No, That's Not a 10 Minute Call

I just came across this old screenshot of a 10-hour conference call from 2012, when I worked at Wyndham Hotel Group in corporate IT. (Wyndham owns about two dozen brands like Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson, etc.)

Every website deployment was a major endeavor requiring a separate deployment for each brand throughout the night, followed by a quick "smoke test" by QA before moving on to the next brand.

This painful process took many hours. In this case, we began the conference call at 10 PM on a Sunday night and we were on the phone for ten hours straight.

Would you ever believe that AT&T could keep a call connected, without dropping, for ten hours?

Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse Tour

This afternoon, I took a one-mile walking tour of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse that’s mostly run by robots, here in San Diego. This facility spans 3,330,000² feet, employs 4,500 people, and operates 23/7 in three shifts with one hour of daily downtime.

I highly recommend taking one of these tours which are free and open to the public in nearly 20 states: Amazon Tours.

The most fascinating part was watching the robots disappear into the darkness as they moved shelves of Amazon products since they don’t need light to see where they’re going.

Sorry, no photos allowed.