Getting results

Surprisingly, one of the big challenges in China will be understanding English. Some people do not seem to speak using consonants, making their words sound very muffled. As if they were speaking to me with their mouth covered, a door between us, and through a mattress. I got through all of the technical information I had to cover after an hour and 15 minutes, but struggled to keep them on my agenda. They had several detailed questions that were only partially appropriate for this call. I simply didn't have the energy to keep them on the phone any longer to ask about Chinese New Year happenings. Plus, one of the people on the call was in the UK where it was half past one o'clock in the morning. (As an interesting side note, there were four time zones on the call: myself in US Central, the client in China, and two individuals from the software vendor, one in US Pacific, and the other in the UK). And I was missing a subtantial part of the game.

Since the call was so long, I only saw the last 5 minutes of the Northwestern/Penn State game where Penn State won the game. Northwestern was struggling--intentionally fouling to get the ball back so that they could try to win the game. (Penn State didn't look good either.) While I thought the experience would have brought back memories of game excitement at Notre Dame, the arena is much smaller and the energy level is much lower. I was hoping to write a little something about travelling to basketball games, but this game didn't provide much inspiration.