Backfire

We are trying to get ahead of schedule on the catalog (due to be finished by the third week of November). We fell a little bit behind, but then got mostly caught up last week. This week, we have been placed on what is called mandatory overtime—everyone works an extra hour a day.

For me, this means getting here at 7 a.m. (when it is still dark) and leaving at 4:30 p.m. I am supposed to pick my younger child up around 4:45, but this week, it has been more like 5:05. My day care provider is okay with that, for one week. My older child doesn't need to be picked up until 6 p.m., so that's not an issue.

Anywho, the point is: an extra hour of being at work does not (in my case) mean an extra hour of work. Although I haven't been doing much personal stuff at my desk (i.e. writing weblog entries, balancing my checkbook), I also haven't been slaving away on these pages.

I've been doing a lot of surfing and day dreaming. I tend to go here, or here, or even here, to be educated about the upcoming election (and in case I need facts to present to my in-laws).

Today, for example, I have been here about 2 hours. And I haven't managed to even start the spread I picked up at 7:15.

I am still doing up to five-six spreads a day (that's 10-12 pages), but I feel slow and inefficient. To say my mind is not 100% on my work would be an understatement. So I'm not sure how this extra hour is helping.

Maybe I just need an extra cup of coffee.

Graduation Day

As of 8 a.m. yesterday, I was no longer the New Girl.

A new writer started, and if memory serves (doubtful in the midst of these review pages) she will be overwhelmed with information in short order.

She is sitting in JD's old desk, so right over a cube wall from me. They changed the door (? door — how about opening) to her cube, so it faces a less busy hallway. When they did it, they made a lot of noise, which I wouldn't have minded so much if they had bothered to pop over and say, "Hey, we're going to be making a lot of noise over here for a while." I mean, it's just common courtesy.

To add to New Girl's confusion, we're in the middle of a catalog (I started right after the book had dropped, and it was a slow period until the Web Project from Hell); it was a Food Day (don't ask); and we played a Wii at noon.

Now I had never touched a Wii in my life (Weird Guy loves when I say that), and I got roped in. While I would rather have sat quietly in my cube paying bills during lunch, I did play a shooting game and skee ball. I was pretty bad at both, thank you very much. At least I have an idea of what a Wii is, though. In a couple of years, unless they come up with something else (and they will), my kids will be asking for one. I should start practicing now.

RANT

We're working on our 600+-page catalog. As we attempt to move more toward a web-based sales entity, the catalog has, appropriately, been shrinking. (Have a mentioned we're a technology company, one of the largest in the world? And I still do my timesheets on paper??)

Anywho, as a result of shrinking the catalog, product presentations have been slashed and burned, and nowhere moreso in the product line I inherited from JD. We'll call it the ABC product line. Products have been combined mercilessly; there is one presentation where we are shoe-horning six pages into two.

The designer I am partnered with for the ABC section, the Quiet Guy, has been doing an awesome job. We have done as much as we possibly can to make these product presentations lean and mean. We are using icons; editing text to the minimum; deleting redundant text or tech specs; shrinking pictures.

Most of the team has worked very, very hard on this. It has been confusing, frustrating, and time-consuming. But we have done a hell of a job.

The pages went down the hall for review (to clarify: "down the hall" means "to the product managers/marketing department"; down the hall is supposed to review the pages for typos, accuracy, cross-sells, etc.). The pages finally started coming back on Friday.

And they are a fucking mess.

The lead product manager -- we'll refer to him as Italian Stallion, or IS -- on the ABC line is an idiot. Even Quiet Guy says so. IS has decided that he wants all the pages to be consistent. Which means he wants a "what's included" box (WIB) on each product presentation.

I pretty much hit the roof on Friday when I saw these pages. I knew they were going to be bad because of how much we had to cut and squeeze and edit and so on. I knew there would be mistakes and oversights. But I didn't imagine we would have to find another two inches of space on every presentation to fit in a fucking WIB. Plus an additional bullet point or two. And tech specs.

Quiet Guy went to bat. He looked at all the pages and decided where we absolutely could not fit those boxes. He went to the lead designer and Our Boss, and drew his lines. He said he would do the best he could on the rest of the pages, but these pages and presentations could not have WIBs. Period.

And we won that battle.

There are still a lot of WIBs to do. I have to track down what is actually included, and put them in the boxes. Again: tedious, time-consuming work.

We are only about one-third of the way through, after two days. More pages will be coming back from review. The pages that we are changing have to go back down the hall.

And in the midst of all this, they want to pull me onto another project, a rebranding for one of our partner businesses. This is especially frustrating because the marketing director, Egghead, is "giving us direction" on the rebranding. This means that Egghead, who is a bigger idiot than IS -- possibly he is the biggest idiot down the hall -- has decided how we are going to design and write the rebranding materials. Even though Egghead is not a writer or a designer (and believe me, it shows). This means that I will spend time writing wonderful, engaging copy, and the Young Guy will do a really cool design, and Egghead will look at everything and change it back to his original crap. Talk about a waste of time! AND it will suck.

Manic (NOT) Monday

I have having a very difficult time focussing on work, at work, today.

Part of it is probably that it is Monday.
Part of it is that I have a product to write about, and if it is not the most boring product to write about (barring cables) then I don't want to see what the most boring product looks like.
Part of it is that there are other things I would like to be writing about.
Part of it is that there are other things I would like to be reading about (i.e. my NFL team's impressive Week 1 victory yesterday, the political news -- such as it is, blogs I like to catch up and comment on).

I'm usually a pretty good self-starter, and pretty disciplined. But I am just not on it today. My mind is wandering; I am looking a these tech specs as if they are written in Chinese; and I just want to be miles away from here getting real stuff (i.e. housework) done. Because the weekend was busy, and I didn't get anything accomplished at home. Or I keep glancing at the clock, and lamenting how much longer I have until lunchtime -- and I don't even like the food my cafe serves.

I wonder how Monday stacks up on the productivity scale. Higher or lower than Friday? I am better on Friday, I think. I am motivated to get done everything on my desk and not leave anything hanging.

I may leave this product hanging until Wednesday at the rate I am going.

The Emails are a Prime Distraction, Thank You

Last week was all about my coworkers and former employees getting in a tizzy regarding the Republican's VP pick. See, there is this email distribution list that I was kindly (used loosely) included upon, and the subject is generally political in nature. And everyone on the list is pretty much a raging liberal (I am, if I may be so bold, a conservative liberal). So the entertainment points are pretty high, but it is difficult to actually work when my email in-box is pinging at me every other minute with someone else's snarky opinion/observation. (Believe me, I participated. I think I was less snarky and more, "Watch out! She is dangerous." But I'm sure I had my snarky moments.)

Then I got side-tracked into an email correspondence with a former employee that was fun, but a time-waster. And while I was answering her emails, I was fretting about what I should be doing instead, and also wondering about her job, and if it was just a slow day for her that she could just email this person she doesn't even know, but clearly wanted to chat with because something I had emailed had caught her attention. We compared notes on family, where we live, our jobs, and even exchanged pictures of our kids. And I would truly love to have lunch with her, because it seems we may be sympatico and all, but, dudette, I gotta work.

And Then There's Lunch

And all I really want to say is, it's a good thing I didn't say anything about the bone in Ray's sausage, because there is no way a sentence like that about one of your co-workers is going to come out right.

(They were serving kielbasa in the cafe, and either Ray of Sunshine chipped a tooth or found a bone in it, which fact alone almost made the vegetarian-me throw up in my mouth a little bit.)

A Few Choice Words

It's crazy around here, and I haven't been tending to this sanity-saving area. But it's finally Friday, and I would like to go into the three-day weekend with this:

"It's not having what you want; it's wanting what you've got."

"Balls to you, daddy."

"No, I don't want to battle
from beginning to end
don't want to cycle or recycle revenge;
I don't want to follow death and all of his friends."

These are a few of the lyrics I have been moved to write down on a post-it and stick to the tower of my CPU this past week. They are from Sheryl Crow, The Clash, and Coldplay, respectively. I also have one from KT Tunstall: "affection is yours if you ask; first you must take off your mask." But that doesn't seem to fit in the attitude I need for work these days. Home, yes; work, not so much.

Also, in case you were wondering, here's the story of my tagline. I bald-facedly stole it from John Cusack.

You're welcome.

One for the WTF Files

I am freaking out a little bit. Remember when I went through the run-down last week about who was here and who wasn't? Well, my co-worker who has pneumonia CAME TO WORK YESTERDAY. She proceeded to cough and hack her way through the day. I honestly expected to hear a loud gasp and thud as she finally succumbed to her inability to draw a full breath.

Who the F comes to work with pneumonia? Does she know if she is contagious? (I heard her hem and haw an answer to this question, which makes me think that she doesn't even know.) If pneumonia is something you get by inhaling infectious particles (either viral or bacterial particles) it would seem to me that, yes, there is a good chance you are contagious.

I am angry at my co-worker, and I hope she doesn't come in today or the rest of the week. I don't even care so much for myself as for my children. I have one starting school next week. It would kind of suck if she had to sit out for a month or so to get over something that mommy brought home from work. And what about my younger child?

It's not as if Odd Duck's job is in jeopardy. She was supposed to be on vacation this week anyway. Why would she come here? She's got almost 20 years; her product lines are solidly hers. What would make her drag herself to the office? She's clearly unwell. I don't think she's doing anyone any favors.

It's one thing to come to work with a cold. It's a completely different issue to come to work with a serious illness. Especially if you don't know if you're going to give it to others. (I'm not the only one in the department with young children.)

My Workplace is a Ghost Town

I don't know if it's the time of the year, or if JD is sticking pins in voodoo dolls (knock it off if you are, JD), but this place is a ghost town.

Quiet Guy is on vacation;
International Catalog took a day off;
Young Guy took today off;
Ray of Sunshine had to leave to take care of his wife, who fell and broke her wrist;
The Fat Lady is on vacation;
Odd Duck has pneumonia -- who knows when she'll be back?
Quiet Lady is on vacation;
Web Lady is on vacation.

We had to combine lunch tables today. Which was a fun change up, but I have done about 10 flow and edits today; Busy Writer has done two; and Senior Writer is still catching up from her vacation, plus doing some of Odd Duck's work.

I'm lighting some candles in church so no one else disappears over the weekend!