Explicit Explicitly Open Living

Deloitte Systems Analyst (SA) Training Week

Colorado was a lot of fun and a lot of work. We spent at least 10 hours a day working on our projects and learning. Then following that was another 5 hours + of hospitality. Hospitality just means that there is open bar all night long. Then when that shuts down, the partners open up their suites until everything has completely died down.

I spent this past week in Colorado Springs being trained by Deloitte to be a fantastic SA.  
I arrived in Colorado late Saturday evening without my luggage.  I checked into my room and headed immediately to get some food then hang out at the hotel bar for the rest of the night.  I was pleasantly surprised to walk into my room at the end of the night to find my bag sitting next to my bed.
Sunday consisted of an initial orientation to the program with many introductions.  We broke up into our assigned teams exchanging pleasantries.  Sunday, was a short day of introductions followed by some free time before the usual nightly activities.  I managed to get a run in during the free time.  Then the night ended with what would become a familiar occurrence – “hospitality.”  What this means is that there is an open bar all night long with the usual snacks as well.
Monday was our first day of real work.  It was my first taste of what the week would be like.  We met back into our groups at 8 AM.  We ran through several team building exercises and were introduced to our project for the week.  We had to make a recommendation for how a cellular phone company should deploy a new billing and customer service system through their corporation for several million customers.  Work on the project ran until 6 PM without any letup in the diligence or working on a solution.  It was a long day, followed by hospitality until I needed some sleep around midnight.
Tuesday, was more focused than Monday.  8 AM to 8PM working hard on the project at hand.  It was a very tiring day.  But, Wednesday was a day for a little relation (at least from the project).  Wednesday, we had one interview for the project and then spent some six hours doing community service.  Then after the community service, we had Karaoke night which turned out to be a lot of fun.  I sang at three songs thought the night with various other backups.
I signed up to help put rock and such around houses for my community service project.  This was pretty tiresome work, because we had to move quite a lot of gravel around these six houses.  Then is started to rain pretty hard which made me retreat back to the bus for a nap since I had been getting very little sleep the previous nights.  After what would have constituted a flash flood at home, the rain turned to hail.  The hail wasn’t very big, but it was still hail.  Finally, it let up and we went back out to continue working.  Luckily now everything was complete mud.  The reason we were doing this was to make the areas around the house so they wouldn’t be muddy.  This made working very hard, because trying to get wheelbarrows of gravel around houses where the wheel sunk 6 – 10 inches in the mud was not easy.  Then on top of all that, some people living in these houses came home on motorcycle.  There was another one sitting in the garage along with a car.  The guy didn’t say a word to any of us, nor did he come out to help.  We were picking the weeds around his house, covering it with plastic, then gravel, the lining it with large rocks for decoration.  I have always felt that community service should be helping the people in real need.  People that will appreciate what we are doing for them.  People that can’t do their own yard work, or can’t afford for have some of the nice things I have in this world.  Even though, I worked hard.  I was happy be outside doing some work similar to that of my farm boy days.
Thursday consisted of another long working day under a lot of pressure.  The presentation with our recommendation was due at 8 PM.  So we took the twelve hours we had to finish up the project.  Once the presentation was submitted, we took some time to decide how we would present on Friday.  We conclude we all should present because we are all there to learn.  Thursday night’s activities had a very weak showing.  This is because everyone wanted to prepare for the presentation at 7 AM on Friday, and the sleep depravation was getting to everybody.  I still stayed up till 1 AM when there was almost nobody left hanging out and then went to bed.
Friday morning at 7 AM presentations started.  I go to the room at 6:20 to prepare my part.  Each group in my room presented until 9:30 where we met in the main room and two teams presented their presentations which were considered the best.  One presentation that a group did was quite amazing – the PowerPoint itself.  Although, one of the presenters made some CLMs (Career Limiting Moves) in my opinion.  Comments like, “Please hold your questions until the end, because we will be having a question and answer session.  We are generally just a few steps in front of you” to the dean of the program (a partner).  Wow, I was really about to get up there and hit him.  This guy made some other comments stepping way over the line of respect for authority.  If he said any of the things he said to a real client, the whole deal would be off.  I was totally appalled.
But after the horrendous performance of the group, we were allowed some time for lunch, but then we were to be in rooms until 6 again doing more work.  This time testing.  Nobody wants to do testing, let along sit through a boring presentation on how to do testing.  Finally, the day was over and it was skit night.  Skit night was so much fun.  Teams were made by combing two teams and then grouping each of us into groups of four.  We were then given 15 minutes to come up with a skit.  My team first thought of doing a reality dating type skit, but then we switched our direction to just do “partners best pickup lines.”  This turned out to be pretty funny in our own room.  Another group did a fraternity hazing where the fraternity was a secret Deloitte frat.  That was also very good.  But ours won overall and we went on to compete again the winners from the other rooms in the main meeting room.  Our skit didn’t go over so well here, partly because it was a bigger audience and because another group did a top 10 as well and they went before us.  Oh well, it was a lot of fun anyways.  All of us SAs hung out for a while longer after the performances and awards then headed to the dean’s suit to hang out for the rest of the night.  Almost everybody stayed out packing the suit to capacity.  It was a very entertaining night overall with most everybody staying out late.
Saturday consisted of an early morning with more testing.  Nobody was motivated to do any more testing.  We only had a few more hours to be there and we already have our sort of completion celebration the night before.  So the time dragged by until it was finally time to have closing remarks.  We all said our goodbyes, and grabbed some lunch.  I then took the time after lunch and before my flight to go to the gym and get a quick workout in.  As soon as I got back from my workout the buses were about to leave.  If I was 2 minutes later coming back from the workout the busses would have left me at the resort.  Luckily everything worked out and the overall SA Training week was a great experience.