Friday, for reasons that have never been clear to me, my own personal ChaosManage, Vela, was singing my praises to Gidget. Something about my work ethic or something, I don't know.
Today, Gidget was sending emails to Vela and me, celebrating because leads for last month (that's what I do) were up 91% over the same time last year. Does it not seem obvious to all of us that, yes, if they hire someone to do this job full-time, instead of relying on Gidget to do it nights and weekends, that results should improve enormously?
Vela forced a (well-deserved) day of comp time onto Gidget to help make up for the long weekends Gidget has been working recently. She also informed Gidget that I should plan to take a comp day soon and, yes, I do a small amount of work on weekends but not much and I'm not really sure that, objectively speaking, I approve of people being given comp time to reward them for working the hours they're already being paid to work.
I'm frequently amazed (and even appalled) how coming to work regularly and doing the work they're ostensibly paying you to do inspires management to frolic about, strewing flowers and crooning kudos. It speaks very poorly of today's workforce, don't you think?
Seriously. They give you money. You give them a certain amount of time and a certain percentage of your brain. I'm not complaining about this.
Anyhow. I'm under orders to leave at noon this Wednesday and if I'm not able to talk Vela into letting me work instead, I may take the opportunity to dash out and do a little Sekrit Shopping. I already have Monday off for my Birthday Holiday. (I wouldn't normally waste a day off when I'm already getting a long weekend, but there were a lot of schedules to juggle and this was the day that worked best with everyone else's schedules.
This past weekend was fun. An early (and gluttonous) Thanksgiving feast with a group Saturday. Everyone made Gourmet Delights (even me!) and we ate. Rack of Lamb, a savoury bread pudding with sun-dried tomatoes and fois gras, a green bean casserole**,fresh-baked bread***, and carrot cake****. And about five bottles of wine.*****
Sunday I abandoned my usual round of laundry-clean-the-kitchen-clean-the-bathroom to hit a mall with the R.C. From now until after January 1, I try to avoid malls on the weekends, so I had a desperate need to get a birthday gift for Gidget (12/1) and grab Christmas gifts for department co-workers here at the Argonut Café.
I succeeded in the former, not in the latter. While no one has said anything about a department gift exchange, watching Vela and Gidget swapping birthday-wedding-whatever gifts over the last 8 months has convinced me that the need will arise. After Gidget's birthday, I may discuss it with her. She's as cash-poor as I am these days and will probably be relieved to be off the hook for a gift exchange between the two of us (I love a friend who is close enough to think that not having to shop for a gift is as good as getting a gift). Then I can toss a bottle of wine Vela's way and be done with it.
So, you might be wondering (I know--you're not), what's happening in Anne's World over the long weekend, aside from the potential Sekrit Shopping? Very little. Holidays built around massive gluttony don't really appeal to me and I gave my thanks this year on November 4. What I'm planning is what I'm usually planning when I have a long weekend. Really Good Cleaning. Massive amounts of laundry. Dusting some of those things I don't remember to dust on a regular basis (baseboards, ceiling fan blades), scrubbing floors, tidying up various piles of whatnot that have accumulated over the last month, etc. And watching DVDs! I'm in the middle of one series with another one waiting (Ahhh, the luxury of birthday bounty!) and am eager to find a few hours to spare for viewing.
I may go mad at some point and eat chip-and-dip. (A once-a-year indulgence.) I might make a pot of soup. I will unquestionably sit up far too late at night (watching DVDs or reading) and sleep too late in the mornings, thus throwing my inner clock out of whack and making the eventual return to the workaday routine a nightmare.
Quite the little Party Animal, aren't I?
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* Gratuitous Men In Black reference. Because I like science fiction. And because, like the best of the best of the best in the movie? I have no idea what I'm doing.
** That was me! Meg's recipe and supervision made sure this from-scratch version of the Campbell's soup classic turned out not only edible but delicious!
*** Slow-rising, though. The bread was not available until later in the evening.
**** I missed this on account of Extreme Tiredness. I went home about 9, long before this party-hearty group was ready for dessert. I think they were all a lot younger than me.
***** I had a sip of a much-discussed white. As always, I found it interesting, but not something I would drink a lot of. It's amazing how, once I stopped drinking, I began to realize that I'd never really liked the taste of 95% of the alcohol I used to pickle my liver in.
That's me--the woman with $3 in her pocket to last her until payday, and, okay, maybe payday is tomorrow, but still. Except during stints of unemployment, I haven't run this close to the edge in twenty years. (*)
I mean, sheesh, you suck up one little sock in one little vacuum cleaner and the next thing you know, all of your disposable income for the next two weeks is being handed over to the only little man you can find who knows the magic way to disassemble Number Five and reassemble him, sockless, afterwards.
It doesn't help that I threw away $10 at the grocery store yesterday--buying ingredients for a recipe I wanted to try that turned out to be so disgusting that the whole thing went down the disposal five minutes after I took it out of the oven. Brooding. Culinary experiments are for the wealthy.
Except for the part where I'm finding the whole, you know, no money thing annoying, I think this is proving to be a valuable experience. I mean--I'm regretting having wasted $40 in the last month, on "gourmet" ingredients for recipes that didn't turn out well. More, I'm regretting the $10 I had yesterday that I don't have today. $10! I can't remember how many years it's been since I thought twice about an amount of money as small as $10. I guess I'd gotten very careless about money.
What I mourn most (aside from the occasional fit of weeping when I'm in a store and won't let me buy something I want) is the lack of extra funds for my normal Good Cause Gifting at this time of the year.
I just have to keep remembering--I'm only "poor" because I was too lazy to pay off my credit card bill each month, back when I was making all the money in the world. I've already had my fun--now I have to pay for it.
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* I gave you a lot of commas there. Just spread them around anywhere you think they're appropriate.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)Maybe it's none of my business and maybe I should be focusing on other things (like my job) today, but for the last hour, I've been stewing over a bitter rant that I can't allow myself to deliver to the people who inspired it. The plant service folks are roaming around the building, decorating it for the holidays. Even aside from my irritation at having "Christmas" decorations up before Thanksgiving--I hate what they're doing.
One of the beautiful features of this little building is the two-story atrium in the center of the building, and the railings (balcony and stairwell) of solid wood.
Those fool women are dashing around pounding huge nails into the wood, so they can hang wreaths and garlands from every wood surface.
Am I wrong in thinking that this is wanton destruction? Why don't they do what other companies do--wrap wire around the railing to hold the weight of the garland, or use removable sticky-pads?
Do you not think they would have noticed that there were no nail-holes from previous years, and maybe stopped to think that maybe there was a different way to proceed?
First snow of the season! :)
Posted by AnneZook at 07:54 AM | Comments (3)So, I finish my nice lunch (a bowl of chili, a French bread roll, and some carrot sticks) and twenty minutes later I glance down at myself and realize that, at some point (probably when I was stirring by the microwave), a long string of chili has bounced down my person. (Yes. Bounced. My version of chili isn't all that liquid.)
I scurried to the bathroom, of course, and cleaned myself up, but still. It's so embarrassing, to be seen in public as someone who doesn’t know how to feed herself properly.
Other than that, last week's head cold seems to have passed off. I wasn't nearly as ill as most of the people around me (including the R.C.) seemed to have been.
I'm a little concerned about other health matters, though.
Like, I'm fairly certain I've fallen victim to some kind of alien invasion or maybe just a mutated terrestrial plague. I finished lunch a mere 40 minutes ago and I'm already so hungry again that my stomach is gurgling. (It's not the chili, no.) Every day for the last four or five days, at around 10:00 in the evening, I'm suddenly so hungry that my stomach hurts.
I'm picturing this plague as a kind of massive tapeworm thingy, roiling my stomach--banging on the walls and demanding sustenance or it will eat its way out of me and take over the planet. (Not to self: The Alien movies are bad for your psyche.)
Also, I'm tired a lot. More than I would expect to be. Working an eight-hour day should not be this difficult.
Today I'm checking the performance of the new campaigns I uploaded during last week's massive Change Everything frenzy. I can't make up my mind--some accounts are doing much better, some are doing a little better, some are about the same, and a small handful are doing worse.
I'm a person who likes definite results, but I'm also a person who finds it very entertaining to scoop up a massive amount of data and try to boil it down to something sensible, so I guess that's ok.
Anyhow. The alternative project waiting for me is worse. There's this handful o'Nuts, the Bowery Boys. I've mentioned them before--a collective marketing group that has been, collectively, the bane of my department for the last four months.
Basic situation (a refresher for y'all) is that there are more of them than there is business to support them in their area. Also, the Head Boy is getting 70% of the business and the other Boys lack the youknowwhats to tell him that they think everyone should pay in proportion to the return they're getting. They've been subsidizing him for six months and bitching to us about it--but when we give them the opportunity to tell the Head Boy their concerns directly (as required by the terms of their collective marketing agreement), they go all coy and quiet.
Their most recent idea is that I will create separate campaigns for each Boy and they will pay separately. Which is fine, but they're leaving the bulk of their marketing money in the shared campaign, which primarily benefits the Head Boy. And this at a time when all the Boys are struggling to make a go of it. How--noble. (Or do I mean cowardly?) They're putting their leftover pocket change, about forty-eight cents each, into their new campaigns. Which is pointless because the new campaigns are targeting under-inhabited areas where people, if they want our services, will always go to the Head Boy's location.
Basically, I'm going to have to find an entire day to create four very complicated and highly targeted campaigns that (get this) have zero chance of working. I am, as you can imagine if you bothered to read this far, entirely unexcited about carving eight hours out of my overfilled work week to complete this project. I've done the CYA part of the project already, though.
I sent this, in an email to Vela and Gidget:
I am happy to set things up as requested under the clear understanding that there will be little or no traffic to the four new campaigns. Once the campaigns are set up, I do not want questions or complaints because they do not produce traffic or leads.
You might say that's pretty snippy, and maybe it is, but I like people to understand, up front, what to expect.
I could seriously use a nap right about now.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)
i think i'm getting a cold
I'm all for living in harmony with nature and whatnot, but the bunnies that swarm around this building are very pushy. This morning, one of them hopped into the parking lot and stared at me until I moved over fifteen feet to let it get to one of the remaining patches of sweet, green grass it wanted to nibbled for breakfast.
I mean, I'm bigger than it is and I might have been dangerous. How did it know I'd be so easy to push around?
Stupid rabbits.
I tried a new make-up routine this morning and I might have wound up looking fabulous if I hadn't forgotten my mascara. How can a face with this many layers of creams and powders and whatnot on it look unfinished? Also - bad hair day.
Whatever.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be 32. (Shaddup.)
Yesterday afternoon, late, I loaded up one location's campaign with the new marketing structure I've been working on for the last three months. I came in to check it this morning, and was more relieved than I can say to find that nothing was broken. (When you're making sweeping, wholesale changes to a system that produces over half your company's sales, it pays to be cautious.)
Now I have to load up the other fifty campaigns. I'm the sort of person who will happily spend three months creating some new kind of system and then test it with deep interest--but who then views the loading of the other 50 campaigns as tedium beyond belief.
Also, in today's big surprise (NOT), they have decided not to move to the new once-a-month 'NutNews schedule that was slated to take effect on November 1. No, they want to stay on the twice-a-month schedule through the end of the year.
Also, they want the new version "spiced up." Apparently the sleek blues and the cleaner graphics are boring. I don't know what they mean by "spiced up." I have inquired what they have in mind - porn or bright red fonts or whatever.
If TeamChaos wants to improve the newsletter, they'd be better off taking a look at their yawner content.
Glancing casually at the early-morning voting news, I see people whining because they cast their votes early and then changed their minds on some issues. They're blaming early voting for causing them problems.
Me, I think they should have figured out what they wanted to vote for before they voted - be it early or on the day. This really is a nation of whiny, cry-babies sometimes, you know? And a lot of them want to be spoon-fed at every step of their lives.
Sheesh.
Actually, it's been a pretty decent day so far, in spite of the tedious hour-long meeting on the new benefits program. (Such a waste of time.)
Posted by AnneZook at 02:32 PM | Comments (4)