to the annex and found Jay, Ari and Semos talking to some people. They introduced me and I really didn't think much of it. As I sat, Jay asked if I wouldn't mind taking their son out for an evening. I was kind of put off, but Jay said they wanted to entertain them so I said OK. I was going out with Rick, Roula and Silvia so I said to meet us at the annex at 10 pm. The parents were a little scared, but I told them it was very safe and the place was a traditional music club, kind of like country music. I said I would bring him back to their hotel and I wouldn't keep them out all night.

We met at the appointed time and we walk down the street to the clubs, it was only about a 5 minute walk. We went to a place Roula knew of and we got a table in the back. It was already getting crowded, but the table wasn't bad. The kid was about 17 and seemed interested at first. We ordered a round of drinks and the kid got a beer. I told him that he could have a beer, but not to go wild. He sucked that beer down in a minute, just like most American kids would. The thing is that the beers cost about 5 dollars each.

We sat and listened to the music and talked, the kid got bored and went walking around. He went to the bar and got another beer, then tried to talk to a few girls, got shot down every time. I watched him as he sucked down the second beer and then went for a third. I knew this would be a short night, we were there for only 20 minutes and he was on his fourth beer. I could tell he was getting buzzed already. We finished our drinks and I said we would have to take care of getting the kid back to the hotel.

Silvia had her car near so when the kid came back, I said that we would have to go because the girls were tired from working all day. We got to Silvia's car and drove the kid to the hotel and dropped him off. He seemed bummed, but he was already too buzzed to stay out any longer. We went to another place for a few drinks and called it a night. The next day I told Jay that we had to dump the kid because he was drinking too much, I wasn't going to be responsible for him. I didn't hear anything from Jay or Ari about the night so I guess the parents didn't know the kid had too much to drink. I wasn't going to do that again so I let Jay and Ari know that I wasn't too thrilled with that particular assignment.

Visiting Ari:

I was so fed up with the shit that was going on and stupidity of the corporate meat heads. Jay wanted to know what was going on in the meetings, so I would stop at the annex after work and have a drink, then on the way back stop at Ari's office and give him a memory stick with info or tell him. He was a contracted consultant and officially a part of our team, so I wasn't going against any company policy. This became a way to pass info to Jay and keep them up to date as to what is going on. Mostly it was daily or weekly status reports or info on some software they are developing, which was against the contract requirements.

Hanging at the MMM:

The harbor near the MMM.

Since I had to go to all the command centers, I had a few places that I would like to go to, but others were a pain. The MMM or Ministry of Mercantile Marine was where the Coast Guard had their command center. I would take the train to the port and walk the mile or so to the facility. I would call Tryphon and tell him I was close and he would come down and wait for me, it made it easy to get in and go through the security. Once in we would go up to the center and go over the never ending list of things they wanted, plus see what was going on with the system installs. Most of the time Tryphon would want to take off and go for drinks or lunch. I tried to keep the work going but it was hard sometimes. While at the center I would meet the Commodore and the other ministers, plus all the people passing through to see what we were doing. I would have to tell Tryphon that I had to go to another center so I could leave, if I didn't he would want me to stay, have dinner and of course that would mean going to one of the Russian clubs, very dangerous.

Utah jobs program:

We had so many FIFO’s coming and going it was a joke. People who had no idea of what to do or why they were there would come in and just have a paid vacation. We called it the Utah Jobs Program, there were to come for the exercises but since the exercises would be pushed they arrived and were told to go visit an island. The people in Utah at the Salt Lake games also didn’t do much, this was worse since they got a plane ticket as well as a check. Fly In and Fuck Off was right.

IET3 practice:

During the run up to the IET, we had to practice the demonstrations. It was decided that a Greek had to speak and Stavroula was chosen to be the speaker, she hated the idea. The exercise guys came and they worked up this big elaborate scenario and a script to go along with it. Stavroula would have to narrate the events and show the displays. It was decided that a rehearsal would be done and they picked a Saturday morning at the Fire Brigade Command Center.

Of course Stavroula hated it even more, since she was not paid to be there on a Saturday and she had plans. Reluctantly she came and was given the script which she hadn't seen and didn't understand parts of it. She would have to translate it into Greek as she spoke. She asked me about it and I told her to do the best she could. The shit-heads there kept giving her shit about the performance, I told her not to worry.

It started off bad and got worse, she complained the scenario wasn't workable and the wording was wrong. After a few run through and changes the training guys started to bitch that she was not working hard and was to nit-picky. I told them she was there on her own time and it wasn't fare since she never saw anything and had to do the translation on the fly. They shut up and she worked through it. It was decided that the scenario should be re-worked and we left a few hours later. Stavroula said she wouldn't do it again and would ask the company to transfer her to a different job.