It's so nice to be back at work (Hah!) Even CEOJason made an effort to speak to me Monday, not only thanking me for the special candy bar I bought him before I left town, but saying that sales dropped off 50% the week I was out of the office (by way of indicating my importance).

No one asked me about Las Vegas, though. NewBoss Anais asked if I had fun on my "week off" is all. No one else mentioned it at all. I was gone for a week. Maybe no one noticed?

I want to blog the fun, and I will, with back-dated posts, but in the meantime I'm getting behind on blogging current drama.

First, the Café. I came back, of course, to a bit of turmoil. End of month reporting, for which I was already a week behind, more new website issues that should have been dealt with a week previously, new campaigns that people were anxious to get aggravated (Freudian much?) activated, the sound of my own voice volunteering to take on the northernmost 'Nut campaign for the Ontarians whose campaign, the one or two times I've looked at it, was painfully bad, etc.

EOM reporting - in spite of airy promises and evasive agreements, the s/w that underpins the new website is not able to give me the data I need in the form of a report. I did, of course, take the trouble to send exact examples of what I needed--that's what the Didgeree group saw and promised to duplicate.

Bert, whose IT expertise and enthusiasm never fails to impress me, is setting up a secondary staging server for us, using an open-source s/w reporting engine (The current log program collects the data, but Didgeree wants $3k or so to write a special program to give us access to it.)

The new website issues were largely around incomplete data reporting as well. There was some URL tagging that needed to be done--I worked on it half the weekend before I left on vacation and thought I got it all done, but clearly not quite.

My enthusiasm for the outside agency hired to offer 'Nuts an alternative to me managing their accounts is waning. Two accounts that moved over have already moved back and water-cooler gossip says many of the others are not happy with performance. I don't want anyone to come back. In fact, I wanted at least a third more of them to go away. I have interesting, exciting, and potentially revenue-generating project ideas that I'm desperate to find time to implement.

As for me volunteering to take on the Ontarians, I have no excuse except that I can't stand seeing things done poorly. Also, I'm so overcommitted at the moment that one campaign more or less doesn't make that much difference.

In the Land O'Bernie, the newest client, Dollar Funhouse, continues to insist on Helping with their campaign. I did load that one campaign before I left town--using precisely their choices. It fell into a black hold of nonperformance. This does not seem to have taught them anything as they are now emailing about setting up another conference call so they can select more words and write more ads.

Bernie was clearly correct when he said they would try to use this initial set-up time as a chance to educate themselves (for free) with the intent of taking the account over and DIYing it in a few months.

The one guy keeps emailing to ask what's in my brain--what am I thinking and what did I base decisions on and how did I make the decision. Trust me, you do not want to be in my brain. It can be a weird place. One day I obsess about a hyphen. The next day I make major changes with half an eye while simultaneously reading the news, eating lunch, and IMing with a friend. I am not the person to teach things and I couldn't even if I wanted to, since there's no performance, largely because they won't spend any more.

For the record? If you think $3 is a lot of money to spend on an inquiry for a $450,000 product? Go. Away. From. Me.

Forever.

I'm trying to do something for Gidget but she's forgotten her password for the relevant account.

It's like I never went away. Except, I'm tireder.