Results For "work"

Home alone. Chhavi left for Tennessee Monday, and I’ve basically been alone since then. It’s been strangely nice, strangely empty. As I told her last night, I don’t really miss her during the day because I never really see her during the day. But at night, it’s a little different. I really don’t find I miss her, though, until it’s time to go to bed. I guess that’s just indicative of the lifestyle we’ve been living for several months now: we come home and then basically do our own things, alone, until it’s time for dinner, then again until it’s time for bed.

So the big DLI news this week: Tuesday we went out for lunch with Kali — Sweet Chili’s in Arligton — and as we were sitting down, Beth said something to me under her breath: “Did you know Val’s leaving?” I thought she was joking at first, but she had known well enough about Kali, so I took it as being probably true. Then Kali told us all. “Val’s leaving. Today is his last day.” So we went to Carberry’s and got a cake for him, then to Buck-a-Book and bought a card for him.

This means that the whole production-side mid/upper level management is now gone. Well, that’s not quite true since Natalie has her new position. Still, a whole level of the hierarchy has been taken out (i.e., vice president of production). Natalie will report straight to Layne now, as will Adam I suppose. I don’t honestly see that this will be much of a problem. If Val was incompetent as Peter always said, then it will actually be a good thing.

It’s interesting — six months after Rob quit and about three months after Peter quit, everyone they had problems with quit as well: Celina, Val, and Kali. Of course Rob would figure out someone else to have issues with. He seemed to latch onto hating Dale for the hell of it, so maybe someone else would get his dander up. And of course not everyone who annoyed him has left — Ron Smith (who, I admit, is fairly annoying) is still there. What the hell he’s doing, I’ve no idea.

How many people does that leave that were at DLI when I arrived? Bob, of course, and maybe a handful of others. I think Ellen Dixon was there before me, as were a few of the graphics folks and Kiki. Otherwise, I’m probably in the top ten as far as longevity goes.

Now for the big news. Yesterday I was talking to Natalie to see if there was anything she needed me to do, and she said, “No, but I wanted to talk to you.” Off we went to her cube, where she explained that Layne (!?) had asked her whether she would be willing to give me up to tech. Basically, the COO has noticed my work on the tech side of things and talked to my superior about getting me to change departments. Of course I said I was interested, and we then went over to meet with Kevin, the new CTO.

He’s a fairly mellow guy, I think, at least as far as his personality goes. I foresee him being a good guy to work with, though. I think he’ll expect a hell of a lot out of the people under him, but at the same time I think he’ll provide all the support we would need to get the job done.

We talked about the Big Dig that’s coming for the DLI site. Basically, we’re going to reconstruct the site while keeping the existing site going — hence the Big Dig metaphor. I’ve been thinking for a while that we could reduce the whole site down to ASP and SQL and have each page dynamically generated for each user. “That would entail creating a new linking tool,” I thought, “As well as completely re-doing the site. And that’s a huge expense that I don’t think DLI is interested in incurring.” Well, guess what we’re doing — something very similar. No ASP, though. Instead, it’ll all be XML with a Unix base and an Oracle DB. Three things I know nothing about. When Kevin explained the use of Unix and Oracle, I said, “There’s two things I know absolutely nothing about.” His response was quite encouraging: “So that’s two things you’ll have to learn.” Or something along those lines.

One of the things he mentioned was something else I’d never head of — digital dashboards. It turns out that we’re only using a small percentage of the Exchange server and Outlook’s capabilities. These two things can be used to provide massive amounts of information to in-house (and probably outside) employees, but we simply haven’t made the most of it. That’s one thing that Kevin wants us to do, and that makes me, in turn, very excited. I love the idea of being able to make stuff that directly impacts others’ lives and makes their work easier.

Speaking of that, one thing I haven’t written about but that I’m very happy about is the impact my silly macros (I must admit, I’m really sick of that word.) have had on others. Stephen Cebik told me that my macros have cut a process that used to take him upwards of five days down to a day and a half. That’s a major time savings. And of course part of me wants to say, “Hey, why don’t you tell Layne and Jay that. Maybe they’ll send a bit of those hundreds of dollars I’ve saved the company back my way.”

Back to my meeting with Kevin. He told me that I should think during the Christmas break about what kinds of things I’d like to do, then added with a laugh, “And then I’ll have you doing something entirely different.” I think that’s what I’ll do now — a list of things I’d love to do at DLI.

I’d like to be able to work with people a lot. That’s why this digital dashboard stuff seems so exciting to me. It would be like making macros in that I would be creating things that helped people in the here and now. So I think that would be a great thing to get started on — creating these dashboards, working with people to find out what then want/need in such a tool, teaching people how to use the tools (both the old and the new tools), and so on.

I think I could be most useful as something of a liaison between the editors and the software developers as it comes time to begin planning and coding the new tools necessitated by the site’s renovation. I know how editors work; I know how editors use the tools they already have; I know the problems editors have with the existing software. Who better to help plan the production-side tools?

I finally got a letter from someone in Poland — Halina sent me a letter with a Christmas gift — a tape called Śpiewają Gwiazdy Polskiej Estrady Najpięniejsze Kolędy, which I haven’t listened to. She told me about how things at school are going. Recently the liceum celebrated its fifth anniversary — I don’t really wish I could have been there for that, though. A bunch of speeches? No thanks. Of course there would have been some student recitals and singing, which was always nice. Anyway, it was nice to hear from her, though I wish she’d written sooner.

I found recently a new site dealing with the WCG and it’s spliters — including some I’d never heard of. It’s at: http://www.apollo.spaceports.com/~truth/index.html. Anyway, here’s something fascinating:

William F. Dankenbring now believes that the Israelites ignored Moses’ instruction to stay in their houses all night and that the Passover was on the fifteenth day of the first month, rather than on the fourteenth as taught by Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA). John D. Keyser, one of William’s associates for the past ten years, has gone even further, breaking away from Triumph Prophetic Ministries to start his own splinter group called Hope of Israel Ministries. Ignoring the Genesis account, John Keyser has now started to teach that the week has a pagan origin, and that the weekly Sabbath changes each month due to the new moon and can fall on any day of the week.

I just found the website, so I’m going to explore for a while now.

This week at work has been very informative. I’ve learned quite a bit about the goings-on behind the boardroom doors — other-side-of-the-office stuff — that’s got me both worried and excited.

To begin with: the list of people who are leaving grows —

• Ross
• Jim
• Joy
• Chuck
• Peter Dolina

And of course there’s the list of people who have already left:

• Micha
• Jill
• Connie (Asian QC woman who always listened to music in her headphones distressingly loudly)
• Paul
• Ann E.
• David J.
• Trish
• The American History I product manager
• The sociology content developer who lasted for about four days

Of course, the big shock on that list is Peter. And as might be expected at DLI, what’s being disseminated from the upper echelons as to why he’s actually leaving is vastly different from the reality of the situation. I talked to him at length yesterday about these things. Initially, I just wanted to talk to him about me moving to the tech side of the production line here and how his departure might change/halt that. He encouraged me to learn Visual Basic, get a Microsoft Certification for it, and then I could make — in his words — a minimum of $80,000 a year. That’s certainly a nice thought — better still is the idea that I would have a very marketable skill that would provide a certain degree of job security. I would know that even if DLI folds (and I really think it will), I have a decent chance of getting a job.

Peter didn’t just share with me a bit of career advice, though. He told me a little as to why he can’t stay at DLI. In short, he doesn’t agree with Layne and Bob as to how the company should be progressing. There are certain problems that need to be turned around — how Peter would go about turning these things around is fundamentally different as to how Layne and Bob will turn it around. He also mentioned that there are certain people whom he cannot work with. He said, “I cannot work with your vice president,” and he later talked about Val by name. Discussing my marketability were DLI to close, he said if I were MS certified I would have no problem getting another job. “Other people, like Val Rader — I don’t think so.” He also said that there are certain people who he doesn’t feel is helping the company at all, mentioning Celina by name.

Strange — those are the two people that Rob detested more than anyone else. I personally don’t feel particularly comfortable around them, but I bear no ill-will toward them. And I really can’t comment on how well they work. They seem to be good at firing people, though.

That wasn’t the only time Val’s name came up recently, though. When walking to work yesterday (or maybe it was Thursday) Chuck and I were talking and Chuck said that he and someone else (Joy?) had been together, talking about the fact that so many people are leaving. They’d all made that list — project managers in a meeting, with Val, Layne, and Bob making another list in some eight-hour marathon meeting — and Chuck said, “We left a few things off that list.” I asked him what those things were, and he said quickly, “Val, Kali, and Adam.”

(It’s funny — Joy said that we editors were going to hear something about this list at some point. That was two weeks ago. Nothing’s been said yet.)

Chuck went on to say that Val just doesn’t know how to deal with people. “I don’t think he’s intentionally malicious,” he explained, “but he just says stuff that’s not really appropriate.” He feels Val should have been fired with all the others that got the axe some time ago. I would say that Peter would agree.

None of us spoke about Kali, but Mary and I did — without naming names explicitly. She’s feeling rather upset because Kali and Adam poo-pooed the sociology text, saying it wasn’t good enough. Of course that makes her feel great since she’s the only one who’s been working on it and it’s equivalent to saying, “Your work is inadequate.” She told me that she’d gotten some help from Peter B. who’d corrected some things. Kali didn’t like those parts and changed it back to the way it was before. Never mind the content integrity issues that implies — it’s just very annoying that Kali always takes it upon herself to be the final authority. She can’t say, “I don’t like the way that’s phrased,” and simply leave it alone. Phrasing, voice — neither of these things really can be objectively defined as “wrong.” Even if someone says, “This is a more effective wording than that,” and even if it better for most readers, it doesn’t mean it’s objectively, unquestionably better.

It seems that our criterion for readability is, “Does Kali understand it.” That’s the first criterion. Second, “Does Adam understand it?” It doesn’t matter if everyone else understands it — if they don’t, it goes. This is what Mary and I talked about in coded terms. I hate to say it, but in some ways I don’t think Kali is the sharpest knife in the drawer. Well, maybe not that — she simply needs things explained in a very simple manner — baby steps, so to speak. She seems to assume that everyone else really needs that too.

Returning to the question of whether “Val, Kali, and Adam” should be included on that list of why people leave DLI, I do have a strong feeling that Kali (directly) and Adam (indirectly) had something to do with Paul’s leaving. Something? I think everything, really. His “And no, I won’t answer one more [explitive deleted] content question. Don’t EVEN ask!” in his last email seems to be a direct reference to the way editors were forced to badger him to death with content questions. Why was I always doing it? Because I knew that once Adam got it, he would be sending it back with those types of questions. I was just trying to save myself a lot of work later by getting as much of it done now as possible.

And then there was the last Friday he worked there, with Kali sitting at his desk, insisting that she sit at the keyboard — “I have to drive,” she laughed — and thinking aloud, reworking it there, asking Paul, “Is this okay?” I’ve sat through that — I know how painful it is, and I know how unintentionally demeaning it is.

I learned yesterday that several more people are leaving DLI, or have already left. Michal left last Friday; Ross is leaving in a couple of weeks; David Johnson left sometime last week; Jim will be leaving at the end of the month; Paul of course left about three weeks ago; and Chuck will be quitting soon to go to mime school in Paris. That’s six folks in a matter of weeks. And of course it doesn’t count all the folks who stayed for a few days/weeks like the sociology content developer and the American History I product manager. And then there’s Trish, the WCiv I content developer. And of course all the people who got fired a couple of months ago. All told, that’s about twenty people since I began working there. I’m sure more will be quitting soon. It’s inevitable.

It’s especially inevitable when you take into account the tension that seems always to exist between production and QC. Chuck felt the full force of this yesterday. Kali and Adam made a decision and recommendation to Layne that the sociology text is not fit. Fit for what? For a focus group this weekend in D.C. It’s not going to be sold or anything — it’s just going to be shown to profs for initial feedback. I would say the purpose is to introduce the idea of an interactive textbook as much as anything. But now that this recommendation has been made, who knows if it will even take place. And so Chuck was fairly disgusted about the whole thing and rather frustrated as well. I met him and Wellington and that’s where he explained all this.

This is a test — I’m going to keep my journal in Word just for the hell of it this month. I don’t know whether this is a wise thing or not — I’ve been keeping it in Word Perfect for such a long time and I’ve always been such a staunch opponent of Word. Of course, I do everything else in Word because of work, so I’m more accustomed to Word at this point than to WordPerfect. Perhaps I’ll end up converting this at some point. One thing that WordPerfect has over Word at this level is the ability to change keyboards. Of course I’m sure you can do it in Word as well, so . . .

Today was our first day at the new office in Medford. I can say one thing about it — corporate. It’s certainly not as homey as the office in Arlington, though the commute is about the same. And of course there’s all the cubicles. I don’t know if I’m so anti-cube as others, but it’s a drastic change from the other office. At the same time, I was in that little private office for such a long time that I really wasn’t part of the outer gang.

One thing that really struck me today was the hierarchy that has suddenly appeared. Well, not “suddenly appeared” — it’s always been there, it just wasn’t visible. Until today. For example, Adam now has a private office with very nice furniture and such — of course, it doesn’t have any windows whatsoever, and I guess that’s the trade. At any rate, what became obvious right away was that I am rather far down the rung, so to speak. As is Rob for that matter. I’m about as far down as you can get, I guess. I don’t really care — and I really expected nothing less — but it was startling to realize that suddenly today. A little disturbing as well. I’m just accustomed to seeing everyone around at the same time, and now it’s certainly not the case.

On the other hand, it’s interesting how much things have changed since I first arrived a few months ago. I remember Bob running around, Celina at Beth’s desk (I think?) and such — pastries and lots of empty space.

(The Word experiment lasted only a few minutes — I’ll just continue keeping it in WordPerfect for the foreseeable future.)

Today was a day of hierarchy — as I rode the 86 home, some police officers roared down the road and began directing traffic (though they didn’t block things off until we’d passed) so that, at some point, some person we’ve decided is important could pass through without waiting. Why shouldn’t they have to wait in traffic like the rest of us? “People will assassinate them!” Chhavi responded, and I suppose she has a point there — it is certainly a possibility. Still, it’s a little annoying that we’re sitting there waiting while this joker roars by without any interference.

One last thing about today’s adventures: just after I got on the bus (the 86) at Sullivan Station, someone else boarded — the woman with curly hair and a semi-flat, long nose that gets on across from the Harvard Stadium every day. I’d noticed that she doesn’t get off at the Harvard stop, but I’d no idea how far she went. Now I guess I know. Funny thing is, I seem to see her all the time. She was at Stop ‘n’ Shop a few weeks ago — she was with a bunch of folks, whom I assumed to be her roommates (though I could very well be wrong. So now I’m wondering if I see her again whether I should now talk to her. She’s drawn my gaze several times and I’d really like to see what kind of a person she is — in a way, part of it is simply that I’d like to know what kind of voice she has. Anyway, I think I’ll strike up a conversation if she’s waiting at the same time tomorrow — or any other day, I guess.

Another interesting happening today — I talked to Jill (the absolutely stunning sales woman) for a few minutes and actually felt as if she wasn’t just tolerating me. I often feel that she’s merely gritting her teeth and enduring any short conversation we might have. Today, however, was a different story. We had a very pleasant — albeit very shallow — chat. Of course I’m not really looking for more than that, but it was certainly a nice change.

God, this is like something I would have written in high school — perhaps about Christy Anderson. chaut. I guess it just shows that we don’t ever really outgrow certain things — insecurities remain no matter what.