The first of half of the day at Pentair consisted of mostly meetings. The first meeting was between Mrs. Rai and one of her project members down in Florida. The meeting was held in the arctic ocean.. Brr. This was a weekly meeting where the two would discuss weekly progress and problems. Mrs. Rai explained the more they talked, the more problems they would find, therefore she liked to keep the meetings short 🙂 In between the first and second meeting Mrs. Rai had me read the PCO or product change order. This was a lengthy document, which Mrs. Rai said would definitely put me to sleep, but said it was a document that every Pentair employee had read once, almost like a rite of passage . Thankfully, I didn’t dose of, but I really didn’t understand too much of the form. The form was basically explaining the process that an employee had to take in order to change a key aspect of a product. The process was long and thorough, nothing slips through the cracks at Pentair! After this lengthy read, we headed into the next meeting of the day, which was in the Indian Ocean! This meeting was similar to the last, in that both were weekly checkups. However, meeting number 2 consisted of a lot more people, the whole team, from Florida, Samford, and here. Mrs. Rai warned me that these meetings can sometimes get choppy with arguments and bickering, but thankfully this one stayed pretty clean. The team followed a similar schedule as the first meeting: checkups and problems. There were definitely more problems with this project than the last, which was unfortunate, but expected. After these two lengthy meetings and the reading, I was pretty tired and ready for some lunch.
After lunch, Mrs. Rai and I crossed the hallway to another cubicle of a lady who worked in finance. She helped Mrs. Rai with her budget request, making sure everything was in check, before Mrs. Rai sent in the corporate office in Minnesota. After that quick meeting, Ms. Eason showed up! It was great to see a familiar face! After that short meeting, phew lot of meetings today, it was time to resume my side project with the Geneva Mechanism. Today was step 3: running the simulation. It was frustrating but after many attempts, it finally worked! The project was a success and I was quite proud of the accomplishment, even though I couldn’t have done it without some help.
