I miss sleep, or Working from 9 to five, pm to pm - Porto Seguro, Brazil

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Porto Seguro, Brazil

Once again, I'm working all night.  I'm supposed to be leaving Brazil on the 15th and there's a lot left to do.  Let me elaborate...there's a lot left to do that I told all the big bosses and managers that we would have done before I left.  I'm trying, I really am.  It's just so hard to get things done here.  Compared with working in the US, I can't just explain what I want done and then be able to leave so that when I come back, it's finished and is correct.  Nope, I've got to be here and be checking up on them or watching over the shoulder. 

Which means that each task is taking longer than I was originally told.  Sure, they could be finished with the rework and rebuild right now, but the equipment would fall apart within the year.  As an engineer, I would rather see this take longer to finish, than have to explain why the equipment failed again so quickly.  But the up-and-coming product/project manager; start-up;commissioning engineer in me doesn't want to have to go back to my superiors and say, no, I couldn't meet the last resort time schedule to get to stopping point "A".  Any excuses about cultural or language differences won't matter because it was my responsibility to get this job finished.

Well technically, I don't HAVE to leave on the 15th.  But I've already got another job that I need to be at in Oregon on the 18th.  And I told everyone from my direct manager to the VP of the North American group and the VP of the global product line that we could have tasks "A, B, C, etc" finished in time for me to leave.  So now I've got to push the people here to work as hard as I had wanted them to for the last few weeks.  This will be the third or fourth day this week that I've been awake for 24hrs.

I'll just have to chalk this up as another lesson learned at the School of Experience, Hard Knocks, and Tough Breaks...