After I left the power plant and went to work for Dell on August 20, 2001, I wrote letters back to my friends at the plant letting them know how things were going. This is the seventy second letter I wrote.
4/11/03 – Cards At Dell
Dear Soonerites,
I can’t believe another week has gone by already. Before I know it we’ll be having our “Team-Builder” down in San Antonio at “Fiesta Texas”. Our whole team is looking forward to the break. A chance to get away from all the hustle and bustle of corporate life.
A day when we don’t have to worry about responding to e-mail. We don’t have to sit in our cubicles and program neat stuff. We don’t have to go to meetings and sit there looking at the overhead projector while someone explains why they wrote their program one way, when we would have written it another way. — Oh well. Just think of all that fun stuff we will be missing when we have to go spend the day at a boring ol’ amusement park.
Our group has been doing a little “reorganizing” this week. Randy Mott, the CIO (Chief Information Officer), decided that it would be a nice thing if our area changed Vice Presidents. So our group moved over under another vice president.
None of the managers knew it was going to happen until we all received an e-mail announcing to the world that GFACES (That’s our group’s name now), is moving to another Vice President. We will still remain GFACES (which stands for Global Financial And Customer Experience Systems), however, we will not be part of “Corporate IT” anymore (Remember IT stands for Information Technology). We will be “Financial IT”. I suppose that’s ok.
I think we should have another team-builder just to get used to the fact that we are a different kind of “IT” than we were before. Otherwise, some of us might go on feeling like we are still Corporate, when we should be feeling like we are Financial. That might leave some of us feeling rather Financially deficit, and Corporately unfulfilled at the same time. — A good team-builder might just take care of that little problem.
Note that the team-builder we’re having next Thursday was not specifically designed to alleviate the Corporate to Financial Changeover challenges. It was designed to further enhance our Team-member to Team-member communication skills in a way that will increase productivity and develop us into focused verbal and nonverbal communicating powerhouses!!!! It would be hard to fit in a team-building event in this team-builder that would help with the “Transitional impact” of swapping from a Corporate to a Financial IT environment.
Anyway (or Well, as the case may be), my manager told me today that he wanted me to get a Corporate Credit Card. He said that I never know when I may have to go travel somewhere, and if I do, I have to charge everything on the Corporate Credit Card or I won’t be reimbursed for it.
So when I was filling out the form for the Card, there was a place on the form to indicate whether you are a “domestic” traveler, or an “international” traveler. So I asked my manager which one I should put down. He told me that I should put down “international traveler” because I may need to go to India some time in the future.
“India? Why would I need to go to India?” I inquired. He said, “Well, you did such a good job working with the Data Warehouse guys last summer and fall that we thought you would be just the kind of guy to send to India. (not that we have made any plans, because we haven’t — yet)”.
“Me? What does working with the Data Warehouse have to do with going to India?”, I inquired further. Then my manager said, “Well. What are some of the names of the people you worked with when you were working with the Data Warehouse?”
So I answered, “Do you mean, Venkat, Murthy, Srinivasa, Kotamraju, Devika, Radha, Nanda, Liming, Ravi and his other brother Ravi, and Jichuan, Venu, Sohan, Ragini and Azeem? Or are you talking about when I was working with Sev, Subba, Linh, Galen, Nagavalli, Thuy, Hemanth, Radhakumari, Sandeep, Arnoud and Xu?”
He said, “Yep. My point exactly.” — I guess I missed something there. Maybe it will become clear to me later. As for now; I faxed in the form and should have my card within 7 to 10 business days.
I hope all is going well with you guys. I know overhaul must keep you very busy. Let me know how things are going. I’ll try to write next week — Just to let you know how things are going.
Talk to you later.
Your Austinian Friend from Round Rock,
Kevin James Anthony Breazile
______________________
Kevin J. Breazile
Programmer/Analyst III
Dell Computer Corporation
(512) 728-1527
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