"So, Anne," I asked myself. "What is up with the new job? How's that working out for you?"

So far...so still undecided. I'm not sure I have a lot of faith in the company's business model. There's a lot of emphasis on helping clients manage their customer e-mail lists. I'm not really fascinated by mass e-mailing. The idea of spending a lot of my professional life html-coding e-mails fails to thrill.

There's a lot of talk about whether we will or won't be in the business of managing customer's websites, from the technical perspective. Not my strong suit. When I want a website designed, I pay someone to hand me a finished product.

I wasted two hours today entering half of a survey into the wrong software program. I guess that's one of the hazards of the business when you're new and you have two s/w programs to choose from. (Had I read Bernie's e-mail closely, I would not have made this mistake, so, entirely my bad.) (On the positive side, once I switched to the right s/w, I got the job done in fifteen minutes.)

My first bookkeeping test comes up this Thursday. We bill our clients on the 10th. I have no idea who I'm supposed to bill for what but I've carved out time in my schedule on Wednesday to search through the bookkeeping s/w and see if I can figure out who we billed last month. Bernie's also going to help me through it, which will be useful.

We're having 1-1/2 to 2 hour meetings every day for the next two weeks to introduce me to their entire client list, what we do for them now, what we're supposed to be doing for them, and what we would like to do for them if we can convince them to pay us for it. I really loathe meetings, so yuck, but I really need this info, so I have to be there and paying attention every second.

Moment of Mirth:

Today, Bernie asked if we could get A from our website stats. DiamondGirl said we don't track that. Bernie said we should have A on our website stats. DiamondGirl said we don't track that. Bernie said A should be on our website stats. DiamondGirl said we don't track that.

This continued for several minutes, with Bernie becoming monotonous and DiamondGirl becoming increasingly heated.

I begin to understand where part of their communication difficulties come from.

I have not yet had a chance to address this with Bernie, but I did mention to DiamondGirl that if you say something twenty-seven times and the person you're talking to doesn't seem to be understanding it, it might be an interesting experiment to use some different words.