Australia

Or Oz, as it's called. I spent a week in Melbourne in February to scope a project for work. Picked up a little 'strine while down there too, so now I can annoy all my friends with my Steve Erwin impressions. (Crikey!) There is a repair and overhaul site there that needs a new system installed so we can turn off a 40 year old mainframe that costs us big bucks every year. So, they sent me there to go figure it out. Oh, and by the way, it needs to be done by August. 2010.

Great.

Fortunately, it's a small-ish site (80 people) and they are all easy to work with. But this being my single biggest objective of the year, it looks like I'm going to have to live there for a few months to run the project. A senior VP that I know and trust "strongly suggested" that there be a full time project manager down there as he doesn't want that site to be the reason we have to re-new a large mainframe support contract in August. That same senior VP "strongly suggested" who that project manager be. It's great to be trusted, I guess, but that's a long time away from the family. In such predicaments I must forge ahead...

I know what you're thinking. Oh darn. 5 months in Australia. I get to miss AZ summer. Can you sense the disappointment? The utter sense of loss that I will miss one of my adult summers in the desert?

Exactly.

In all seriousness though, as much as I will miss my family, this is a good project and a great opportunity from a career perspective. And I will probably fly Amy and Jade down there for awhile to keep me company, so it won't be unbearable. I'll have a corporate apartment in the city too, so I'm already soliciting all my friends and family to come down and spend a week or two, rent free, while I'm down there

But back to the subject...Australia. First of all, right out of the airport, I noticed something significant about Oz. They drive on the wrong side of the road. Even the cars are set up to enable this, with the steering wheel on the passenger side of the car. Crazy, but it did allow me to experience something I never thought I would. Allow me to explain:

When I was a kid, I spent my early teen years riding in the front seat and absorbing the rules of the road. In essence, I learned to drive from the passenger seat. It seemed natural, the right place to experience the open road from. You can imagine my surprise and awkwardness when I got my drivers permit and had to get used to driving from the actual drivers seat. The seat belt was on the wrong side. The rear view mirror was opposite. The door was on my left, meaning I had to hang my LEFT arm out the window. It was all wrong.

But Australia solved all that. And even though I kept turning on my windshield wipers every time I went for the turn signal, I finally got to live out my childhood dream. I got to drive from the passenger seat.

Awesome.

The next thing I noticed was the utter lack of brand recognition I possessed while down there. I recognized nothing at the local strip mall. You know the usual array of signs...Best Buy, Subway, McDonalds, Kinkos, Starbucks, Target, Borders, etc. Down under, with the exception of the golden arches and an unusually high concentration of 7-11's and Safeway's, it was all new. I also realized I had no perception of brand quality. In other words, I couldn't tell if Lowe's Menswear and Casual Guy were more like Banana Republic or K-mart. This freedom was kind of nice, because I realized I could live anywhere in town and not be concerned that I was surrounded by sub-par box-chain stores. When I came back to Phoenix, I still had this sort of "pre-concieved-notion-free" view and as I drove home from the airport didn't have that subconscious perception that I was in a good or bad part of town. It was kind of liberating, but scary that I had those notions apparantly programmed in by US marketers.

Public transit is huge and effective down there. They have a version of light rail that goes EVERYWHERE. In fact, when I go back I probably won't use a rental car. Between the Metlink and the cheap single-speed I plan to purchase, I should be able to get just about anywhere. I may even have time to catch up on some reading while I sit on the tram.

And then there's Aussie-rules football. I went to a pre-season game on friday night and watched St. Kilda edge rival Collingwood 100-99. Aussie-rules is great. It's one part soccer, one part rugby, and one part basketball with a little American football thrown in. And the field is a giant oval, like 3 times the area of a standard American football field. It's less the organized fight that rugby is, with no offsides rules and the players spread out across the field, but faster than soccer and, in my opinion, more entertaining.

My trip back should be interesting, and I'm looking forward to it. It's not every day I get an opportunity like this, and the challenge is intriguing.

More to follow...