2003-03-19 10:36![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplinei wonder some days if my boss is bipolar in addition to ADD - yesterday was hot & cold running brainwaves. . .
First it was manic panic - I notice that our address database is about 800 records short after a hotsync with his Palm Pilot. Having recently exported the database to refresh another machine, I'm not altogether freaked by this. The boss, however, flips out because there are no backups. Well, gee, it wasn't installed on your data drive (you know, because it's an _application_), and you've got this data archived in four places - your machine, my machine, your palm, and on your home box.
He eventually saw reason when he went home to mail the un-fucked archive to the office at my request, which did two things - one, it got him out of my hair so i could import the not-very-old and uncorrupted data from the other guy's machine into the database, and two, let him cool off. he has a penchant for getting very worked up when he smells data loss, and the guy who did his network admin before me was a consultant and would only come in for a couple of hours once a month, so he was able to be percieved as more of a "pc specialist" - a distinction that i think gets lost because i spend so little of my time actually doing what i'm good at, and so much of it doing skillful mannequin work. [yes, that's derogatory and contemptuous of my secretarial duties - believe me, i can appreciate the knowledge & skill required to effectively manage upwards and keep an office organized. however, that's not my bag, and i'm very much looking forward to the day we hire a dedicated secretary/office manager, because i'm not cut out for it - being passive/aggressive is not the way to inflict one's will on ingrained entropy.]
counterbalancing that, slightly, was the end of the day. the boss' other overmastering interest is the financials. or, more particularly, money coming into and going out of the company as a result of our projects. fortunately, as a result of the immensely complex clusterfuck surrounding our last multi-phase, multi-consultant project, I had a spreadsheet put together from the get-go on this one, with breakouts by person, by phase, with handly little notations like "hourly rate billed to client" and "hourly rate billed in-house" because i know he's going to try and figure out a) where the money is going to go, and b) how to fairly distribute it to the underpaid peons (me).
the angst about my billable hourly rate for "real work" (as opposed to my typing up reports and whatnot - my intellectual "heavy lifting" contributions) was arbitrarily set at $20, which, and i quote, "Isn't really fair, but it's a lot more fair than nothing." negotiations are presumably taking place in his head to determine my share of the net profits (i'd naturally lobby for 1/6th - 5 primary contributors (including me) and a full share for the company). we'll see how that goes.
but he liked the spreadsheet. "oooooh, pretty color-coding. . . "
First it was manic panic - I notice that our address database is about 800 records short after a hotsync with his Palm Pilot. Having recently exported the database to refresh another machine, I'm not altogether freaked by this. The boss, however, flips out because there are no backups. Well, gee, it wasn't installed on your data drive (you know, because it's an _application_), and you've got this data archived in four places - your machine, my machine, your palm, and on your home box.
He eventually saw reason when he went home to mail the un-fucked archive to the office at my request, which did two things - one, it got him out of my hair so i could import the not-very-old and uncorrupted data from the other guy's machine into the database, and two, let him cool off. he has a penchant for getting very worked up when he smells data loss, and the guy who did his network admin before me was a consultant and would only come in for a couple of hours once a month, so he was able to be percieved as more of a "pc specialist" - a distinction that i think gets lost because i spend so little of my time actually doing what i'm good at, and so much of it doing skillful mannequin work. [yes, that's derogatory and contemptuous of my secretarial duties - believe me, i can appreciate the knowledge & skill required to effectively manage upwards and keep an office organized. however, that's not my bag, and i'm very much looking forward to the day we hire a dedicated secretary/office manager, because i'm not cut out for it - being passive/aggressive is not the way to inflict one's will on ingrained entropy.]
counterbalancing that, slightly, was the end of the day. the boss' other overmastering interest is the financials. or, more particularly, money coming into and going out of the company as a result of our projects. fortunately, as a result of the immensely complex clusterfuck surrounding our last multi-phase, multi-consultant project, I had a spreadsheet put together from the get-go on this one, with breakouts by person, by phase, with handly little notations like "hourly rate billed to client" and "hourly rate billed in-house" because i know he's going to try and figure out a) where the money is going to go, and b) how to fairly distribute it to the underpaid peons (me).
the angst about my billable hourly rate for "real work" (as opposed to my typing up reports and whatnot - my intellectual "heavy lifting" contributions) was arbitrarily set at $20, which, and i quote, "Isn't really fair, but it's a lot more fair than nothing." negotiations are presumably taking place in his head to determine my share of the net profits (i'd naturally lobby for 1/6th - 5 primary contributors (including me) and a full share for the company). we'll see how that goes.
but he liked the spreadsheet. "oooooh, pretty color-coding. . . "
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At least they're letting you do things that aren't completely OfficeMonkey. It does help keep sanity.