I haven't had my hair cut since the first of October. I kept meaning to get myself out and find myself a new hairdresser, but I never got around to it.
HairMan does a good job (he's maybe the second-best hairdresser I've had in my life), but patronizing his services has drawbacks.
#1 - The Wash. Alone of all the hairdressers I've visited in my life, HairMan finds it necessary to wash most of my face when he washes my hair. I've mentioned it jokingly. I've reproved him gently. I've asked for (and received) a washcloth I can use to cover my face. In the end, it turns out that having him wipe his soapy hands across most of my face is really more irritating than it should be and I haven't learned to ignore it in the 10 years off and on that I've been going to him.
#2 - The Mouth. I understand that most people who get into cutting hair are People People. They like people. They like to chat, etc. HairMan is certainly one of the chattiest hairdressers I've ever had, and that's fine, I don't really mind it, except that every time his mouth opens, his hands stop moving. Every hair cut, no matter how small a trim, requires me to book an hour of time, and at least 20 minutes of that is spent watching his hands not moving as he yaps away.
I gave up having my hair professionally dyed because the 2 to 2-1/2-hour appointment was just more than I could bear.
A person should not dread going to the hairdresser. (That should be saved for dental appointments.)
#3 - The Dating. Ever since he talked about my breasts that one day, and then asked me out a week or so later? I've felt much less comfortable going to him. Is that unreasonable? I mean, he's never mentioned it again.
#4 - The Location. These negative factors have been offset for the last year by the location of his salon. A mere five minutes from my office, fifteen minutes from home, it was very convenient. (Not as convenient as the salon I tried across the street from my apartment, but the haircuts I got from that woman were just horrible.)
Anyhow.
I can't stand my hair any more, I haven't done a thing about finding someone else to cut it, and in any case, I want to take the kind of look I'm trying to achieve with me to the new hairdresser, to give them a fighting chance of success.
So, I called him today.
After a digression into his horoscope and the passing of the mother of someone I've never heard of before *sigh*, I got an appointment for this Saturday.
Turns out, he's moving to a new, much less convenient salon, starting Saturday.
(Yes, it's like me, to turn a minor inconvenience into a major drama. But the change from a 30-minute round-trip commute to an hour is a chunk out of the middle of my Saturday.)
But!
After I get the cut, I can try one or two other salons, right? See if I can find someone else who can look at what I have repeat the cut.
I thought you might all appreciate a little melodrama on a 'Nut-free topic for a change.
So, today Vela shows Jason what we did yesterday and he's all, "No, no, not all that. Just give them what we had already and leave blanks where we don't have history."
So, you know, basically five hours of my time and nine hours of her time wasted.
I'm not going to bitch at her about it because I have the same tendency to try and do a thorough job of whatever I'm given, but still. I was driven to the point of a meltdown yesterday for no real reason.
MadBoy is back--or at least he's got his offspring sitting on my doorstep. After telling the world that the offspring had taken a class and they were now going to run their marketing campaign themselves, and be phenomenally successful in ten minutes a day? Well, three weeks after that, they're in my email and on my voicemail whining for help because their campaign isn't working.
And still, you know, stupid. Today they wanted access to their website stats. Because their campaign is broken. (If your campaign is broken, you need to fix your campaign. Looking at your traffic numbers won't do that.)
Another far-flung 'Nut came out of the woodwork two weeks ago and wanted to talk about how everyone around him is a thief and he's being robbed of his legitimate leads. And he wanted a stand-alone campaign. We've only tried that one time and it was a dismal failure. But, okay, you know, I'm all about doing what They say to do and not what needs to be done, so I tell him to let me know what he wants in the new campaign. And I send him all the data from the old campaign so he has a list to choose from and knows what works. And he sends back an email that he's bought a book and he's studying hard and he's about to be an expert.
*headbang* That's just what I need. One more freaking "expert" to deal with.
I'm so tired.
I've heard rumblings throughout the years--rarely and never very loudly, but I've heard them. Rumors that modern life has become too much for most people--both in pace and complexity. I've always just rolled my eyes and dismissed those people trailing behind the times as ridiculously lazy.
I mean, I'm lazy. Ask anyone in my family. I'm one of the world's laziest people. I procrastinate, avoid, hide out in fictional universes, and ignore everything ignorable. And yet, I found it impossible not to keep up with the pace of technology after the PC revolution. If I kept up, just through some kind of osmosis of what was happening in the world around me, then anyone who did not keep up was probably being deliberately stupid.
(I blame a lot of what goes wrong in the world on deliberate stupidity.) (Willful ignorance.) (Blind and blinkered idiocy.)
Anyhow. I'm starting to rethink that belief.
I've come to realize that "owning my own business" is one of the American Dreams because most people are incompetent and incapable--and they blame their failures on "the boss" so they don't have to face up to just how stupid they are.
As I look at the group of 60+ 'Nuts we've been saddled with and picture them in the corporate workplace, I can see why each of them left it, imagine what kind of relief greeted their departure, and see, in the end, why it's a darned good thing for the world that women and minorities are crowding the workplace.
Because I have never witnessed such a sense of entitlement in my life. Never, not even back in the 70s, been the victim of such patronizing misogyny. Never, in all my travels, met such a bunch of self-satisfied losers as the bunch of Old White 'Nutmen that I've seen around here.
I'm just sayin'.
STUPID! GET AWAY FROM ME!
I came in this week to a full schedule for Monday through Thursday. And, when I say full, I mean no lunch breaks or time to blink built in. Full.
First thing this morning, that went by the wayside. Via email, I found Vela commiting me to reviewing someone's campaign and making significant alterations. Which was fine, it only took an hour or so.
And then Vela IM'd me and said, "I know you're busy. I know none of your scheduled projects can be pushed back. I know we're past-due on those commitments."
And then she sobbed that she was between a rock and a hard place, needing some data for this Friday's NIMO meeting--and she tied me up, talking about the project on IM, for an hour. And then of course I had to pull the information she needed, which took another four hours.
Mostly, I blame Jason. I blame the man who told the NIMO committee last week that we could create 20 new campaigns for them--buffet style so that everyone could pick and choose what they were interested in, complete with customized ads--who offered all of this, saying, "...by next Friday, because we're not going to waste a lot of time analyzing data."
Vela is working herself into the ground, trying to get just one of them completed.
As for me, well, today's scheduled 12 hours worth of projects got pushed back to later this week, pushing this week's later projects back to next week--but not before the middle of next week because I have month-end reporting to do Monday and Tuesday. Always assuming I get 2008's year-end reporting completed this week.
Why is Anne blogging if she's so busy, you might ask.
Because I'm sitting here, wigging out. Having a little nervous breakdown.
I don't like today. I'm not good at doing sloppy work. I don't understand. The concept is beyond me.
Vela keeps asking me to "review" what she's doing but "not in detail" and to "broadly" approve it. I can't figure out how to do that, okay?
In fact, I can't do that. It's wrong. What the NIMOs are asking for and what she's creating isn't going to work and even as an example of "how this kind of thing might look" it's so badly off the mark that it makes my head hurt.
I can't approve it. Not even conceptually, okay?
I am not buying in to this. I am not responsible for this. I am not giving my seal of approval for this.
I am neither committing to making this successful nor hinting that any part of this might be even remotely successful.
I am refusing to be a part of this. Is there anyone who understands what I'm trying to say?
I am not taking the fall for this.
But!
I know! They pay me to do what they tell me to do--not to do what's right or what will work or what needs to be done. Just--what they say to do.
But!
It's wrong.
Like a rabbit in the headlights--I can't decide whether to hide or run.
Posted by AnneZook at 04:18 PM | Comments (1)When Gidget was here, my monthly schedule looked like this:
Now that she's not here, my January schedule looks like this:
And I'm not even done adding all the projects I've been committed to doing to next week's schedule.
I'm just saying. Not having as much fun these days.
My job? I'm so far from having time to actually do it that I've pretty much even given up being bitter on the subject. I can't even quite remember what it felt like, to come in every day, work hard, and leave knowing that everything was just a little bit better than it was the day before.
In fast, this week it's been pretty much a full-time job to sit through all the meetings I was scheduled for, and afterwards to make lists of what I was supposed to do. I had no hope at all of actually doing any of it, but I was able to insure that the Task List was comprehensive! If I get hit by a bus, or win the lottery this weekend, whoever gets stuck with my chair has their work cut out for them.
I wanted to blog this week - about Gidget, about the inauguration, about the weather, about a dozen other less momentous but transiently interesting things. All those thoughts are gone now....
BTW, I finally got to see Gidget yesterday. Even though they were letting her out of the hospital* late yesterday afternoon, she was thrilled to hear that I'd planned to come and see her, and I got to go and visit with her for a couple of hours.
She's tired, and pretty wrung out, as you would be after a near-death experience and 14 days in a hospital bed, but they seem to be optimistic that she's improving. She's still on a 24-hour IV drip for antibiotics and whatnot, but I'm sure she feels better today, just being home.
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* Swankiest. Hospital. Ever! All private rooms with couches and patient lounges with fireplaces and I don't know what-all. Free wi-fi all over the place. Not a single hard, plastic chair in sight. No metal coffee urns with burnt coffee dregs stinking the place up.
I think I've finally figured out how not to wig out the rabbits squatting around the landscape. When I need to go outside, if I see one, I just make sure I don't change my pace or the direction I'm walking. As long as they think I don't see them, they're fine.
It's saying something when I say that that discovery is one of the best things that's happened to me this week.
Not a week for good happenings.
I don't think I mentioned that I somehow lost a contact lens last week. Normally, having a contact lens pop out isn't a tragedy--after 30+ years of wearing them, I've gotten pretty good at spotting one of the floor or a chair or whatever. This time--no such luck. I was sitting in a chair in my own living room but the lens had clearly popped itself into some alternate dimension. I've been waiting over a week for the replacement (my insurance covered a whopping $15 of the cost and then I had to pay an extra $9 to have it mailed to me because the alternative was to take two hours off work) and I'm getting aggravated. I only had a spare left lens, and I lost the right lens. I can see reasonably well, but things are just that little fraction "off" - and sitting here staring at a computer screen all day is very tiring.
The insanity continues here at the Argonut Café as all the luNUTics continue to live up to their names. The Argonuts Afield staged (did I tell you this yet?) something of a mutiny last week.
After paying a monthly fee for the last year to have us manage their accounts and after getting customized monthly reports, periodic phone calls, and a 'NutNews update every other week on what we've been doing to accounts and what the results have been so far--well, after all of that, about two weeks ago they all discovered to their (gasp!) horror and (shock!) amazement that we make changes in their accounts!
What did we mean by this? What right did we have? Who gave us permission to do this? What guarantees do they have that no changes have been made that were not improvements? What made us think we knew how to advertise their (franchised) business services? What are we doing? Do we know we have destroyed their businesses? Do we know we are killing them?
For the record? Phone leads - up 53% this year over last year. Written leads - up 39% this year over last year.
If anyone in the reading audience can explain to me how leads being up an average 68% since the economy started nose-diving in September is akin to stabbing someone in the back, I would appreciate it.
And the mutiny continues. All account management has stopped while Vela and Jason hammer out a document telling the NIMOs ('Nuts with Internet Marketing Opinions) what we do, under what circumstances we do it, and what right they have to do their own thing or be notified either in advance or afterwards of what is going on.
It's okay that most of my work is on "hold" though, because approximately 36 hours of my (ostensible) 40-hour work-week have been otherwise occupied this week with sitting in 4-hour meetings (where I try to distill a year's worth of knowledge into 30-second soundbites), running special reports, analyzing over 120,000 lines of data (so far), and otherwise justifying my existence daily while the (previously improving) accounts I am no longer entitled to edit start to lose traction.
And with (get this) fulfilling special requests for three 'Nuts who rely on me for that kind of thing frequently but who still feel free to announce to the other NIMOs, via email and conference call, that I'm practically incompetent and have no idea what I'm doing.
I won't go on. I've already gone on for too long and I've barely scratched the surface.
To add to the week's joys--after a week of silence, I finally heard from Gidget yesterday. She's back in the hospital - third time in the last five months, this time with a serious post-op infection. I hate the idea that I can't let a few days go by without checking on everyone I know, to make sure they're okay.
On that same subject, I checked my personal email a few minutes ago to see that the L-i-K-S sent me an email yesterday to tell me that one of my nieces (Pippi) had a serious car accident this week. She is ok, but lots of cuts and bruising - at least, that's how it sounds. I won't know for certain until I can call them this evening. The car was totaled, but that matters so much less than her being okay, doesn't it?
I'm feeling a little bruised myself at this point, and I still have a two-hour NIMO meeting and another 10,000 lines worth of data to analyze before I'm finished with this week.
Last Sunday, I spent four or five hours trying to get the problems with the home PC fixed. I didn't get done, and there's hasn't been a single evening this week when I've had the energy to tackle the project again. I'm going home just exhausted every night.
The week climaxed (so to speak) with a butt-kicking party at 2:00 today. The relevant butts were mine and Vela's.
The same 'Nut who knows I'm not telling the rest of the Argonuts Afield that they're paying for his leads? Felt free to lecture everyone on how he "bought a book" on Google marketing and now he's an expert.
The same 'Nut who emailed me this morning, saying he really did understand that improving performance is a matter of constant work, data analysis, and incremental steps? Announced to the group that this morning I told him I don't know how I improve performance.
The same 'Nut who took over a campaign I spent six months designing and tweaking because I was incompetent? Told everyone he did it--started his own account, created his own campaign, and is generally just doing all the work himself and doing it exceptionally well.
The same 'Nut I've been giving 5 hours a week worth of attention to for the last month, at the expense of the other 60 'Nuts, because he cried so hard about how he couldn't get any personal attention? Bitched because he's never allowed to talk to anyone or have any input in his marketing.
And, by the way, if I was at all competent, I'd create a magic template they could apply to all their businesses to make them magically and phenomenally successful now and forever and ever.
*Sigh.*
I don't want kudos. Really I don't. I just want not to be called incompetent and an asshole when I'm keeping these people afloat (sometimes in spite of themselves) in a really bad economy.
And now Vela and I have the pleasure of a meeting with Jason on Monday morning--where I am apparently supposed to teach him enough about this magic thing called internet marketing to make him an expert in two hours.
And three conference calls with three specific 'Nuts after that--all three of whom swear they won't survive another week without personal attention.
And we have yet another another butt-kicking party already scheduled for next Friday afternoon.
Someone remind me again--why did I quit drinking?
It's been one of those Longest Day Ever kind of days. I wish it was over.
The week has been--eventful.
Our Problem Bowery Boy, the MadBoy from last week, has been up to more of his tricks. After getting essentially everything he asked for (excepting only the power to direct other people's marketing dollars to his own pocket), and being asked to follow only one rule in return--to leave the account where it was, so that we could make sure his target ad area didn't infringe on anyone else's assigned territory.
Well, you can see what's coming, right? He took everything we gave him and then today he broke the one rule.
I passed notification to my own personal ChaosManager, Vela. She passed it to Jason. And, over my written objections, Vela says they intend to "address" the matter during a conference call this Friday.
Since the topic of the call is something completely different and it's being held with the MadBoy and a group of his peers, I feel that this is counterproductive. I mean, is there any good result likely to come of forcing him to take a public stand? No, there is not. We would be more likely to win our point if we addressed the problem with MadBoy privately, that's what I think.
I don't run this place, though, so it's not my decision.
Another of our wanna-be problem children called earlier this week, working up a head of steam over something he wanted. Since what he wanted was easy and all he had to do was to ask to get it, he was sort of left standing there with mad all over his face, looking stupid.
Jason's idea for reporting for the coming year involves a mile-long spreadsheet full of formulas that compare and contrast things we can affect with things we can't, in an attempt to see if we're reaching impossible goals.
Fortunately for me, my only involvement was running a report out of the Webstrainer program. Someone else has to die of boredom, doing the data entry.
Also? Last week Jason handed Vela the same famous line he gave Gidget last spring. "I don't know if you're the right person for this job."
He doesn't care for the quality of her work? How surprising. I mean, all she did was take on the 40-hour a week job of one employee this summer, then add the 60-hour a week job of another employee around the first of December. All the while trying to take care of her own 60-hour a week job. How can it be that he's finding that the quality of work put out by this department is suffering?
Dork.
It's tough. I mean, I sort of like Jason, you know? Personally, I mean. He has a nice, dry sense of humor. Very understated. But from a business perspective? Not so much. And if he gets rid of Vela? I am so out of here, bills to pay or not. It boggles the mind to think of what kind of person he'd hire--or how much pain they're going to be in, trying to run a six-person department with themselves and 1-1/2 other person and without Vela's three years of experience in the place.
I'll bet he hires a man, too. Our misogynistic Argonuts come to heel like little puppies when it's a man's voice on the phone.
15 more minutes. Will I be able to take it? (It still astonishes me how quickly this went from being a dream job to a nightmare.)
And lo--I was writ down an ass!
Not just an ass, but with a hole on the end of it!
The Argonut Afield (who is, yes, one of the Bowery Boys) who had been accustomed to using Gidget as a whipping post when he lost control of his anger issues? Is going to find out that I am not Gidget.
I forwarded that little jewel of an email* (along with his other badly spelled, all-caps, hysterical reaction to the news that I'm giving him what he's been asking for for the last six months) along to my own personal ChaosManager, Vela, and CEOJason, with a polite note saying that I didn't intend to respond directly to the moron nice man.
The New Year is starting off with a bang!
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* Which consisted only of the words, "YOUR[sic] AN [fill in the expletive],"
Posted by AnneZook at 01:50 PM | Comments (1)