It's an eye thing. When I get too aggravated or stressed, my eye twitches. I can feel it going at it like mad tonight.

I'm thinking it's already time Bernie and I parted ways, to seek our separate futures.

It's not just that my Tasks List is now two pages long with no billable work on it and he think we should work at least 50% on billable projects every week.

It's not even that he keeps saying he can't afford to pay us if we don't do more billable work every week, as demoralizing and de-motivating as such statements are, especially when repeated every 7-10 days.

You know what? It's not even that it's his own freaking fault we're not doing billable work since he hasn't brought any new work in in months. There is no billable work to do. (Why does he keep telling us he can't keep paying us unless we do billable work? Is he trying to frighten us into going out and selling the company's products and services ourselves?) (Okay, so mostly he says that to DiamondGirl, since she's the programmer, but we can't do what we do without her, so it comes to the same thing in the end.)

It's that of the 39 items on my Tasks list (at least 30 of which he identified as "top priority" when he handed them to me), only four of them bear any resemblance to each other. I mean, only four of them are the same kind of work. This is not a company that focuses on its core competencies because this is not a company that has identified core competencies.

(He says he'll take whatever work comes by, to keep the bills paid, and I can sympathize with that goal, but then he bids two hours for a project that a highly skilled graphic designer would need 16 hours to complete, not that we have a graphic designer on-staff, skilled or otherwise, and then he gets pissed when we can't do the work at all, much less in two hours. Am I crazy or is he crazy?)

In theory, we do surveys and evaluations for associations and conferences. We also do (opt-in only) e-mails to customer lists for those same clients. We help our clients talk to their customers and we help our clients gather feedback from their customers.

In the last month, the only projects he's been discussing have been based around e-commerce, graphics design, website design & support, Google Ads, and county fairs.

You can buy e-commerce website solutions off-the-shelf these days, graphics & website design are specialty areas and there's tons of competition out there, Google Ads is not a service we can charge a client much money for, and he's not popular enough with me to make me willing to give up my weekends for the entire summer to work county fairs all over the state.

Because he swore his life wouldn't be worth living and he wouldn't know how to go on if we didn't, we built him a new software application for a field he identified as "critical" to our success.

Upon further investigation, I have discovered that this field has no money and in any case, our resources wouldn't be sufficient to meet our needs if the field did have money. (Part of our laughable "core" competency rests upon a proprietary software program of limited capacity and for which the developer is no longer in business.)

Also? I am not traveling to Mexico to train a client who could perfectly easily be trained using an internet-based conferencing program. Nor am I traveling to Florida to spend two days being trained on the subtleties of a software program I already learned how to use. (Florida? In the summer?) Nor am I flying to California in late September, spending one day setting up a conference, then flying to Las Vegas for 24 hours to set up a conference and then move everything the next morning, after which I will fly back to California to finish the first conference.

Who am I? Joan Jet-setter? I am not.

Traveling on business is hell under the best of circumstances and he is not the best of circumstances. I'm not whipping 'round the world for him, at least not until he starts paying me a living wage.

And then before he left the office tonight, he was making noises about how expensive it is to pay health insurance for employees and how it's almost impossible to cover the costs.

I've been listening to him over the last month, and doing a lot of thinking. When he hired me, he told me he was discouraged and ready to walk away from the company if it didn't work out.

I think the truth is that he's burned out, he thinks that being a "consultant" would be a lot easier, and he just doesn't want to keep doing the work it takes to keep a small business going.

People always think being a "consultant" is a path to glory. They picture themselves roaming the country, being paid to tell other people what they ought to do and how, and then leaving town while the company gets on with finding the people and resources to do the actual work.

Any jackass can stand outside a situation and say how it could be better. Talent comes in making it better, but that's more work than the average "consultant" wants to get into.

So, yeah. Tonight I'm bitter. And twitching.