I’ve been experimenting with delegating at work, exercising my dotted line-ness and whatnot. I don’t even know if that makes sense to non-cubicle folks, the dotted line thing? Have my references become so enmeshed in corporate speak that I no longer can communicate outside of banal non-threatening beige walls? Can I no longer talk the talk outside of the box? Shoot me in the head, please, as long as it’s after my 3:30 conference call.
So, I need some numbers (aka metrics (aka Proof So I Can Nail Someone To A Board During A Conference Call With Percentage Changes) and using my big sexy statistics brain, I derived what I needed and then was going to start collecting all of that info, but my boss said ‘Weet, no, make them do that. The people you’re measuring. That’s their job. Tell them what you want and they will make it happen.’ So I did that, and then they asked someone else to do it for them, who came to me and asked me what they meant, and then went back to them and said ‘Yeah, you’re going to have to figure that out manually, as I can’t automate those metrics’ and then they came back to me and told me that the numbers, they were all impossible. So then I had to basically tell them how to pull each number and now I’m spending my afternoon writing Excel formulas so that someone else can do work for me. This is why I’m a control freak, right here, because people have trained me that asking them to do something is harder than doing it myself and it takes much longer. People do what works, myself included. I don’t know how to fix that. This is my conundrum and the reason I don’t ever want to be more than a dotted line, right there.
I would very much like a pet duck.
The lasagna ended up being super delicious and we’ve been living on it for days, which is great, because I’ve been scurrying around trying to put away Christmas decorations (trying but not really succeeding), prep for the Minicon, finish my pre-graduation requirements (holy shit, apparently that’s happening in May or something), work on my thesis, compile my book list for the thesis defense, and trying to read ahead for the upcoming semester’s lit class. Also, we both just found out that next week, I’m going to be traveling all week, as will Esteban, which means that we have to find a babysitter for the cat. Someone to come in every day, shove half an allergy pill down her gullet, give her a treat (so that she’ll continue to tolerate the pill/gullet action) and then make sure that the people don’t accidentally trap her in a room after their visit. I’m hoping that I can bribe June with some loose leaf Earl Grey from Teavana, but we’ll see. And even though I scored excellent accommodations at my new favorite hotel in Shermer, Il (which almost makes going there fun again) and I can make a Mitsuwa run to find accoutrements for Mr. Bento (or maybe another Bento’ I am BROKEN), I’m really feeling pissy about it because travel always means a huge backlog of life junk that has to be done before and after every trip, and then also, expense reports and DTs from caffeine withdrawal.
I almost have Esteban convinced that our next vacation will be a Belgium/Amsterdam thingy. Esteban wants to tour breweries and I will do just about anything to wander around the continent. We talked a little bit about our different tourist styles and are working that whole thing out, because he’s into the ‘sitting, doing little’ aspects of vacations and I probably get more done before noon on a travel day than I do all day when I’m at home. The exception to that was the booze cruise, where I did very little and mostly sat in the Nap Deck and read a book. Maybe we will go on a booze cruise to Belgium, if it doesn’t cost a million billion dollars. Win-win-win. And I think that’s probably the argument used by the people who went down on the Titanic. I don’t know, something about the Atlantic Ocean freaks my shit out, which is just silly, but so it goes.
This is what I have to think about in January. Instead of the suck that is January. I would like very much to see the sun one of these days. Here’s hoping.
