I woke up yesterday having slept pretty well. It felt good to get a full night’s sleep after the long day of travel I had on Thursday. After getting up and ready, Dad and I walked to the bus stop to head into his office. Kris (my dad’s boss) wanted to talk to me about working for KUE Digital, which is the company I have been doing some contract work for.
When we got to the office, I tracked Kris down, and we set up a meeting for mid-afternoon to discuss some work they may have for me and the possibility of me coming to work full-time in Renton. For most of the morning, I worked on my personal website, making updates and generally getting some things done that I have been wanting to do for awhile. For lunch, my dad and I went to a deli across the street and got a couple sandwiches.
After lunch, there was a company-wide meeting that I was able to witness. And when I say company-wide, I mean they were including people on the phone in South Carolina as well as a two-way video link with their office in Colorado. Since it was an “all hands” meeting, they had it in the main room where all the programmers work. Coincidentally, this is also the same room in which I set up my computer to hang out. So everybody was in here, and they kept mentioning how things said in the meeting were confidential, so I just tried to keep my head down and not pay attention.
After the meeting, Kris came and got me, and we went to his office to talk about finding work for me. He told me that they were looking to hire a good web designer and wanted to know whether I was interested in a full-time position here or if I wanted to stay as a contractor. Glad to have an easy “out”, I quickly told him that I am not looking for another job right now, but that I am very interested in continuing to do contract work for the company. This seemed to go over pretty well, and Kris said that he would try to find some work for me by the end of the day or Monday at the latest.
When I came out, my dad told me that the receptionist for the company, Jennifer, was into salsa dancing and that he had told her I was a dancer as well. I talked to her a little bit about the scene in the area and told her that while I can salsa dance, I’m not really great at it, but if she knew where any good swing joints were, I’d be happy to go. She said she would look around for some places and get back to me.
At the end of the day, Kris stopped by the cubicle where I was hanging out to let me know that he should have some work for me on Monday if I was interested. I told him I’d be here (or that I would let him know otherwise), and my dad and I left to go out for drinks with a couple of his friends. That was when things started to get really interesting.
All of the people we met (originally, it was only one person, but we ran into two more at the pub) were current or former employees of KUE, the company my dad works for. One of them had just been fired over a scandal involving some internal documents (I won’t get into it here, because I don’t feel like being sued), and the general consensus at the table was that he was scapegoated. I did a lot of listening and got to hear some true horror stories about the company and the way it functions, and it certainly made me feel a lot better about turning down their job offer.
Another topic that seemed to come up was how one of the guys at the table was a rather successful “ladies’ man”, and it turns out, that was no misnomer. As my dad and I left to head toward the bus station, the guy walked up to a girl who had been sitting alone (and who had glanced his direction more than once), and in the span of about 10 seconds, was sitting with her and chatting away. Everybody loves a success story… guys like my dad and I just have to watch guys like RJ work, because we have never and will never possess that kind of confidence.
When we got back to my dad’s apartment, we sat around and hung out, watching TV. We watched some entertaining videos that we had on our respective electronic devices (his iPod and my laptop), and just had a generally good time.