Dispersal of the Primal Cloud Mass, 21st Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime. I'm not going to recap yesterday's lengthy post, other that to note that in 1984, I was chosen to go to Barbuda to perform a groundwater evaluation of the Caribbean island for a, well, "colorful" group of clients.

In that Orwellian year, I was barely four years out of college and had just finally completed my Masters thesis in hydrogeology two years earlier. For most of the time between graduation and getting shipped off to Barbuda, I had worked for the State of Georgia's Geologic Survey, an experience I found quite miserable. The Survey was my first real job in my chosen field but, having lived and gone to school in Boston before that, I had no prior experience with and no knowledge of Southeastern geology. But in response to an epic drought in 1980, the Georgia legislature had granted the Survey's Groundwater Division additional funding to hire some new staff. Calls were made and my thesis advisor, who had also once taught the head of the Groundwater Division, had recommended me. So I wound up at the downtown office of the Geologic Survey with no experience and no knowledge of Georgia hydrology, other than the academic basics of the science.

It turns out they didn't know what to do with me. There was no clearly defined job description for my position. Most of the other staff were experienced geologists and were continuing their post-graduate or doctoral studies in Georgia geology, and were investigating very specific aspects of the state's geology and groundwater resources. They immediately sniffed me out as an imposter, lacking, as I was, any knowledge of the state or of how to plan and conduct a proper geologic investigation. They didn't like me and I didn't fit in.

"You should just turn around and get on the plane back to Boston," one otherwise very charming woman there told me. Conversations sometimes stopped as soon as I entered a room and I was mocked for talking like a Yankee and having Yankee mannerisms. Once, when a bunch of us went out for some afterwork pizza and beer, someone pointed me out and said to the rest of the group, "Hey, everyone - look at how people from the North hold their slices!" (I had folded a particularly greasy and limp slice lengthwise to manage the drippage). I was an archetype to them, a Yankee who talked with a funny accent and had no idea of what he was doing. "You don't belong here."   

They were right, actually. But, hey, don't blame me - I didn't hire me. What the Survey should have done, in retrospect, was team me with an experienced geologist so that I could learn how investigations are performed and get up to speed on the regional geology. I would have gratefully accepted the mentorship and both I and the groundwater resources of the great State of Georgia would have benefitted. Instead, after I floundered trying to identify some new specific and unique problem to investigate, I was assigned various odd jobs with no real value. And the pay was poverty-level awful.

I'm surprised that I lasted three and a half years, but it was job experience and I didn't have an alternate career plan. But I did learn a lot on the job about Georgia geology and eventually answered an ad in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and got a new job with an engineering consulting company for a better-defined and better-paying job. 

The difference in mentorship was like day and night. Those engineers mentored the hell out of me. How to write a proposal. How to dress for the office. How to tie a knot. How to take field measurements. How to document findings. How to prepare invoices. They knew precisely what they wanted from me and how to get me there, and I, in turn, responded enthusiastically. I wound up working for them for twenty years.

Among the many things they impressed upon me was that a proposal had to be a precise document. When signed by a client, a proposal becomes a contract, and a contract has to stipulate exactly and without any ambiguity what services are to be performed and the quantities of deliverables to be provided, and the schedule and deadlines have to be clearly identified. There was no room for "gray area." If the contract is not clear, I was taught, a disappointed client can initiate a lawsuit claiming they expected something different, and it will be up to a judge, or worse, a jury, to decide what the contractor was supposed to provide.

So imagine my surprise when I was told there wasn't really a written proposal for the assignment in Barbuda. "It's kind of a reconnaissance," I was told. "Spend a week on the island and see what you can find. Write a report when you get back." As a contract, it couldn't have been more vague.  

My shock was compounded by the fact that the project was  managed not be some other newbie like myself, or even one of the usual office or project managers, but by one of the Presidents of the company. There were several Presidents in the company for the various corporate subdivisions, because everyone knows the title of Vice-President is so common in corporations as to be almost meaningless. 

I had sat through a Saturday seminar on how to write precise and defensible proposals, only to discover that a corporate President could tell a developer (a notably litigious class of client), "Yeah, we'll send someone to your remote Caribbean island to see what we can see."

To this day, I don't know why they picked me for the assignment. There were several employees with more seniority than I who would have liked an all-expense-paid trip to the Caribbean and had their hands up volunteering but were passed over for me. It's interesting than none of them seemed to resent me for getting picked. Unlike that otherwise-very-charming-woman at the Geological Survey, they understood that I wasn't the one who picked me for the project, and there was no reason to be angry at me for doing what they would have done had they been picked.    

I did some homework before I left only to find that, as I had suspected, that there wasn't a lot of literature on the groundwater resources of Barbuda. This was at least a decade before the internet, so I had to leaf through printed catalogs of the publications of the U.S. Geological Survey and visit the library and work the card catalog to ascertain that there was little to assist me. And by "little," I mean "nothing." All I found were some textbook discussions about the general principals of groundwater dynamics of islands and a lot of warnings about seawater intrusion.

I was told to meet the client, Charlie, at a small, non-commercial airport just outside of Atlanta on a Monday afternoon, and he'll get me to Antigua and arrange transport for me from there to Barbuda. No need to buy an airline ticket or book my own hotel. Charlie will take care of everything. But when I got to the airfield, I found that Charlie was already in Antigua. However, his Lear Jet and personal pilot were waiting there for me, along with about a half dozen or so members of his entourage.  

That entourage was an interesting group. Not only was there the pilot and copilot, but also an architect, an engineer, and a photographer and his model. As far as I could tell, there were no Aragon royalty. There were a few other people who only introduced themselves as "advisors" but whose role wasn't further explained to me; intuitively, I knew not to pry (I could read a room). They were all very nice and friendly people, generally youngish, and all very attractive, and as far as I could tell, I was the only one "on the clock," the only one working, except possibly for the pilots. It was single-row seating on the jet and it was a night flight, so we mostly all dozed on the four-hour trip, except, hopefully, for the pilots.

We got to the hotel, more of a resort, really, around midnight. The facility had luxurious rooms, a casino, restaurants, numerous swimming pools, and a private beach. It was lovely - I've vacationed at far lesser destinations. I was too wired after the flight to go straight to bed, so I went down to the casino and recognized Charlie at a blackjack table from some of the photographs I had seen. Before introducing myself, I watched him lose $4,000 on about six straight bad hands. 

He understandably wasn't it the best of moods after that, but I still felt obligated to introduce myself anyway and tell him I had arrived. "Oh, so you're Ralph's guy, huh?," he asked (Ralph was the corporate President representing my firm). I suppose I was, and Charlie gruffly told me to meet him at breakfast at 8:00 am and he'll get me to Barbuda tomorrow, and then went off to his room for the night.

Charlie. If you've read Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, the novel's Charlie Croaker isn't a bad approximation of our real-life Charlie. Forget the Netflix adaptation - it wasn't at all faithful to the book and Jeff Daniels' casting as Croaker was way off the mark. I like Daniels - he's a great actor but he looks like he could be a professional baseball player and the Charlie Croaker of the novel was a former Georgia Tech running back. Little in Daniel's appearance suggests "football player." But as I watched Charlie trundle off to his room, a blonde woman on his arm, I could imagine him as having once played football,

I didn't play the casino after he left - it was a high-rollers kind of joint and I was decidedly not a high roller. But at least now I had a plan, such as it was - meet Charlie at the restaurant for breakfast and find out how he was going to get me over to Barbuda. That was as much of a scope of work as I had so date for this nebulous project, but I still had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do once I arrived on the island.