2004-01-11 - 9:48 a.m.

Playing With Rainfall

No, I've not been dancing and singing in the rain. Instead I spent the past week studying Delta rainfall and evaporation patterns. It was nice to spend a week just looking at data. I now feel like I have a better understanding of things.

I also went out to the field one day. I'm a levee patrol volunteer, which means in the event of a nasty storm, I could be asked to work a 12-hour shift driving around in a pickup on the top of a levee that is about to break. It is slightly dangerous.

When I was out in the field, all of the other volunteers where there. The funny thing is that instead of only focusing on the field location (I'm already very comfortable with this location, as I've been out there on my own and it is pretty close to my folks' house), I was watching and listening to the questions and level of interest the other volunteers took. Frankly, in a dangerous situation, I?m going to have to be responsible for their lives as well as my own. And the reverse is true as well.

A team is built on the fact that both people can trust the other. And the volunteers are all good people, with one exception. There is one guy who was asking dumb-assed questions. Constantly. He works in my group, and although he is a nice guy, he is a big boob. An idiot really.

At first people thought it was the language barrier, but get this, he left for Burma for a month, and there was no drop in productivity for the group. For a few guys whom he bugs, they actually took time off, and their productivity didn't change, because without this other guy around, they got their normal work done just the same. The guy does literally nothing, and in a time of state crisis should really be reassigned to something he can handle. What that is, I have no idea.

I think I'm going to ask that I not be on a team with him, because frankly in an emergency he will probably get himself killed. I hate to think that an engineer can do that and this sounds negative, but the truth is that when you strip away my sense of adventure and my childlike play values, I'm probably too much the little general. Great to have around in a crisis, but also very wary of some people.

-=-

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