I've been making a point of popping into NewBoss Anais's office two or three times a week, just to keep her up to date on what I'm doing and what issues I'm facing. And to tell her, over and over, that to do Webstrainer correctly, it has to be all I do. That's usually right before I forward her an email or tell her about some voicemail I received from a 'Nut that someone--not me--needs to deal with.

I may have to stop visiting her. When I popped in a few minutes ago, she looked a little wild around the eyes. (Hey, it's not my fault that the entire marketing department, including everyone who knew all about everything we were into, got laid off and all she has left is me.)

Tommie the Temp has been freelancing for us for four or five years. We rely on him. Or, rather, we relied on him. Because he graduated last week, already has a shiny new full-time job, and no longer considers $12 an hour exciting money.

NewBoss Anais has asked me, three times in three different ways, if I'm sure I couldn't do Tommie's tasks. And I've been honest with her. Some of it is not outside my capabilities. But it's an issue of time.

I have to focus on what I'm doing.

Which brings us around to the Potential Smartness of Me. Because it turns out that the money we spent for SEO (search engine optimization) efforts last fall was wasted--I've been told that management never got the new webpages live. Which, in turn, means that the phenomenal quadrupling-quintupling-sextupling (is that a word?) of our campaign quality scores is solely the result of my efforts over the last year.

Finally! Being obsessive-compulsive pays off!

Boy, am I glad to have a three-day weekend.

______________________________

P.S. Update to the PeaNut story!

Turns out that PeaNut was so desperate to get access to that stats package because he busted his campaign while "doing it myself" and was determined to find out what I had done to it before I turned it over to him. He clearly suspected deliberate sabotage.

Bottom line, one day, in pursuit of total insanity, he sat down and dumped his vocabulary into his campaign. As near as I can tell, every word he'd ever heard, aside from articles and pronouns. Consequently, he was spending his daily budget in four hours every day, and getting nothing for it. Instead of seeing any kind of cause and effect (yesterday I did "A" and today I see "B") ?
He chose to decide that a change I'd made for him the week before (and at his request) was the problem.

The lengths to which people will go not to be "wrong" astound me. I mean, all he had to do was to keep his mouth shut and fix his mistakes and no one would ever have known. But that would have meant admitting, at least to himself, that he had made mistakes.

What a loser.