Oddball Update

Well, long time no see, eh? I have really abandoned this site lately. After attempting (and failing) to create a-post-a-day in July, August fell completely apart, almost as some kind of subconscious retaliation for the work I put myself through the month before. Whatever. It’s the first of September now, so I figured it was as good a time as any to actually put some kind of fresh content up here.

In two weeks from today, my wife and I go on our trip to Thailand. It should certainly be fun! The final two weeks leading up to our departure, however, are going to be anything but fun. Here I was, being a good little soldier and planning this entire trip out far in advance. Months ago, I requested (and received approval for) the 13 business days I needed to take off from work, constituting basically the entire second half of September. Things were looking good.

Then, last week, disaster struck. The guy at the office who I had intended to shift the critical parts of my workload to (I had even prearranged this with him casually back when I requested the time off) decided to quit! That’s right, so now I’m fucked—again. There is nobody, literally NOBODY else in this office who has any prior experience with the tasks I needed to delegate, and nobody who I feel even remotely confident will be able to complete this work without turning it into a holy-shit, drama-queen catastrophe prime time event on ABC.

I learned that this employee was jetting out of here last Thursday or Friday, so on Monday this week, I sat down and spent five hours writing a 20-page document detailing every possible nuance of one of the jobs I need to offload during my absence. It’s one of those stupid ad page setups, where we waste uncountable amounts of time and go through neverending piddly details to accomplish something which, basically, doesn’t matter one drip in the grand scheme of Planet Earth. There are so many possible ways for the procedure to become fucked up by the client, the account manager or the designer, it took 20 pages of a very technical-oriented white paper for me to basically say “Copy listings from Excel to InDesign, build PDF, save.”

And that’s just one of the tasks which will need to be completed during my absense. The other just hit me like a ton of bricks this morning, as I grapped with completing it. At the end of each month—usually in the last three days—a couple of our most high-maintenance clients, who coincidentally have the most complicated and high-maintenance websites, flood our email boxes with a buttload of stuff to do. Each month we routinely change the featured resorts, special getaways, sweepstakes, surveys, and other random hoo-ha on two of these prominent travel sites. As I mentioned, we usually get about three days’ notice, as it isn’t till then that either client deigns to actually send us the data we need to execute the changes. Then it’s a hair-raising rush to the finish line for the last couple days of the month, inevitably ending with the client bitching “WHERE ARE THOSE CHANGES?!” to the account manager while I, meanwhile, take care of absolutely all of it myself, because nobody else at my office either 1) has the skill or 2) wants to bother.

I can’t even begin to imagine who’s going to do these client site changes while I’m away. It involves using Visual InterDev to interface with the STAGE server, make direct changes to ASP source code, then manually deploy the files to the BATCH01 deployment server. I can barely explain what that means to a layperson without talking their ear off for an hour. How am I ever going to clue somebody in to this whole process? The employee who’s quitting used to do this work, and he transitioned it to me a couple months ago. It was relatively easy for me to understand the procedures because I am already of a technical mindset and seem to have an ability that few people around here have: the ability to learn things by experimentation. Me, when I encounter something I don’t understand in the computer world, I try things until I get it right. Most people I run into will try the one thing they’ve been told to do, and if it doesn’t work, they just sit down and drool, and wait for somebody to come and make it all better.

Add to that the fact that everybody at my office is overworked. It’s not just me—everybody on staff appears to be struggling with more work than they can handle, at least that’s the only explanation I have for why it takes them days to do anything and why I seem to be doing half of their work for them. I seem to have been an Account Manager Assistant Whipping Boy because the only thing my job entails anymore is cleaning up after the account managers, doing work that they used to be expected to do, even doing simple stupid stuff like uploading magazine cover images to websites that couldn’t possibly get any easier. Why am I doing this crap? I haven’t been involved in an honest-to-god product development or marketing function in almost this entire year. What concerns me most about this is that while my job is more tedius, time-consuming and generally more thankless than ever before, the kind of work I’m doing—in the corporate world—should probably pay less than the work I was hired to do. That’s something real nice to think about!

Honestly, I can’t blame the guy who’s quitting for leaving this place. I’m pissed at the crapper it’s thrown me into, but if I were him, I’d have done the same thing. I mentioned he transitioned these tasks to me a few months ago? The reason is because he was moved from his Senjor Project Manager position—a job he had risen to just a few months prior after working here for more years than I—to a lowly support guy in the newfound Directory Advertising division of our company. Much like I, he was downgraded from a product development engineering position to one of simple servitude. Nowadays he just sets up sites and fixes peoples’ mistakes, which—surprise—sounds a lot like my job description anymore.

He’s going to work for a local home building company, a corporation that creates model homes and builds communities around the state that are filled with these homes. As an employee, he gets a new house at cost. Given the ridiculous real estate market around here, that could mean a savings of 40%. On his way out last week, I asked him to give me a call if his company ever needs someone in the graphics department. I’m fucking serious. He said he would. I hope he knew I wasn’t kidding.

So, yeah. This rant about who I’m going to get to cover for me during my first major vacation in almost a year has turned into a rant about my job in general. This is something that’s been gnawing at me lately, so I figured it was as good a time as any to bring it up. The general rantage about work doesn’t help solve my problems, though, so I’m going to have to try and find somebody who can do this work. Which is going to be great fun, because everybody I approach will bitch and moan and act like a priss about it.

And if I can’t find anybody at all, then I’m faced with the very real possibility of having to come into the office on the Friday immediately following my return from vacation, all jet-lagged and shit, and doing a bitchload of work in one day because this client-sensitive bullshit can’t be accessed from a computer outside of our office LAN. Yeah, that’s really what I want to do! I’m getting really tired of everybody asking me, every time I approach them about my absense, “Is there any chance you’ll be able to access a computer while you’re gone?” Uh, fuck you? Yeah, I’ll just pay sixteen hundred greenbacks so I can fly halfway around the world, shack up in an Internet cafe in Bangkok and go to virtual work. Bite me, you cackblaster. The reality is that I probably won’t have Internet access at all for most (if not all) of my trip anyway, and even if I get access, it’ll be a dialup connection. I can see doing some stuff for the office while I’m just chilling out in Detroit or something, but if you put this much time and effort into going on a big trip, it deserves your full attention.

I have half a mind to just walk out of here on the 14th and say, “Well, folks, I’m gone for two weeks. If anything comes up, figure it out.” Because that’s what a lot of people do when they go on vacation, but I’m too responsible a person to leave it at that. What gets me is, my effort to take responsibility doesn’t seem to be appreciated, so I’m beginning to wonder why I bother. I sent an email around to the CEO, the chief of Account Management and the chief of Engineering yesterday asking for their advice or suggestions on who would be an apt stand-in for my ad page duties while I’m away. The chief engineer responded with, “What department should handle it, account management or engineering?” Uh, who cares? We have about 35 employees, kay? Whoever has the skills should do the work. I don’t care if they’re the damn receptionist. In a company of our size, where everybody has to cover all the bases, why is the politi-corporate bullshit of “whose department’s job is it” still a factor in a situation like this? I do work for every department in this damn company. Are you saying your engineers are too good to do likewise? Or maybe they’re paid too much to bother?

So, in response, I wrote to him that the task ultimately went back to account management, but it takes an engineering-oriented mind to understand the nuances and grasp the unfamiliar software, so engineering would be a better source for personnel in this case. Because I just can’t see any of our account managers doing this. They’re mostly skilled in client relations, communications, data entry and such, although one of them has some skills with HTML and web scripting, and knows her way around InterDev and our other software environments. But she can’t stop for a second to do anything like that, because her phone is always ringing off the hook with clients calling. See what I mean? Engineering needs to do this ad page, because otherwise it’ll just never get done. Period.

Of course, that email from the chief of engineering was the only email response I received, because management really doesn’t seem to be listening to me lately no matter what I say to them. Later on I caught up with the chief of Account Management in the restroom and actually pursued the issue right there, to which he grumblingly admitted that he was probably going to wind up doing my ad page task himself while I’m away. Okay, that’s fine—but is there some chance I’ll know for certain before, uh, an hour before I leave? Owing to my sense of responsibility, I’d like a chance to sit down with the person who’s slated to fill in for me so I can walk them through a few things one-to-one, rather than just drop a 20-page white paper in their lap and say “Read it.” Even if I did just toss them the document that I painstakingly wrote myself from scratch, that’s more than most people would do. But in my attempts to go above and beyond lately, nobody seems to care enough to lift a finger. So I guess I ought to just adopt the apparently new company attitude: “We Don’t Give a Shit.”™ Seems to work for the rest of the staff.

Sigh. Well, this is just one of the things bugging me right now. It’s getting to the point where it is just so exhausting having to care so much about the jobs and responsibilities of everybody at my company, having to follow-up to make sure people do their jobs that aren’t even related to mine…I’m just ready to drop the gauntlet, say “That’s it” and just walk out.

Categorized as Rants