Georgia on my Mind...

Greetings all. It's 7:09 PM on Tuesday and I'm back in the hotel again. I left Daisy a taunting voicemail, about how cool this place is, but it's been a LONG damned day... probably the longest I've had since I started these road trips. The morning started at 4:30 AM when we got up. This hotel staff is the nicest I've ever met. There was a little old lady running the desk this morning when I went downstairs. Breakfast doesn't start until 6 and no one but me was apparently awake in this hotel yet. This little lady went and got the cook to start breakfast an hour early so we could eat before we went to the job site. She went in the back and brought me all kinds of pastries to hold us over before breakfast started... a very good start to the morning. We arrived on the job site shortly after 5 AM. We wanted to be there early because this is the worst network crawl job we've ever had to do. We knew that the interior structure was likely to be over 120 degrees by late morning, so we strapped on our head-lamps and went to work before dawn; pulling wire, boring holes in the roof, busting up concrete, etc. It was a long morning. My energy level was hanging OK for a while, until about noon. My legs were tore up from the job early in the morning and I got 3 hours sleep last night, due to Tim's abhorrent, horrible, terrible, excruciating snoring! (Claire, you darling deserve a friggin medal!) The staff at this location was the coolest I've ever worked on-site with. They went out and got us Lunch today and paid for it themselves, brought us doughnuts, they were just very cool people. Since we started at 5 AM and only broke for 15 minutes for lunch, we took off at 3:30 in the afternoon. That's a 10 hour excruciating day on no sleep, so we felt that we deserved a break. We went to Wal-Mart here in Moultrie and picked up swim-trunks and came back to hit the pool. By the time I called Daisy to leave her a message, I was sitting at the pool behind the hotel, under a palm tree, getting sun, enjoying the pool, and looking out over the lake directly behind the pool... it was the best moment of relaxation I've had in quite a time. We came back to the rooms around 5:30 or 6 I guess. Tim fell out almost immediately, snoring as usual, and I read a book. Dinner was a few minutes ago. We got pizza from somewhere or other.. I can't remember where, and now I'm free and done for the day. We're thinking about sitting back tonight and using my laptop to jack into the hotel TV and watch the Family Guy DVD's we brought. Ok.. you guys talk to me. This sucks. I hate being away from all of you. I'll be home Thursday night unless we get this new VC3 job they called about today. We got another offer for another store so we may be going to Gainesville while we're out here. We're already 600 miles from home so I'll take all the jobs I can get while I'm here to avoid making another trip. The more jobs I do while I'm here, the higher my profit margin is when I return. WORK QUESTION: I have a work related question to pose to you all at large. I'm trying to figure a new way to manage profit and loss for these jobs. I'd like to have a good "project" management platform that will handle billing labor, tracking employee time on site, Cost of Goods, differentiate travel expenses, and provide me with a profitability matrix. For example, I'm curious to know after this job if it was more efficient to bring 2 men with me and finish the job faster, or bring 1 man with me and take longer, but accrue less expenses. The common thought is that 3 men working per hour are better on-site than 2. For example, today we billed 3 guys at 10 hours each. That's 30 hours of work in one day. If it had been Tim and I alone, we would have most likely taken 2 full days for the work.. which would have been more labor time. (although I'm trying to keep it cost effficient for my clients as well.) The other side of that coin is the cost of housing and feeding 3 men as opposed to 2 men. Two men occupy one hotel room. 3 men take 2 rooms, exceeding the normal cost per man by 150%. Not to mention, feeding them, and supplying tools for 3 men on site instead of the normal two. It's just an idea I've been working with... but I'd really love to have the input of another project coordinator or project manager on this idea. What methods do they use to calculate P&L? What software? Etc. Ok. Enough work conversation from me. I miss you all. April, call me when you get this. Sassenach, call me in the morning between 9 and 10 if you can, or afterwards if you can't. We've missed our phone tag routine lately. The rest of you, post post post.... Love you all and I can't wait to be home with you. See you soon.