No apologies for the obscure Frasier reference. I love that show.
I forgot to tell you that, the Argonut Café having an Actual Name that's tangentially related to, well, Argonauting, I find boat references sort of funny.
So, when wandering through a craft store a week ago, I spotted an incredibly inexpensive balsa-or-wood (the material is somewhere between those two) model of a sailing ship that you were allowed to assemble and finish yourself, I forked over the six bucks (yes, that's what it cost) and took my new toy home with me.
This weekend, I finally had a couple of hours to sit down, unwrap it, lay the pieces out, and--I know you're expecting my next words to be "assemble it" or even "start assembling it, but they aren't going to be--stare at it in bewilderment.
All of the pieces are there, no problem. There's a picture--unvarnished and unpainted for better reference--of the finished product. I just--can't tell which piece is which or what goes where.
Instructions: "Punch the pieces out from the balsa/wood board they're cut into. Attach to same number (1 to 1, 2 to 2, 3 to 3, etc.) using the picture and diagrams below as reference."
That's all very nice. Simple and clear, right? When I disassemble the pieces, there are handy slots for attaching, so that all seems good. But.
The pieces don't have numbers, not on them. The numbers are on the diagram and you're supposed to figure out (guess?) which piece they apply to. Many of the pieces are very similar in shape with only slight but (I suspect) rather important differences in length or width. It's impossible to tell from the diagram or picture if these two identical pieces are A1 and the two slightly larger pieces are B1, or vice-versa. the diagram isn't that precise.
Thirty minutes into the project, I thought to stop and Ponder Boatness. This led me to the revelation that the assorted pieces needed to be assembled on the framework of the keel (something mentioned nowhere in the instructions but which, in hindsight, I should have assumed from the beginning). You can't just hook "1" to "1" (assuming you figured out which two pieces each had a slot the designer thought of as "1") because you can't just push two pieces of wood together and shout stay! It's not a puppy.
So, I found the keel, found the pieces with slots "1" and "1" (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), placed each (facsimile) "1" on one side of the keel, let them go, and watched them drop to the floor. Not a puppy. Didn't stay.
There are no tabs--none of that Tab A and Slot B stuff. Yes, slots everywhere, but no tabs to push into them. The instructions mention gluing as an option if you want a permanent piece, but not just for assembly.
Another thirty minutes, and now I'm thinking that probably, when they told us to punch the pieces out from the board they were stamp-cut into? They didn't actually intend for us to separate mirror images from each other, even though those were stamp/cut in the same way other pieces were. Because, you see, if you didn't separate the mirror image pieces, then "1" and "1" are already hooked together! Voila!!
Granted, that would have been a better thought before I detached everything, but that was what the instructions said to do and, okay, the pieces wouldn't actually be attached to the keel, so you couldn't actually make a boat but I felt encouraged by this line of thought, even without having solved the problem of which pair of mirror-images had the designer's imaginary "1" on them and which had the "2", etc.)
It took only a few minutes to pick a handful of little strips of balsa-or-wood out of the trash with the idea that these discards might have been intended to do double-duty as pegs to keep "1" and "1" in contact while YES! if you pegged the mirror-image pieces together, then separated them a fraction of an inch, the middle part of the peg would just about fit into a heretofore unexplained slot in the keel and holding the two pieces against it!
That was the theory. It worked, too, except that the (probably makeshift) pegs are a trifle too wide for the slot and tend to break rather than slide in and except that the mirror-image pieces are a little too heavy to be held into place by 1/4" of balsa-or-wood sitting loosely in a 1/2" slot.
It looked right when I was holding the first piece, but when I let it go, it was not a puppy again.
Still. I'm not discouraged. I might have spent 90 minutes on the project and not actually have gotten two pieces attached, but I will try again. I don't think I have ever made a model before, of any kind. It is verrrry interesting.
I mean, you wonder what line of work is actually available to a sociopath in today's modern society, don't you? And then you try to assemble something and you look at the wholly inadequate and frequently outright dishonest instructions, and you know.
So, NewBoss Anais and I showed up at the office at the same time last Friday, only to find out that the fire alarm was going off again. Instead of herding together in the front of the building with the other lost souls, we took off for Starbucks* and a quick latte run. They finally let us in the building around 8:30.
Note to R.C. - You see? Beyond the pleasure of an unanticipated latte, there was no particular value in me having shown up "on time" on Friday.
Then there was one of those obligatory, "it's so-and-so's birthday this week so everyone is going out to lunch on Friday" gatherings that ate up another 90 minutes of my day.
And there was another obligatory get-together in the conference room at 4:00, the reason for which I never quite grasped but inferred was related to something that happened about a month ago. We all had a glass of champagne, including me!
Not one of my more productive days, Friday, but not at all my fault.
The weekend was fun. Not wildly eventful, but fun. A trip to the Container Store where I finally broke down and bought one of the bookcases I've been coveting for the last two years. I also picked up some planet-killing stackable plastic drawers to organize some stuff in the closet. Tab: $220.00. Winces.
The drawers were just the kind of thing. Everything I needed to have fit in them did fit and it freed up a lot of space in the bottom half of the closet since I was able to remove a fairly massive but un-functional chest. (Unimportant except to me, since what I was working toward was enough vertical space for things like my pants to be able to hang without creasing.)
I disassembled and discarded** the last two black plastic bookcases in my bedroom. As I had hoped, the single wood bookcase held all of those books and has room for more. It's very exciting--I swear the room looks twice as big. Just replacing black with white lightened the entire room up--the black color had a lot of "weight" to it. And it's so tidy! The plastic bookcases wasted a lot of space both above the books on each shelf and in front of them. It's much more compact now.
And then it started to snow.
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* This was a good thing. I didn't know that Starbucks was there - it's almost within walking distance!
** Not in the trash. First floor lobby with a "free to a good home" label on them. As usual, someone wanted them and they were gone in an hour.
I like arriving in the office in the morning, opening my email, and finding some nitwit shouting at me because I haven't "fixed" something I told him was out of my control.
Yeah. I like that.
Next to that, I like opening the next email on the page and finding that someone else who doesn't understand the problem has promised that I'll "fix" it today.
Yeah, I really like that.
That was how last Friday started. Fortunately it got better after that, but I seem to be having a little trouble getting over it.
Today started off with me pouring soup on the kitchen floor when I tried to pack my lunch. I had to stop and mop up, which made me 20 minutes late to work.
I'd feel guiltier about that if it wasn't for the fact that I wasn't the last one in, not by a long ways. This place is pretty casual about that sort of thing. Whoever is covering the reception phones is supposed to be in by 8 or before but the rest of us straggle in as the mood takes us. Since I don't consider punctuality a particularly interesting or worthwhile 'virtue' I like to work places where there's a lot of -ish to that 8 am start time. I'm reasonably capable of arriving at the office around 8-ish.
This irritates the heck out of the R.C. She feels that if the official start time to a work day is 8:00, then you should be at your desk, computer booted up and bright smile pasted on your face by at least 7:55. Me, I say that if you look back two weeks ago on Tuesday and you can't remember who came in "on time" and who was either five minutes late or five minutes early? Then it's not really important, is it?
Today we also had a little fire drill here at the office. Not exactly a drill, since the alarm sounding was neither planned nor expected by any of us, but nevertheless it went off and we trooped cheerfully outside to soak in some sunshine. Ten or fifteen minutes later we were still enjoying the sunshine because the firemen hadn't arrived.
Someone called the building management company (I don't know why they didn't call the firemen, so don't ask) who apparently contacted the fire department to tell them there might and/or might not be an actual fire and that we'd all appreciate it if they could fit us into their apparently busy schedules.
Obviously, since I have the time to blog about soup on the floor, there was no fire. I don't know what triggered the alarm. They didn't show up because no one invited them to the party.Turns out that some essential connection between our alarm system and the fire house wasn't working and the firemen didn't know we'd been alarmed.
To do them credit, once they got here, they cleared the building for us all to get back to work in about five minutes, but still. Most of them weren't even very cute, which has to be against some kind of fireman regulation, don't you think?
Bernie called yesterday and I promised to take a look at a potential campaign for a potential new client. He gave me a chance to bail out--to say I didn't have time. I didn't take it. Temporary insanity or something, I don't know.
Anyhow. With luck, he won't close the deal--this one is in a completely different industry than the last one and these stand-alone campaigns are a lot harder to make successful than my other ones are.
The words, "please" and "thank you" are rarely out of place. Even, or maybe especially, in online communications.
Treat others with a little respect and they will usually return the favor.
That is all.
Killer insomnia last night. The last time I checked the clock, it was 2:45.
Couldn't have been physical - I cleaned out yesterday, sorting papers and books, organizing and throwing out (two giant leaf bags!), doing some cleaning and three loads of laundry, all of which took several hours.
Hmmm., I'll admit that while I felt pleasantly tired yesterday evening, I didn't feel precisely worn out. Maybe I was getting less physical exercise than I thought? Still. My bed felt comfy and my pillow felt snuggly. I just couldn't sleep. My brain & body just didn't feel sleepy.*
Possibly it was my diet - I experimented with new recipes yesterday and ate a weird assortment of things all day. While they were all quite delicious, it's more than possible that I overdid it--either on sheer quantity or on variety of ingredients.
Or, it could have been the fact that I slept in on Sunday morning--until 9:15! I can't remember the last time I slept in that late….
To put it all into perspective, of course, I should mention that I contacted DiamondGirl about doing some freelance stuff for me--some of the Gidget work that I don't like and don't want to mess with--and she told me that she's been fighting H1N1 since mid-December. Shudder. She's been sick for a month already and in spite of sounding like she should be in a hospital bed when we talked today, she swore that she's light-years better than she was a couple of weeks ago.
So, what else?
Well, the weekend was fun--I had a shopping spree on Saturday, the likes of which I haven't had in quite a long time. I got a new clock-radio, two $4 t-shirts, a new humidifier, new mascara, and some chocolate. (Okay, put like that, it doesn't sound quite so extravagant, but I swear it felt like an indulgence.) I did the aforementioned tidying, sorting, and cleaning on Sunday, a task that always leaves me feeling satisfied and a bit less claustrophobic in what is, after all, a reasonably spacious apartment for two people
Part of what I sorted out for donation is, yes, more books. Had to be done--they're the only thing I have left in significant bulk.
What I should have cleaned out but didn't were all of the sketching and drawing supplies. With me, every new hobby used to be a pretext for shopping and I have an assortment of pens, pencils, paper, and tools that would do credit to a professional artist. If I'm not going to use them, I really should donate them, but that's a step I haven't brought myself to take yet.
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* I feel sleepy enough now to make up for it. I'd ask NewBoss Anais for permission to go home and take a nap but I have this terrifying suspicion that napping this afternoon would lead to another sleepless night.
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P.S. That was at 11:00 this morning. Now it's 1:30. I just ate lunch and decided that the abundance of jalapeno peppers might have been the reason for the insomnia. That was hot.
I don’t even remember how long it’s been since I blogged. (It's not because my newest game in the Series That Ate 2009 has been sucking down my brain. I swear!)
I’m guessing it was before my stupidworkcomputer conked out on me. It was never the same after the Great Virus Infestation of ’09* and I finally went to our pseudo-IT guy this week and demanded that something be done to fix it and he told me to pick a computer from the ones sitting around unused and swap out the boxes for myself.
Sometimes I fantasize about being the R.C.--she's never worked at a place that didn't have a full IT staff and no one has ever told her to "do it yourself" when she's had a computer problem.
It's possible that the pseudo-IT guy was irritated with me because he had to deal with the Great Virus Infestation, but if it weren't for viruses and whatnot, many IT people would lack employment.* *
Anyhow. I swapped out my box for the one Gidget used to use and I've been dancing between the two of them all week because I didn't have email access on the swapped box until today. Not that I actually mind not having constant access to my email. I only remember to look at it every couple of hours even when it's sitting open on my desktop.
My point is that now I'm stuck with Wnidwos 2007, a fate I've successfully avoided for the last two years. Sigh. I'm waving good-bye to the thoroughly tested and rock-stable Windows XP and staring with loathing at the idiocy of poorly constructed "ribbons" replacing my familiar, compact, and easy-to-use menu bars. * * *
This week it was numbers, numbers, numbers all week long. Not that it isn't always, but more than that. End of month numbers. End of year numbers. 2008 vs 2009 comparative statistics. My head is spinning from all the numbers--most of them don't make sense to me any more. Long, statistical story short - written leads are up a bit from last year, calls are down a bit from last year, making it all a wash--and the 'Nuts both in and outside the Home Café are whining about how revenue has nosedived.
I'm bewildered--we lost half a dozen or more (low-performance) locations but leads are up at our most productive locations. Unfortunately, I'm probably the only person here who makes a concerted and organized attempt to track ROI, so no one knows where the money went. In the end, I've decided to decide that it must all have something to do with the part of our business model that has nothing to do with me. An SEP is the best kind of P.
NewBoss Anais visited my quiet little corner of the Café earlier today. She wanted to talk about a bonus program. They'd like to bonus me on results that improve over last year.
I wasn't sure what to say.
I do think that before they start talking bonus money, they might reinstate the 15% pay cut they gave me last year, don't you? I mean, at this moment my salary is easily 25-40% below the market value for what I do (not including the industry and specific company knowledge I have) so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask them to get my paycheck back to where it was when they hired me.* * * * I'm not even expecting them to adjust for inflation.
In the end, I told her that no matter what metric they selected, I would be able to juggle the numbers to "prove" that I'd earned a bonus and that I preferred not to be put in that position.* * * * * Then I reminded her that, in my job, at least 50% of what I do is significantly affected by forces outside my control, making "success" rather hard to attain.
Also, I hate that kind of thing. The perception that I could do my job better if I only bothered to, that irritates me.
I suspect I have a weird attitude toward money.
Also, I'm pissy about CEOJason's little speech during our last all-company meeting. He congratulated everyone on getting all the necessary work done in 2009, even though he'd cut the staff by 50%. He said these results proved that the Café had been over-staffed. No one spoke up (although I badly wanted to) to point out that his simultaneous decision to eliminate twenty time-sapping, money-sucking special projects had been a significant factor in the ability of the remaining employees to get through the necessary work.
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* Did I blog that? It happened right before Christmas. Sadly this catastrophic event was triggered by my own stupidity in goofing off at the office—surfing around and reading books online on a site that turned out to be infected.
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* * But I maintain that it's not my fault that they weren't running a decent virus program on the stupid network. I ran a full system scan with their software and it swore my computer wasn't infected--the dialogue box clearly said so, as nearly as I could tell in the middle of a deluge of browser windows popping open to share bad pr0n images.
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* * * I don't care if you can minimize the stupid ribbon. Minimized, it doesn't have any functionality at all. Maximized, it eats 10%-15% of your screen space with distracting and useless graphics. I do not approve of software companies joining the conspiracy against text.
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* * * * It was okay to underpay me when they hired me because I had no clue what I was doing. It was not okay not to deliver on the pay raise I should have received after I trained myself and produced a 40% increase in leads that first year, it was not particularly okay for them to force through a 15% pay cut last year, and it's certainly not okay for them to act, today, as though my current base salary is an acceptable rate of pay for what I bring to the table.
This 'do more with less' trend, of course, is a thing that has pissed me off since it was invented by Reagan and his cadre of criminal cronies. It is not okay. I am not a labor unit and I decline to be downsized, outsourced, or reimagined as a less-valuable asset. There is a limit, beyond which I will refuse to continue doing the work of two or three people for the salary of 2/3 of a person. It's becoming a matter of principle and, for someone who values a quiet life as much as I do, it's becoming surprisingly important to me that I actually speak out against being treated this way--not by the Argonut Café in particular, but on behalf of every worker in this country who has been tricked into accepting this as the natural way of things.
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* * * * * Naturally I would never juggle the numbers that way, but the bottom line is that accepting their proposition would put me in the position, every single day, of putting the welfare of a company that would dump me in a heartbeat ahead of my own welfare.
This goes along with the discussion just above--companies show no loyalty to their staff (the Café laid off an employee of 18 years with no more emtion than they showed toward getting rid of the guy who had been here for four months) and expect increasingly ridiculous levels of loyalty and sacrifice in return.
Posted by AnneZook at 04:47 PM | Comments (3)Happy holidays! I hope everyone out there in the electronic world had a great time over the past few days and that Santa Claus brought you everything your little hearts could desire!*
Me? I cleaned up. A four-day weekend, a new DS game, new books, and other assorted whatsits to play with and/or eat. What's not to love?
I'm not big on official "resolutions" (why wait until the end of the year to make changes if you think they need to be made?) but I've been contemplating the Best Of--or, rather, a Best Discovery Of sort of thing.
The Best Discovery Of 2007 was a show called Clean House. During the First Great 21st Century Sabbatical, it provided much-needed impetus for me to get off my butt and clean out some of the accumulated debris of fifty years of living. (Because I live on the event horizon of a black hole or near the epicenter of a time warp or something, the flotsam and jetsam turned out to be limitless, but it gives me something to do when the weather is bad, right?)
The Best Discovery Of 2008 came last October when I discovered a show called What Not To Wear. Aside from the fun of mocking the show's victims, I found there was much to be learned. Practically nothing that was in my wardrobe in October of 2008 is in my wardrobe today.
The Best Discovery(ies) of 2009 are less life-improving but just as much, or more, fun.
There were three or four versions of Harvest Moon (The Game That Ate 2009) (I received yet another variation for Christmas!), there's a recently discovered show called Glee. and the year-long favorite Corner Gas, a little Canadian sitcom ("Time well-wasted.") that has me enchanted. (I got S6!)
Thanks to a friend of the R.C.'s, we discovered Hungry Girl. We have both tried and enjoyed recipes from the cookbook already (and the R.C. never cooks!) with at least two dozen more marked for trial. Since I have another five--or maybe ten--pounds I want to take off, a "diet" cookbook with recipes this delicious definitely comes in as a Discovery. I mean, cooking! I'm not good at it, but I do love to mess around in the kitchen. What fun to be able to mess around without packing on the pounds!
It's fun to contemplate the new things that have entered my life in the last few months. Probably more fun for me than for you, but that's okay. The internets are currently telling me that my blog site is down anyhow, so you aren't actually having this inflicted on you....
Two hours later - It's back! I'm inflicting!
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* I did intend to log on and wish y'all the best of the season before it was all in the past, but my head got befuddled on Wednesday by a very nasty virus attack on my work computer.
Seriously. What is the point? And what's with the redirects to pr0n sites? (So very Twentieth Century.) Are you seriously telling me there are still people out there who find some kind of satisfaction in that kind of thing?
Anyhow. After that, I got frustrated on Thursday, trying to fix the sound on my home laptop before I got distracted by some freelance work, and so on and so on and so on.
Minor thoughts I'm bored enough to share....
#1 - The R.C. introduced me to a new restaurant last week. Andre's is, from what I'm told, one of those long-time institutions, and one of the R.C.'s favorite-ever dining places. (Her excuse for not having introduced me to in any time in the last twenty years or so was that she thought it had closed.) (Right.) It's a fabulous little prix fixe patisserie tucked away just off of a major thoroughfare. It has atmosphere. I love a non-chain restaurant, don't you?
#2 - Those of us toiling away at the Argonut Café are getting a four-day weekend at New Year's as well. While I love the idea of having such lovely, long weekends, the (teeny-tiny) mature part of me knows that the remaining winter months, with no holidays at all, are going to be long and gray.
#3 - The first season of Glee is due to be released on DVD at the end of this month. The R.C. has it on pre-order, so I'll be able to get caught up before the new season starts (in April, I think). In the meantime, the network is showing two episodes this Wednesday evening and two next Wednesday, so I can get started watching ever before I get started getting caught up.
#4 - I did not practice Frugality around Christmas this year. Considering that I only really exchange gifts with the R.C. (and send small gifts to the L-i-K-S, Rapunzel, and Pippi), there are an astonishing number of packages under our little Christmas tree. While many of them are of the very small "stocking stuffer" variety, another heaping helping are not. So far I have refrained from poking, prodding, or shaking any of the interestingly shaped boxes. I'm very trustworthy that way.
#5- One of the aforementioned parcels, embarrassingly enough, is from NewBoss Anais, someone for whom I not only didn't buy a gift, but didn't send a card.
#6 - Another friend surprised me with a bag of very good coffee. I like knowing someone thought of me and do try to accept gifts in that spirit, but I'm always flustered when gifted from someone with whom I have not previously made gift exchange plans and, yes, I'm aware that this sentence could have been more graceful but I don't care that much.
#7 - The R.C. was insufficiently inventive when it came to providing a wish list for gifts this year. I had to take some chances and I'm a bit concerned about one or two of them.
#8 - Gidget and I don't gift, but I did manage to convincer her not to pay me for The Gidget Co work this month. She's short of money at the moment, so that amount really will be useful to her. Anyhow, I finally remembered to bill Bernie for the work I did this fall so I'm flush, and as I told her repeatedly, I haven't had that much time to spend on her accounts the last three weeks and I'd be ashamed to take money at this point.
#9 - When I lunched with Gidget and Vela last week, one of them mentioned the rumor that CEOJason had gotten canned. I can vouch for the fact that he's still showing up here every day, but the rumor (they have a pipeline into the Shadow Board that rules us all) does have me wondering....
#10 - I don't think I mentioned the Argonut Café Holiday get-together, did I? It was the evening of the 11th, at ChaosManager Daenna's home. Each member of the 10-person staff here at the Café was warned that there would be two dozen attendees and asked to bring enough of their dish (it was a pot-luck) to feed twenty. I suspect I'm the only person who thought about it and realized that if ten people each bring food for twenty, you have enough food to feed two hundred people--especially taking into account the American hostess's ever-present fear that there Won't Be Enough* which she inevitably insures against by providing a ham, two pies, home-made cookies, and six kinds of dinner rolls. We ate, they played pool or foosball or air hockey and then, endless hours later, we played a gift game--a variation of the dreidel game--and I wound up with two free movie tickets, big thrill, then everyone was getting tipsy and it was 11:00 p.m., so I went home. The end.
#11 - The last week or so, work has been a peculiar mixture of urgent tasks and "nothing to do." Because of the holidays, people who might ordinarily be searching for our services are now searching for things almost but not quite what we do. It would be a mistake, as I keep telling myself, to interpret any of the stats for the latter half of December as representative. So, basically I'm either doing four things at once, or sneaking over to read H. Rider Haggard novels online. I don't normally (aside from the occasional blog entry) goof off on company time. I'm not sure I really enjoy it, either. I think the days pass much more quickly when I'm working.
#12 - Am I lame if my favorite-ever Christmas movie is A Muppet Christmas Carol?
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* Culturally, Americans seem to have some kind of weird issue around enoughness. Our entire society sometimes seems fixated on getting what's there to be gotten before there's not enough left to go around.
Without getting excessively political, I still want to say that I'm amused that the major oil contracts in Iraq are not being awarded to Chump & Cheney's Corporate Cohorts or, indeed, any US-based oil companies.
Right now, Dick and George are probably sitting there, stewing--thinking that killing a hundred thousand or so Iraqis should have done the trick and wondering what a guy's gotta do these days to get a guaranteed payoff.
So, yesterday's joys included the 'NutNews--which was supposed to go out on Friday but then they're supposed to give me 24 hours for coding and proofreading and I didn't even get the files until 3:00 Friday afternoon. This edition may and/or may not have gone out error-free--I just didn't have time to care.
Yesterday's joys also included an appointment with HairMan originally scheduled for 4:00 but then moved to 11:00 am to accommodate his schedule. Carving 1-1/2 hour out of the middle of my day is stressful for me. While I generally do eat lunch, I couldn't be said to stop working while I chew. (My brain was so out of kilter that I stiffed HairMan on the tip. I left him a message this morning apologizing and promising to make it up to him next time. So embarrassing.)
Since yesterday's joys also included a request from NewBoss Anais to create and activate a campaign to cover the Southernest DIY 'Nut's location (he just closed his doors)--a campaign intended to run for one or two weeks while she waits for 3Dorks to get their highly automated process up and running--well, it was Monday all day long yesterday.
Seriously. How stupid is that? I can barely start getting real traction in a normal 7-14 day period, much less a time when two major holidays are distracting the entire country from getting any work done. I kept wondering if it was really worth eight hours of my time to create a campaign that might generate one phone call in the next two weeks?
And! Then she comes to my desk, at noon today, and tells me that 3Dorks might actually be able to get their act together in a timely fashion (for a change) and that their campaign should be active today or tomorrow. So, yes, the campaign I finally got activated at 10:00 this morning might get shut off at 5:00 this afternoon.
I don't normally mind having a busy day--not even if there are conflicting projects to be done.
What really fried my brain cells and created chaos in what passes for my mind these days was the discovery, as I walked into the office yesterday morning, that I'd donned black shoes, a gray shirt, a black jacket, and a pair of very distinctly blue pants.
Even as late as 5:00 yesterday afternoon I was sitting here thinking that I'd be willing to do the entire day over again if I could get a do over to dress myself properly, remember to tip the guy who worked me into his holiday schedule on a couple of days' notice, etc. Sigh. I suck.
At the moment, I'm ignoring about 30 emails in my (work) in-box. Whatever those people want, they can wait for tomorrow or even next week. I can't deal with it today.
But!
Holidays!
With a four-day weekend coming up, I'm prepared to really relax and enjoy the holidays this year. This is the first time I haven't been unemployed or on a Major Frugality Plan during the holidays in--I'm not sure--maybe four or five years? And a four-day weekend! It was nice of the Argonut Café to give us Christmas Eve off, since they couldn't afford bonuses or even reinstating our original pay levels.
I'm still working my way toward the quasi-completion of two Harvest Moon games, the R.C. got the new Zelda game earlier this month and we're both working on it, I treated myself to a new book last week and I want to get time to read it, etc. I have big plans for the long weekend.
Most of which don't involve spending money--at some point in the next 30-60 days I need to get some major work done on my car, which needs both struts and a new clutch. I'm guessing, two or three thousand for all of it. Wincing. Even reminding myself that I'll probably be able to keep driving this car for another five or six years doesn't really ease the pain.
In the "free, but annoying" category, I have to take the laptop back to the repair shop again. The sound on the CD/DVD player doesn't work any more--it was fine until I took it in for them to fix a busted power switch, but hasn't worked since. (I'm getting my money's worth out of that extended warranty I bought.)
We're supposed to get weather tonight and tomorrow. Not as frigid as the last round--eighteen above instead of below for the low, but an unknown amount of snow. It always worries me when the weather forecasters won't guess at how much snow is coming. Sometimes we wind up with a foot or more.
On a final, happy note, I should point out that after having ignored the PC speakers Gidget left behind when she was laid off--ignored them for the last year--I thought to move them to my desk last Friday.
I have sound! I brought in some CDs. This morning I had the Brandenburg Concertos and this afternoon I'm having Strauss waltzes.
More sensibly, it also means I can finally view some of those training and education videos that Webstrainer shares so freely.
After a leisurely two-hour lunch with Gidget and (former boss) Vela, I went to get back into my car and I got a leg cramp! I had to stand up to make it go away!
Yes, that's what passes for drama in my life these days.
What can I say? I'm done with my holiday shopping, I mailed my cards, I've even finished my wrapping, all but one small gift. I survived the office party (so boring), made the long-overdue appointment to get my gray roots banished, got (mostly) caught up on my free-lance work, and even remembered to invoice Bernie for the last three months' work I've done for him.
I fell in love with a new television show (Glee) and have found online episodes I can watch. I'm working my way toward the "end" (as much as these have an "ending") of both Harvest Moon Island of Happiness and Cute. (Harvest Moon: The Game That Ate 2009!)
I finished fringing four more scarves for my ongoing personal Warm Necks For the Needy program. (I'm getting better at it - there are a couple of these I wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen in myself). I have two more scarves underway--both with self-invented (or at least "discovered") patterns and an idea for another one (pattern, I mean, not scarf) (although I suppose it's much the same thing). I bought a circular needle and am dabbling with the notion of hats--I have a lot of yarn to use up from a 2007 buying spree.
This year, I seem to be receiving the gift of peace for the holidays. My life is largely uneventful. I'm so pleased.
I finally finished month-end reporting for November. I was grouching around, moaning about how bad 'my' numbers look when it occurred to me to lay them out beside the October numbers. And, lo! The November numbers are bad, but they're about 20% less horrible than the October numbers were!
Of course, me being me, I'm not satisfied that I've regained three months' lost ground in the last month. I expected more out of me than that.
Still.
Next up? A real challenge.
Two bits of background:
#1 - If we all cast our minds back two years, we'll all remember that I was originally hired because the Argonuts Afield, whose campaigns were under management by Doodledorks, didn't like the results they were getting.
#2 - For the last year or more, I've been grouching around and moaning about needing landing pages--website pages specifically designed to service search engine advertising traffic.
Caught up? Okay.
TeamChaos has been testing the landing page concept with 3Dorks (the third incarnation of Doodledorks) for the last three months. It's been proven (I think) that a "landing page" does, in fact, produce the major increase in leads that I told them it would produce.
However, in spite of the impressive results, CEOJason remains unconvinced. He's uncertain of whether it's the landing page idea/design, or if 3Dorks is just better at it than I am.*
His idea is to get 3Dorks to set us up with landing pages just like the ones they've been using, and for me to manually manage campaigns toward them. This, in CEOJason's mind, will prove once and for all if the Argonut Café needs to find the dough for landing page design and implementation (not a small or inexpensive undertaking), or if they can just replace me with this same automated system.**
Yes! It means that they're considering going back to what didn't work two years ago--because going backwards will be cheaper than doing what it takes to move ahead.
If you're ever wondering why 'small' businesses in the US tend to fail? Remember that this is not the first place I've worked where the owners put the company in reverse because going forward was too scary.
I've also been grouching around and moaning about the weather for the past three days. All I want, I thought to myself repeatedly, is temps in double digits. Is that too much to ask? I just want to wake up in a place where it's not two below zero. And, lo! When I got up this morning? Negative thirteen! Double digits.
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* As I told NewBoss Anais, to a certain extent, yes, they're better at it than I am. It's software, okay? It's all automated for them--micromanaged 24/7. In-house, it's just me and a keyboard, forty hours a week.) (They provide more results, but I provide better quality results. Agencies toss up a lot of chaff with the wheat because automated systems aren't designed for nuances.
** No, of course they didn't say it that way. But it seems pretty obvious, don't you think?
Sadness #1 - It's the slow season at the Argonut Café. That means we're drinking that ghastly five-pound jug of F*lg*rs so-called coffee that someone bought when they were in a rush one day, instead of the marginally better C0stc0 blend. Because people are stupid, they keep the F*lg*rs in the freezer when it's not in use. (Never, never, never freeze coffee!) (Not that I suppose it makes much difference if it's F*lg*rs.)
Plans to switch to Starbucks (under the theory that with only half the number of employees, the cost wouldn't be prohibitive) stalled on November's low sales revenue.
Sadness #2 - I thought it was bad when it was two Thursday morning, but then it was minus two this morning, so, perspective. It's 33 degrees right now. People around the city are pausing to note our brief return to unfrozen temperatures. The next mercury nosedive comes tonight and temperatures will stay below freezing until the middle of next week.
Sadness #3 - The streets are largely clean and dry, with occasional patches of ridiculously slick ice where you least expect them. This will change on Sunday, as the next storm system moves in and hangs around through Tuesday.
In other news, I took yesterday off to do some free-lance work and finish up my holiday shopping. I got no work done, but about 75% of the shopping taken care of, so that's one for the plus column.
Today is both Friday and payday. Another positive note.
If I make it to the grocery store tomorrow, I'll have not one, but two new recipes to experiment with on Cooking Sunday! The R.C.'s all-time favorite food is chicken pot pie. She found one or two lower-calorie recipes for it that I'm looking forward to messing with.
My all time favorite foods are probably fois gras and truffles. I can't afford truffles and I have moral and ethical qualms about fois gras, so I can't have it.*
I mention these things because the R.C. brought home a catalogue yesterday that offered fois gras, truffles (both black and white), a selection of caviars, and some truly impressive patés.
There was a moment when my fate trembled in the balance--when I was poised between having ethics and having an entire plateful of fois gras, all to myself. (I almost convinced myself than an entire lifetime of boycotting veal was enough morality for one person.) (Almost.) (*sulk*)
I don't even like geese. They're loud and dirty and mean. (Not, you know, that cows are any more likeable, but veal is baby cows. That's just wrong.)
Plans for the weekend include the usual frivolities (laundry, house cleaning, and cooking) along with seasonal pleasures (holiday cards and some gift wrapping).
Well, SSB**, but that's how it is sometimes. Have a good weekend!
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* More accurately, I don't go out of my way to have it. I mean, I don't let myself buy it. I wouldn't order it in a restaurant, in the unlikely event of my going to a restaurant swanky enough to offer it.
Obviously if I were at a friend's home and they served it up, common decency and good manners would compel me to scarf it up, beg for seconds, and still be talking about it a year later.
** Sorry So Boring
Well, to begin with, I'm this week's winner in the, "I Really Suck At What I Do" category. Again.
Ohmigodsoboring story really short:
Of the fourteen 'Nut campaigns I worked on last week, half improved and half slid down into the sub-basement of performance. Of the nineteen 'Nut campaigns I did not get to last week? Half improved and half slid down into the sub-basement of performance.
If I'd laid in bed all last week, eating bon-bons and reading trashy novels, I'd be right where I am now. (Only, you know, with chocolate all over the sheets.)
After four hours of data analysis this morning, I can confidently say that, after those bid increases I told you about, if I'd done nothing else since, all of the campaigns would look better today than they do.
I have trust issues, okay? And I have bigger trust issues with me than with anyone else. That one I know ever believes I know what I'm talking about or know what I'm doing--that's always been a constant in my life.* So much so that I've internalized it and I doubt myself before anyone else has a chance to doubt me.
In this case, it just never occurred to me that I might be doing it more or less "right" and that only the 'Nuts' collective allergy to high bids was to blame for the performance slide.
I guess I'll just write it all off to "education."
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* I am the Incompetent One. I adopted this role early in life, largely at my mother's urging. She was a woman for whom excelling meant "showing off," especially if you were a girl, and she discouraged that sort of thing. Frequently and firmly. (Girls who show off or seem to be too smart don't get husbands, you know.) If you're a child who, through no fault of their own (genetics or something), is prone to excelling but is willing to do anything for a quiet life, you easily develop the habit of never being "good" at anything.
Also? People like you better if they're better at things than you are. Many of the long-term friendships in my life have been based on me discovering what someone felt was their "specialty" and then making certain, for however many years necessary, that I was always about 50% "worse" at it than they were.
For example, Gidget feels we make a great team because I can't write, which she likes to do, and I'm good at things involving numbers, projects she doesn't like. The fact that the opposite is true--I love trying to write and hate messing with numbers--is something I'm willing to lay aside in my relationship with her.
I am the Incompetent One. As long as I keep my friendships tightly compartmentalized, it works for me. I mean, sure, I set myself up for failure sometimes, but I'm not a doctor or anything, so I can live with the consequences.
What started me off on this tangent, anyhow?
Probably my desire to think about anything but all that wasted time last week....
I'm sorry for the long silence (although I don't imagine any of you are sorry to have missed five or six episodes of whining and ranting about the same ol' stuff).
Boring story short--I'm still working on shoving us back to the Quality A-List.
The bid increases did a lot to pull in more traffic and more-or-less stop the meltdown.
Now I'm going through each campaign, word by word, researching six months worth of ad data to find the best ads for each word in each separate campaign, then reloading them as single-word "groups" (that's the simplest way I can think of to put it) with the corresponding "good" ads. This should give each campaign's performance scores a quick boost. I've done that for about half of them so far.
I knew that the words were absolutely key in these campaigns so I can't imagine why it never occurred to me to look at the data sorted in this precise way before one of our Webstrainer reps suggested it last Tuesday. It was, to say the least, enlightening.
It turns out that I've been deleting ads that were superstar performers for some words, and retaining other ads that had no business being associated with other words.
Okay, so it takes at least twice as long to evaluate the data this way. It's the right way to do it. I'm sure I'll get used to it.
Word First! That's my new slogan.
By some time next week, the extra traffic we seduced Webstrainer into serving will start to evaporate unless the campaign's performance justifies keeping us on the fast track, but it's taken me six days to get fourteen campaigns done and I don't see any way I can do the other nineteen in the three work days available to me next week.
Yes, I do have a long weekend, but I really need to spend next Friday working on The Gidget Co campaigns and on Bernie's campaign. There are some of Gidget's campaigns I haven't touched for two weeks and I'm interested in looking at Bernie's campaign in this new way I was discussing a moment ago.
In the meantime, I'm fending off NewBoss Anais with a whip and a chair. She wants two more 'Nuts to join the in-house Webstrainer Train and I just don't have time. One is a 'Nut who bailed out six months ago and hasn’t had any campaign. The other is the Southernest DIY 'Nut (and the least nutty of the three) who has been DIYing for six weeks and should now be understanding why this is not a game for amateurs. And while that's fine and more work means more job security, blah, blah, blah, I just can't allow myself to be distracted at the moment.
And there's another bunch o'Nuts, in the Flat Crazy State, whose campaign (which I have never seen) is managed by an outside, local agency, but who still, for reasons that I really don't care about, think that emailing me with their questions is the correct procedure.
I don't know, okay? I don't know what you're advertising because I don't know what you told your agency you wanted to advertise. I don't know what's working or not working because I haven't seen what you're doing.
And, no, I can't send you "benchmarking" data because, 1) you haven't shared any data with me in six months, and, 2) since I don't know what you're doing, I wouldn't know what to benchmark.
Naturally, this was wigging me out, but my actual meltdown didn't occur until the 'Nut forwarded--get this--forwarded an email from Gidget, from March, of 2008, and lectured me on how I should provide them with that kind of data. (And then asked a question about the email in such a way as to make it obvious that this is the first time they've followed up on it since they received it eighteen months ago.)
There were five full-time people in this department in March of 2008, okay? Today there's just me and NewBoss Anais--and she spends most of her time on "business development" and not marketing.
After I tossed a minor hissy fit at NewBoss Anais, she gave me permission to ignore that last email, at least for a while.
Anyhow. Nineteen more campaigns to fix. No time for blogging.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:20 PM | Comments (13)I'm bursting at the seams with stress. (Picture a double-stuff oreo where the creamy filling is sort of acid-reflux green.) *
I ate breakfast. Then I ate my morning snack. Then I ate my afternoon snack. I'm afraid to eat any more. I might be sick.
In the "will wonders never cease" category, Webstrainer actually sent me an email (well, okay, they responded to a reminder from me, but I've learned they don't follow up unless I nag) saying they do have some suggestions. We scheduled a call (90 minutes from now) and all I can do is sit here--churning and waiting.
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* Seriously? What would you wish for? That they'd find a big mistake on your part--because then you'd have been incompetent, but you could fix it?
Or that they'd find it's all about the DIY 'Nuts? Because then you'd rock, but the accounts would still be trash.
Posted by AnneZook at 01:10 PM | Comments (2)Last Wednesday, at the urging of my 'better self' (and after two specific requests from NewBoss Anais), I contacted our three DIY 'Nuts and requested that they clean up their blasted campaigns.
The first guy I contacted argued with me--he thought that because he undersood what he intended, his brain waves are somehow psychically transferred through to Webstrainer and on to ten million web searchers. It took me two days, but I finally convinced him and he removed a hundred or so low-score keywords. (He does not seem to have taken my pointed remarks about campaign organization or ad performance on board.)
The second guy was all, I haven't been paying attention, but I'll go look at things, which was annoying but at least he responded. Eventually he removed a handful of the bad words but left around 100 of them active. Which was useless.
I'm still waiting to hear back from MadBoy's Mad Offspring. He hasn't done anything at all so far about the 200+ poor quality words in his campaign.
Why these drastic steps, you ask? Why are you, Anne, notoriously 'Nut-adverse, reaching out in this fashion?
Because all I've done for over a week, by way of management on my 30 campaigns, is sit here and delete low score keywords. Almost all of our best-performing words, in fact.
Long story short, a conference call with Webstrainer early last week confirmed that a lot of "my" problem with my nosediving quality scores was the DIY 'Nut campaigns dragging the entire company down with them.
Last week, I pitched a major fit at NewBoss Anais. When I managed 45 accounts and we had one DIYer, the good I did far outweighed the bad he did. Now that I manage 30 accounts, and we've had four or five craptasic DIY campaigns running for several months this year, the balance has tipped. (Webstrainer is always quicker to shut you down for poor or even potentially poor performance than they are to give you a second chance--with ten hundred thousand people clamoring for placement on their pages, they don't need to loosen up their standards for the also-rans.)
I could, of course, sneak around and work on Gidget Company accounts, but my handy-dandy offline tool has started popping fatal error messages at me every time I try to download a new account. If I can't download the accounts, I can't work on them.
For those of you wondering what happened in that MadBoy call with the Webstrainer rep a couple of weeks ago?
Not much.
MadBoy didn't attend, but his Mad Offspring was there. The M.O. had no interest in discussing any of the things he'd done, what his results were, or any of the geographic targeting issues he'd been annoying NewBoss Anais about for two months. Instead, he demanded repeatedly that the Webstrainer rep explain to him everything that changed during a specific four-day interval this past June.
I'll spare you a lot of tedious detail--just trust me when I say that not even traveling back in a time machine to the very days the M.O. was inquiring about would have enabled the entire Webstrainer workforce to produce the information the M.O. wanted. I swear, from his attitude, he really thinks we're just withholding information from him to be mean, you know? He got pissy with us all at the end of the call. ("I guess if I'm not going to get the answers to any of my questions, that's all.")
I mean, okay, I sympathize that he wanted something and didn't get it, but applying a minimum number of brain cells to the topic--say, ten--should have revealed to him the sheer, galaxy-sized magnitude of what he wanted. I tried to apply significantly more brain cells--say, a hundred--to the question of "what would it take to capture data that way" and my head exploded four or five times before self-preservation kicked in.
In the meantime, I'm sitting here, twiddling my thumbs. There's nothing I can do to rectify the situation, no edits I can make to any of the campaigns that will do any good at all until the low-quality campaigns are cleaned up.*
I'm beyond even making rage-induced blog entries on how damaging this has all been. 18 months worth of work, down the tubes. I scrabbled, fought, and clawed for every tenth of a percentage point of quality improvement I could get for a year and a half. All gone.
I'm so stressed out, I am literally shaking.
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* If you have a bucket o'garbage, dumping perfume in it doesn't make it smell any better. And you can't take the perfume back out and use it later.
Denver is a good place to live. I mean, where else could you live where it could snow for 48 solid hours and yet you can drive to work on largely clear pavement the next day?
As always, the apartment parking lot and the fifty feet of side road we have to drive to reach the traffic light were the trickiest part of my commute today.
The management company did their best on the parking lot--they had the trucks out plowing three times a day for the past couple of days. However, no one could have predicted Miss Only I Exist backing her tractor-sized truck out of a parking space this morning, then stopping so she could walk around it and knock her 14" of snow off--not onto one of the many the drifts scattered around the lot, but onto the only clear pavement available, the driving lane. In an astounding display of selfishness, she not only didn't apologize to the other drivers trying to creep past her to the exit, she didn't even seem to notice that she was not alone on the planet.
Internet marketing is a good job to have. Not everyone in this city was snowed in for two days but didn't have to use vacation time or lose pay. Me, if I have a computer and internet access, I'm good to go. And I do work when I'm working from home--I got a ton of stuff done.
The R.C. isn't so lucky but she did make it in to her office yesterday--for 3-1/2 hours.
Anyhow.
Everything was fine until I logged into my Webstrainer program to start the day's work.
Ten seconds later, I was buried in a seemingly endless avalanche of poor quality scores. Words that, a mere twelve hours ago, were highly OK or even Excellent are now irrelevant, in appropriate, and inactive.
In fact, yesterday, I was good at what I do. Today, I'm an abysmal failure.
On the "good news, I suppose" side of the equation, I have so much work to do that the time is just whizzing by. Right now, it's less than an hour until the conference call with Mad Boy and the Webstrainer rep.
The snow that is. It's been tumblin' down since about 9:00 last night.
Since it rained for an hour or two before the snow started, the accumulation isn't massive, but the sheet of ice under that 3"-4" is daunting.
They've updated the forecast to say a possible 18" accumulation.
We have food and power, and I have about 200 new ads to write, so I guess I'd better fire up the ol' laptop and get to writing.
Posted by AnneZook at 08:24 AM | Comments (2)I had a good weekend. Saturday I bought three (three!) new books. Sunday, I played in the kitchen. I love playing in the kitchen. I had a variety of ingredients I'd bought with a vague idea that they might be combined to produce some kind of food-like products.
Most of the combinations I tried were--unfortunate. Pre-made, frozen sheets of phyllo dough are fun, but you have to move faster than I move to actually cook with it. (You also need either a baklava recipe or savory ingredients--neither of which I had to hand.)
In the end, I fell back on a tried-and-true cobbler recipe and produced a cherry cobbler that was really very nice. (OTOH, what wouldn't be nice if you dumped half a cup of melted butter into it?) It kept talking to me, though, and since my butt is already quite large enough, thank you, I wound up putting most of it down the waste disposal unit.*
I shouldn't have mentioned the cobbler to Fun Bobby today. He's quite put out with me--he says my cobbler reminds him of the cobblers his granny used to make him out on the farm or something. Even the R.C., who doesn't like cobbler, complained because I didn't save her at least a spoonful of filling.
Yeah, and while I'm thinking about it, I don't want to hear from you cooking snobs about using pre-made dough. I always use it--life is too short to do otherwise. I'm more interested in playing with filling than in making dough.
Although, naturally, the batter for the cobbler was from scratch--there's no other way.
So, what else is new?
Well, I took a day off yesterday. I spent it the same way I've spent every other vacation day I've taken this year--working on free-lance projects. I got it all done, but I'm still uneasily aware that I should be working on these accounts each week, not every couple of weeks. Must. Be. More. Conscientious.
And today, I'm back at the office. Fending off 'Nuts with one hand while I dig through last week's notes with the other, trying to remember what it was I was working on before I was distracted by NewBoss Anais's request for a series of reports--reports that took 14 hours to produce--last week.**
I have accomplished very little today. I keep staring at the campaigns, starting to make edits, then stopping myself because I'm not sure what to do next. In consequence, the day is going very slowly.
The Southern 'Nuts--the S'SWest 'Nut and his Nor'East 'NutNeighbor, are complaining that their forced marketing remarriage is not producing leads. I marched into NewBoss Anais's office and said, "I told all of you not to do any of the things you've done and you did them anyhow and my position from here on out is that I don't care and I don't want to hear about it."
Sadly, she is wise to me and didn't believe me.
MadBoy & his crazy offspring have been quiet--I suspect they're Up To Something. Or, just lurking--waiting for Friday's call and the confirmation of their belief that the world is out to cheat them.
Another 'Nut location bit the dust today. (It's not on my conscience--he didn't have a marketing campaign. His opinion was that he shouldn't have to pay for leads. *boggle*) And, yes, he owed the Argonut Café a ton of money that we are unlikely to collect.
And, speaking of the corporate Café, Fun Bobby just wandered by to confirm my home phone number. They're making contingency plans, in case the snow storm moving in tonight is a big one. He said they'd call me if I didn't have to come in--I said they would be safe in assuming, if we have more than six inches, that I wouldn't even be trying.
Since the current forecast on a local news site is for "at least half a foot of snow" (emphasis theirs) by mid-morning, with more falling throughout the day, I'm already making plans.
Not that I need, you know, actual preparation. With a computer and internet access, I'm good to go.
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* I'm on a diet.
Crabby Diet Girl, that's me today. I want to lose another five pounds, but I don't want it to take two months, because then I can't eat Christmas candy! So, I'm back on tuna salad, yams, turkey, and low-fat yogurt. Bleah. (Okay, I really like yams and I can live with tuna salad for a few weeks and even a strict diet lets me have a single tablespoon of gravy on the turkey to liven it up and low-fat yogurt doesn't bother me. But I can't find a "diet" category of food that would cover cherry cobbler. Makes me crabby.
Anyhow, I'm a grown-up--I can be crabby whenever I want.
** She wanted me to send out quarterly "performance" reports to all of the locations. "Let sleeping dogs lie," I told her. "Don't rock the boat. Don't ask for trouble." No one ever listens to me.
I just had to talk to our Webstrainer rep about MadBoy.
I've been sparing you a rehash of the same old aggravations, but, yes, the idiot 'Nut is back and sowing turmoil in all directions.
It all started about three weeks ago when I noticed that he'd changed his campaign to deliberately target territory that's "owned" by the other two Bowery Boys--the two he used to share a single marketing effort with. Naturally that's strictly against the rules--they sign legal contracts not to do that--so I passed the info along to NewBoss Anais and hoped to remain uninvolved.
For the last three weeks, I've been forced into endless discussions about MadBoy. I've wigged out myself, pitched numerous fits, and flatly refused to be involved in the problem. I've advised my own particular ChaosManager that there is no solution to this problem and that they make a mistake in breaking the rules for this hammerhead, leave themselves open to legal action from other locations, and generally just don't do themselves or the world any favors by not shutting this guy down.
I had hoped that, at the very least, I would be come so obnoxious on the subject that NewBoss Anais would bypass me. No such luck.
As he is prone to do, MadBoy, when approached about his contract violation, counterattacked instantly, demanding (and not for the first time) that we change reality to suit the way he thinks the world should work.
Long, stupid story short--his DIY approach to marketing isn't working, the outside agency he contracted with to do it for him either isn't doing it, isn't doing it to suit him, or weirded him out in some other way, and he's decided that the fundamental problem with his life is that the Argonut Café is in violation of the contract we signed with him because we can't make Webstrainer abide by the terms of a contract they not only haven't seen and didn't sign but directly contradicts their published policies.
(More simply, one of the other Bowery Boy campaigns has better ads, higher quality scores, and spends more money. So those ads sometimes show in MadBoy's "territory." He feels that since we are unable to force Webstrainer to rewrite their software to prevent this, we are in violation of his contract.)
Anyhow, he's demanded and is getting a conference call with one of our Webstrainer reps on the phone. His position, when he's feeling polite, is that I might believe how I tell him--or, rather, how I tell NewBoss Anais to tell him--the program works, but that doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about. When he's feeling slightly less polite, his position is that I'm an incompetent jackass who doesn't know what I'm talking about. But, mostly, his position is that everyone hates him and is deliberately cheating him.
I tried. I honestly did try not to prejudice the Webstrainer rep or say anything inappropriate. She even complimented me on my diplomacy. (I never said I tried to keep the strain from showing.)
It's hard to prepare someone for a call with a blowhard know-nothing who considers themselves an expert and is inclined to scream and curse if contradicted, using only diplomatic, objective language.
Also, I'm crabby because I've been forced to actually look at his POS campaign several times over the last three weeks and several of what I dubiously think of as his "choices" have come close to giving me an aneurism.