Oddball Update

Goodness sakes, you haven’t been sitting here waiting since December, have you? Well, I apologize for leaving this site derelict for so long. In truth, I’ve been too busy to even think about posting here, most of the time. During those times when I’ve actually had a few minutes to myself, writing a new Oddball entry doesn’t seem fulfilling because the only topic I can think to write about is work. Since I like to spend my free time thinking about something else, I’ve mostly abstained from writing at all.

As you may have noticed, I’ve spruced the place up a bit. The latest milestone release of Wordpress (version 2.1 ) just arrived, so I decided to upgrade…and that seemed like as good a time as any to actually post something. Additionally, I finally got around to making that alternate color scheme I promised way back in July. Codenamed “Blue Steel,” it’s an easier-on-the-eyes way to get your oddball fix. I liked it so much, I made it the default design. You can still use “Plum Crazy” if you prefer; just click here or on the appropriate link under “Themes” on the right sidebar.

So what’s been going on? I’ve been slammed — that would be a nice, easy way to sum it all up. It seems like there’s been an ever-increasing load of projects on the table at work, and even though I’ve recused myself from almost all of my usual side jobs (even Birty Dird, believe it or not), the size of the proverbial inbox is still jaw-dropping. I’ve found some time for relaxation here and there, though — which has been even better lately, thanks to my new HDTV receiver and Nintendo Wii console.

In the last week or so, though, life has gotten easier to live. I don’t feel quite so overwhelmed anymore, either. Has my workload been decreasing? Not really — in fact, there’s even more stuff to do now than ever. What changed, rather, was the way I approached it all. Typically, I’m a very non-confrontational type of guy. I usually do what people ask of me without any questions, not wanting to seem inadequate in some way. I’ve always had an innate tendency toward this kind of behavior, and it was exacerbated during certain years of my education.

This week, though, after a very nerve-wracking, patience-killing and gut-wrenching start to the year, I decided I was done giving myself to everybody’s wants and needs like a sacrificial lamb. I decided that I would prefer to be known as the guy who stood by his convictions for better or for worse, rather than the amiable fellow who always did as he was told until the day when he spontaneously self-destructed. In short, I decided to Get Even™.

One of my biggest projects at work right now is the creation of a new website for one of our big products. A little backstory: We currently have two distinct (and only loosely related) product lines, both of which are being marketed through a single website. The website is really just too verbose for its own good, so we’ve recently taken a whole new approach to marketing in the hopes of improving it. To start, we’re splitting off one of the product lines and creating a “sub-site” for it, which will still live under our current domain, but with radically different content.

I don’t like marketing. In fact, avoiding doing more marketing was not the least of the reasons why I left my last job. One of my bosses (I serve many masters, remember) got on this huge marketing kick after reading a motivational book written by a leading marketing guru, so he pretty much called the shots on this new website project. The ideas that were presented were actually quite good, so I worked up a design in Photoshop.

Following that, we embarked upon a month of hellish review and re-review, designing by committee, and superfluous “town hall” meetings as we all tried to distill our wild marketing ideas into useful verbiage to place on the new website. If I’ve complained about my bosses being nitpicky before — and I know I have — that was nothing compared to now. Every single thing I’ve created for this site, visual and verbal, has been scrutinized over and over, changed one way and then changed back, then changed again, then changed back again. All the while, my two immediate superiors argue over every petty little aspect, over whether certain words sound strange, or don’t look right, or make them think of a bad meal they once had, or some similarly non-sequitur thing.

Okay, so I was stuck listening to this babble and revising my designs repeatedly until everyone agreed that they liked the look. We were only dealing with prototypes of two pages here, mind you. It took us two or three weeks to arrive at a final decisions on the look — just the look, not the content — of those two pages, after which I started building the HTML and CSS, and tokenizing them for our DotNetNuke CMS. Then, of course, we had to nail down the words themselves.

For some inexplicable reason, instead of building the website, I’ve been asked to all of these meetings, where I (also inexplicably) wind up acting as the court reporter. We get on a GoToMeeting, I’m asked to broadcast my desktop screen to the whole group, and all I do is put Microsoft Word front-and-center and take notes. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that the whole process drags on for an ungodly amount of time, with these conference calls often lasting two or three hours. During that time, my two bosses continue to bandy nitpicky little semantics back and forth. It’s also clear that one of them — the one who went googly-eyed over that marketing book — seems to think he is the only one with all the answers. If that’s the case, I don’t understand why he doesn’t just write down everything he has floating through his brain, then email it all to us and ask for our feedback. Instead, a group of ten of us has to painstakingly build the verbiage piecemeal via endless conference calls. It’s mind-numbing.

I know I’m not the only one who feels these meetings are a waste of time. In the last few of them, I’ve noticed that nobody says anything anymore, except my bosses. They’ve all learned that voicing your opinion on the website’s verbiage can only lead to two things:

1. One of the bosses telling you why that isn’t a good idea, and
2. The meeting dragging on even longer.

Anyway, we’ve now spent a month in development on this website, and we only have one actual page of it built and deployed to our testing environment. Besides all the endless revision and agonizing meetings, this slow pace has also been due to the fact that I have several other huge projects going on at the same time, including a user interface redesign of the very same product we’re building the website for. The product’s lone programmer has been absolutely working himself to the bone all month, trying to get the redesign implemented before February. During this process, he’s been pulling me into countless impromptu meetings at all hours of the day and night, requesting additional resources from me and largely monopolizing my time. In fact, he’s overworked himself so severely that now he’s going to physical therapy once a week because his hands have become almost unusable.

So it was a bit of a tooth-grinding moment this past Friday afternoon when my boss — not the one who read the marketing book, but the one who is my immediate superior — asked when I thought we could get the new website launched. Gee, I don’t know — do you think you and Captain Marketing over there can agree to nail stuff down in a reasonable amount of time? Because otherwise, the sky’s the limit! We don’t even know what content we’re going to put on 80% of the as-yet unprototyped pages!

On a normal day, I would have torn my hair out, bitched up a storm, settled into a funk for the rest of the evening, and then, after calming down, given my boss a date three weeks in the future that I know he wants to hear, but which I know is completely unreasonable. This past Friday, I decided not to succumb.

I told him I was not confident enough to set a date with any kind of certainty. I pointed out that the entire timeline was incalcuable due to our incessant and often lateral revision process. I remarked that I had no problem with exacting precision, but that it rarely coexists peacefully with an aggressive schedule. I also suggested that if he wanted to streamline the development process, the first thing he could consider was releasing me from these superfluous content development conference calls wherein I do nothing but act as the court reporter for hours on end. My time, I argued, would be better spent actually developing the artistic and technological aspects of the site, since as the graphic designer, those are my most prominent skills.

Normally, I wouldn’t say any of this for fear of “reducing my perceived value” in the organization, but now I just don’t care anymore. I’ve seen my colleage — the programmer who’s implementing my new application UI — go completely to pieces, both mentally and physically, after setting an unrealistic deadline for himself and refusing to admit that it’s just not healthily achievable. I’ve decided something that I should have concluded long ago: That self-destruction, either mentally or physically, is not an acceptable price to pay for telling the bosses what they want to hear.

I’ve always been worried that unless I pledged to get something done in record time, people would find fault in me, or think I was lazy, or trying to get out of working hard. One look at my timesheet for the last three weeks will tell you that none of the above is true. In the presence of all the evidence of my continued conviction and hard work, if someone still wants to assume that I’m a slacker, then I am more than happy to seek employment elsewhere. Not because I don’t like where I work — I really do — but because no job is worth subjugating yourself to a cause that can’t ever be satiated and then driving yourself crazy trying to make the impossible come true. I’m through pretending, and from now on, everybody I work with is getting the real story. For better or for worse, at least I’ll be true to myself. Hell, I’ll actually be enough of a person to call “myself,” otherwise I’m just somebody else’s yes-man.

And it’s not like I’m working with a group of seasoned corporate professionals — most of these guys are only a little older than me, and some of them are just as quirky as I. They don’t necessarily know what’s right either, and half the time I think they just set deadlines that they know they can’t meet because they think people can’t work efficiently without arbitrary dates hanging over their heads. If I want these guys to entertain alternate opinions or ideas, I’ve got to start by telling them like it is — or at least as I see it.

So I’ll continue doing my best work — like I’ve ever done anything else — but this time, I’ll stop worrying whether or not it’s adequate. And if this past week is any indication, I’ll be a much happier man as a result.

Categorized as Life, Site, Life/Work