Lunch With Axiom/ImageCare Coworkers: The Hatred Runs Deep

Ben was out of town today, off to Texas for some art show where he was exhibiting. A really slow day again – I did a few small errands, checked code, bits of this and that.

The coolest thing was that I got to talk to Rey after lunch. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me talk about lunch first:

Ed wrote me an e-mail, and he and Cary were getting together for lunch. I worked with both of them at Axiom, and we all went through a similar "traumatic" experience, what with the company slowly sinking into the ground. Both Ed and Cary were definitive of the employees at Axiom/ImageCare: cool, smart, incredibly funny, and an amazing work ethic. Both of them good guys who deserved better than they got.

So I meet up with Ed at 12:30, and we walk an incredibly long distance to meet up with Cary. I forget the name of the restaurant – some diner on Jackson and Canal I think. We settle down, chichat, and get our food. I order a breakfast deal, and it’s WAY more food than I expect. And since we sat outside, there was a busboy tray close to us – and a bunch of pigeons kept attacking all the leftover food, throughout our meal.

So – after getting sedated with that massive meal, stumble back to work and find Rey waiting for me in our office. I try to shake off lunch, and we talk shop in his office. We settle on an hourly rate, and I just gush and say my peace. I have a bad habit of this, but I’m remarkably direct when I need to be.

I tell Rey that I’m not all that concerned about the contract time, or about the next month. I’ll help out at whatever rate we come to an agreement on. I tell him that I’m more interested in a permanent position, after September. While we chat, I try to impress on him that I’m capable of thinking like a business/marketing person – asking where revenue will come from, questions about target audience, value, etc etc. Up until today, I felt that Rey viewed me as "Justin’s friend who did Flash." I tried to excite him about potential ways we could use technology, and also to discuss roadblocks and challenges when using technology (incentive, payoff, upgrading etc). I felt our conversation went well, and that I was able to prove that I could see beyond the technology and the "eye candy," and also provide insight into why/how technology was being used, and to what end.

Rey and I ended up trading a lot of links, and we kept this "Hey – check this site out" thing going on for a while. What I expected to be a brief, 10 minute contract rate discussion turned into something bigger. While he was unable to tell me where the company would be in a month, he tried his best to assure me that they’d keep me in mind. Can’t ask for more than that, at least for right now. Rey and I both had a good talk, and kept getting the other one excited about possible projects. I took that to be a good sign.