HQ

Last week I went to Great Bend for a 2 day Operations meeting. Basically all the management in KDOT get together to listen to speeches by other KDOT people and some salesmen. The topic were generally entertaining or educational. After the presentations, people got drunk. There was a "happy hour" sponsored by all the district engineers. Following that, we all moved to the hotel lounge where all our drinks were paid for by a very successful and generous asphalt salesman. I think I heard his tab ended up being $1400.

Starting today until Nov 3rd, I'll be working Road Design in headquarters in the capitol. I spent most of morning meeting various people in the squads. Saw a few of my former classmates, though one them was on their own rotation in construction. There's 10 squads with 3-7 people each; 2-3 engineers and 3-4 technicians. I saw 3 guys getting ready to play spades so I joined in as their 4th. We won on the last hand. I heard that some of the squads play Call of Duty at the operations meeting. I luckily got into one of those. I was originally in a different squad, but they changed it up on me when I arrived this morning. I've enjoyed my first day. Look forward to the rest of my rotation. Only bad thing I have to say is that I can't use firefox here. I'll have to look into trying opera tomorrow.

I am currently staying in a Comfort Inn, not my first choice. There's no microwave or mini-fridge in the rooms. There's wireless internet that was good enough to play FFXI for a while, but it died after 1.5 hours. The connection got worse over the night. My connections died one by one, first FFXI, then Google Talk, mIRC, and eventually basic web browsing. AIM was the only thing that survived. I checked this morning and mIRC was back, so hopefully it will last tonight.