Bernie turns out to be one of those guys who likes daily "status" reports telling him what you're working on.

I can live with that, although figuring out how to get DiamondGirl to tell me what she's been doing every day will be a pain.

But. I sent him an update on Friday for the week (since I hadn't been doing it daily) and this morning I find this huffy e-mail in my box all about how surprised he is that he's paying two people full-time and he's only getting part-time work out of them.

He seems to think his employees should be able to account for every minute of every day. Now while I know some organizations do have staff do that, those tend to be people in "predictable" jobs where they have a concrete work-flow. Which, you know, does not include this company.

Anyhow, I spent 20 minutes writing him a really hateful e-mail.

Of course I deleted it unsent and re-wrote it. I'm not sure how hateful this one is, but after he reads it, he may decide he doesn't need me around the office.

Dear Bernie:

I agree that DiamondGirl's time was not well accounted-for last week. I noticed that and had already intended to discuss it with her. There’s been a bit of sloppiness about tracking projects and progress in the past week or two and that’s largely my fault because it’s taking me some time to get my feet under me.

Understand that part of my time and part of DiamondGirl's will never be accounted for. Those “impromptu” meetings where you come out of your office and discuss the possibility of doing some project with one or both of us, for instance. I’m not sure you realize how often that happens or how much time it takes up. There’s also the “fuzz factor” which is the amount of time lost when someone get interrupted in the middle of a complicated project. It can honestly take someone like a software coder fifteen minutes or more to retrace their steps and figure out where they were.

My understanding about these status e-mails was that you wanted to keep track of the major projects we’re working on and how much time we’re investing in them, especially the ones with “billable hours” and not that we were having to account for how we spend our time every day.

If you need me to track the amount of time I spend washing dishes, getting the mail, running off door-to-door solicitors, answering (mostly wrong number) phone calls, figuring out Tina’s filing system, looking for documents I need on the network, not to mention the half-hour it took Friday to write you that status e-mail and the 30 minutes I’ve spent on this one this morning, then that’s going to be very difficult.

Whaddya think? Too hateful?

I love being employed. I actually got a paycheck last week.

I should have savored it. It might be my last.