I decided to take my first "Summer Friday" today. Every other Friday from the one right before Memorial Weekend to Labor Day, we get to take a half day. I haven't been able to take one all summer, so I just blew off the afternoon today (sort of--I'll get to that later), and left at noon. Managed to make it home by 2 pm, which is pretty good considering the off-peak train schedule that runs only a couple of locals per hour.

Had the scheduled phone call with my CEO at 10:30 this morning; he called me in the office. This morning, Canada #2 called me to schedule a conference call this afternoon at 3 pm between me, her, her boss (Canada #1), and our CEO. In fact, my call this morning with my own boss, our CEO, was all about the subject of this afternoon's call. CEO-man had heard all about this Canadian client crisis from Canada numbers 1 and 2, but wanted my perspective on the issues. This project has taken on a serious case of "scope creep" and the sales folks are panicking about it. I filled in CEO-man about a lot of the backstory of which he was completely unaware.

Anyway, I have approximately five minutes before I have to call into the toll-free number that Canada #2 thoughtfully provided. The fact that I have speakerphone at home on my land lines and full office connectivity straight to my office computer's hard drive from home makes blowing off this afternoon, but not completely blowing it off, quite easy to do. Nobody else on the conference call need know I'm not physically in the office, because none of them are in the NY office, either. We're calling in from NJ, Toronto, Chicago, and Des Plaines. If there's a dead giveaway that I'm not in the office, it'll be the sound of a prop plane coming in for a landing at Morristown Regional Airport, but that doesn't happen very often.