Plumage

Yesterday I finished my current project at work that I've been working on for the past two weeks. On Monday a new project(s) will start. Or they would start if there were any to start. Yep, when I go into work on Monday I will have no billable customer work to perform. There is one customer I am still awaiting an e-mail from with about 60 hours worth of work that is coming but I do not know when I will hear from them. It could be Monday it could be Tuesday it could be a month from now. So with no real customer to charge the company has a few options. They can tell me to take a vacation, or a leave without pay for a few weeks. I have a little over 4 weeks of vacation time saved up so this can get me out of any real pickle for about a month. They could just lay me off. Since they have no work for me to do, laying me off is always an option. Or they could put me on overhead and allow me to charge to our company's savings. This year I was told to limit my overhead charging to 2% of my time which covers things like special meetings we are required to be at, or required training like an ethical standards in the workplace review. So putting me on overhead for a few weeks or months is no small issue.

Fortunately, as we all know, I am sensational and work will be putting me on overhead. I will be charging our 'awaiting coverage' task line. Work doesn't want to lay me off because we will be getting an $8 million contract which should get turned on in a few months. They need me to work this contract and laying me off would probably be more costly than putting me on overhead.

So now they need to find something to keep me occupied during this down time. The best thing in these cases is to invest that overhead money in me in the form of more education. Currently they want me to learn up on electronic warfare. That's pretty interesting. Here's an ex-graduate theologian studying electronic warfare. Oh well. So no worries yet, I suppose. I still have a job and they are wanting to invest even more into me. The only concern I have is that I am only the first of about 10 to 11 of us who will be in the same situation. Several more will be joining me at the end of the week and nearly all of us likely before the end of the month. That's a lot of overhead money being spent.

Speaking of electronic warfare I heard about a neat technology the other day. When a rocket is launced in the air, there's always all the smoke that comes out of it. Well apparently those rocket exhaust plumes are fairly unique to the rocket. It should be no surprise to you that we have satellites everywhere watching locations of interest 24-7. The technology is that when one of those rockets is launced that satellites can watch the plume and we can figure out what sort of rocket was launced. So if Iran were to launch one of it's missles we could simply look at the huge plume of smoke that comes out from it, even though the missle itself may be too small to see, and say "Hey, Iran just launced one of it's mid-range missles". I had no idea we could do this, but the phenomenology of rocket exhaust plumes is already a large area of research. There's a company slogan for you "We do what you think to be magic."