When we got to the airport, I had to go to several officers to get various papers stamped. First I went to the airport manager's office, then to some guards, then to the Tai Airline office to confirm my bag had arrived, then to the custom's officer who had the key to the room where my bag was locked up. When I met with the Thai airlines official, he told me my bag arrived Monday night. Go figure. After getting all of the appropriate paperwork stamped, I made it to the customs desk. The Customs official would not be in for another 30 minutes.

Government officials have very cushy jobs. Nandini said it is often harder to lose a government job than it is to get one and very few people actually work on the job. They often arrive at 11:00 and leave at 4:30. When they are at work, they either just sit in a chair or read a book. Since it is basically illegal to fire anyone in India, there is no incentive to work. In order to fire someone, the employer has to fill out stacks of paper work and go through about a year long process to complete the firing. Promotions are not an incentive either, since they are not given on the basis of work, rather the connections people make. If you work hard, then your only reward is to do all of the work of the people who don't work. As far as I can tell, if you are a good worker, you are stupid for taking a government job. I asked Nandini if the pay was good and she said it was okay, but there were other ways to make a lot more money. When R.S. and Anjan were telling me about the bribes, the most bizarre thing to me was that the bribes were usually around 2 rupees. That is less than one penny! Some things just don't make sense, but all of the pieces were starting to come together.

After 30 minutes of waiting, I went back to the customs desk. The official was there and told me to wait while he got the key. Five minutes later, he went over to speak to a guard. The two men called me over and we went through a door into a room filled with bags and then to a back closet. When the guard unlocked the door, he escorted me in. The room contained probably 30 bags spread across the floor. The Customs boss told me to pick out my bag. Of course, it wasn't there. The man asked me what color it was and I said maroon. He then proceeded to check the tags on all of the black bags. When he was through, he asked again "are you sure your bag is not here?" I said no and he escorted me out the door and through the other room with all of the bags and out that door. He told me to wait while he sorted this out.

Twenty minutes had passed when a man I had not seen before came out of the closet and told me to come with him. He escorted me into the first room with all of the bags. When I entered the room, it was filled with about 17 people all screaming at each other and picking through the bags. I had not seen them enter the room and I can not tell you why there were so many people. The room could hold maybe 30 people at most and there were only about 40 bags. As soon as I got in the room, my escort screamed something in Bengali (Indians are always yelling at each other. Once I was waiting for R.S. to join a meeting. He was looking at somebody's computer when an argument broke out. Two more people came over to surround the computer. Within seconds, four people were screaming at each other. Then as soon as it started, it finished and R.S. joined me for the meeting. I asked him what that was all about. He said he was looking at a prototype. "Did you like it?" I asked. "Yes, it was very good." Again, some things I just don't understand.). The people moved aside and I went into the closet in which I first looked for my bag. This time, 3 men accompanied me.

When I looked around, there was nothing different from when I first came into the room, but the man asked if I saw my bag now. I walked around pretending that I might actually see my bag. As soon as I started looking, the 3 men also started looking. I told them I didn't see it, but they kept looking. Again they asked what color it was. I said maroon. Now they not only were checking the luggage tags, but started picking up every bag to see if my bag was underneath the one they were holding. After five minutes, they escorted me to the room with the other bags. The 17 people who were looking for the bags before were now gone except for the Customs official.

He asked if I found my bag. When I said no, he said they were going to have to look through all of the bags in the room I was standing in, but I had to go outside and wait. As I was walking out the door, I saw my luggage wheels sticking out from underneath the pile of bags. I leaned over to try and pull mine out, but as I did, people started shouting. I said I found my bag and within milliseconds, 5 people came out of nowhere and started uncovering my bag. They were like ants fighting over a crumb. They were scrambling and throwing all of the other luggage out of the way until one man was standing with my bag. Everybody started shouting again and then they were cheering. The Custom's official quickly stamped my paperwork and led me out of the airport.

I spent the rest of the afternoon meeting more people from TCTI. During Wednesday's meetings, it became clear that everybody was really eager to learn more about DigitalThink. Of course nobody asked a lot of questions, but the questions they did ask made me realize I need to address the specific work we do a lot more closely. At our opening meeting, Anjan told everybody DigitalThink's URL. Within minutes after the meeting, the entire company was looking at our site. During my meetings on Wednesday, people asked questions about the DigitalThink sampler course. It was quite apparent that this did not excite them. So, over the course of the day, I realized I had to demo some of our more current work. Fortunately, I had several courses on my laptop. Well, word spread quickly and everybody wanted to see the demos.

Because of this excitement, my afternoon was meant to be a show and tell. TCTI was going to demo their work and I would demo DigitalThink's. The first group I met with was the Special Projects Team. This is a group of 4 programmers who build the test engine and development tools. They had built some impressive tools. I wasn't so much impressed with the technology as I was with the thought behind the project. I then showed a demo of our courses and gave them my Anatomy of a Course presentation. We were supposed to meet for an hour, but we spent 2 ½ hours talking instead. This group is comprised of the "advanced" programmers and is TCTI's leading problem solvers.

After meeting with the Special Project's Team, we drove back to DA196 to meet with the Graphics and Programming teams. I spent about an hour with each group listening to them tell me about a day in their life. They walked me through with great enthusiasm and detail their process. I asked several questions about how they made decisions, where they had room for flexibility and why they enjoyed their work. I didn't get a feel for each individual, but did get a feel for the groups as a whole.

After I got a show and tell from the two departments, we went upstairs to the programmer's floor for my demonstration of DigitalThink's courses. I explained our course anatomy, our process, DigitalThink's philosophy, our view of learning objects and structured content, then demonstrated our courses. I explained the type of work that we would have them do and how we envisioned it working. The Indian culture is one in which they show very little enthusiasm or feedback to presenters, but I actually saw on their faces a sense of relief, excitement and awe. I would like to think it was my presentation style that caused this response, but I think they were more interested in what was on the computer screen rather than me. In any case, I think the fear and anxiety that was pervasive throughout on Tuesday was beginning to be replaced with excitement. In general, they suffer from the same feelings that we do when it comes to change. People are people whether in India or California.

After the demo presentation, I went onto the roof deck with R.S.. We just hung out in the humid night talking about Indian life. He told me several stories about Hindu mythology. Forty-five minutes later, we came back inside to find Ovick, Anjan and Kakoli to go to diner.