Matching Tracksuits

I woke up at two this morning thinking about — of all things — DLG, Rob, and coming interviews. He’s put an ad in the ARA bulletin and we’ve been swamped with resumes and writing samples. Monday we had a gentleman come in and we basically hired him to do the temple module. That’s fine, and from what I can tell, he’ll do a good job of it. The problem is two-fold:

• The job description in the ARA ad describes the need for someone who specializes in Christianity, particularly early Christianity.
• Rob is completely unwilling to advertise for a world-religions scholar at this point. He wants to wait until we have the other courses.

Of course, once we get the other courses up, then the majority of the work that a full-time person would do will already be done. What do we need a full-time person for now? Rather, what could a full-time person be doing right now?

• Writing glossary terms
• Writing bio terms
• Writing overviews
• Checking for general content clarity
• Writing study questions
• Developing modules

Instead, we’re getting together today at ten to talk about what we want this person who’s coming in for an interview this afternoon to do. So Rob’s already decided that he wants to hire her, but not full time. He only wants her to develop some modules or something. We’ve got someone else coming in on Thursday and a fourth dropping by on Monday. That’s just entirely too many.

I’m worried about it from their perspective, too. These are not grad students looking for a little extra work to put some money in their pockets; they’re not professors looking for some kind of research project. They’re people with doctorates who need full time jobs using the knowledge they’ve spent X years developing.

So what do we do? We talk to Timothy and give him a project worth a maximum (if he’s lucky) of $1,000 with no assurance that he’ll get any more work, and a virtual assurance that we won’t be hiring him full time. That’s completely unethical.

Not only that, but it takes an inordinate amount of time for me to come out and talk about the stupid modules. Why the hell can’t Rob? That’s his job — interviewing and so on. I’ve got plenty I need to be doing. Among other things, that chapter six is going to need some serious work. I’ve not touched it in a week or more simply because I had other responsibilities and I thought I’d just get Whit to re-write it. But what was I thinking there!? Whit’s got enough work as it is. He’s probably not going to make the 15 April incentive date and we’re going to be scrambling to get stuff up by 1 June. I could very easily take a day (which is probably the maximum needed) and do some research and re-write that section. But Rob has told me (and I hate being told what to do) that he doesn’t want me spending any time on that. Well, not spending too much time.

Working with him can really be infuriating. He’s always second-guessing things. But more infuriating is his unwillingness to learn how to use a computer. “Have we glossed this yet in this chapter?” he asks in a comment about a particular word, and I want to scream, “Press ‘Control-F’ and search for that word. If the first occurance is that awful green we’re using for glossary terms, then yes, it’s been glossed already.”

“Why don’t you just show him how to do that?” Chhavi might ask, were I to complain about this to her. The reason I wouldn’t even dream of it is that Rob has convinced himself that he cannot do anything with computers and he’s closed to all suggestion to the contrary. I don’t know if it’s “learned helplessness” but he’s certainly not open to suggestion concerning this. And so he’s always calling on me or Asnel or Luis to come solve a problem that he could easily do himself. I’ll admit that some of it is just knowing your way around a program. For example yesterday he asked me to turn off the auto-formatting in Word and I did so. He was wandering around the right place (in the tools menu) but he was in the wrong specific locality (options). No problem there. It’s things like his unwillingness to learn now to “convert” files when all I do when he forwards them to me is save them to “My Documents” and then double click on it. I could download the Mac converter I have on my computer for him, but he wouldn’t want that. Dragging and dropping is too complicated. “I’ll just send it to you,” he’d say.

There’s so many annoying things about that company. Today, for example, is Wednesday and we all know what that means — editors’ flogging, uh, meeting. It might as well be a flogging considering how torturous it is. We go on and on about some of the stupidest things! And I’m sure everyone thought the whole gloss/bio issue was fairly stupid, but it was a matter that would affect the content. Mark’s nonsense about writing things as they appear in their native languages was simply a matter of taste, to a degree. In writing things in their Anglicized form we’re not making any sort of normative claim like we are in putting “Jehovah” or “Zeus” in the glossary.

When all of this was swirling around us at the last meeting, I scribbled a note to Mary: “Does this mean that we should write *** instead of Fyodor Dostoyevsky?” Stupid nonsense.

It’s all just an incredible waste of time in my humble. And it makes me think, “Maybe I should try to get myself ‘moved’ into the tech department.” Certainly there’s similar issues there, though. But it’s much less a matter of taste and interpretation, I would hope.

Strange things happening at work today. I was plugging away when Peter came into my little shared office and asked if he could talk to me for a few minutes. He motioned me to follow him into the techies’ room. Once there, he closed the door and began by saying that this was a “confidential” conversation. After the brief exchange we’d had over Kali and the linking tool, I was fairly sure it had something to do with that. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

To put it bluntly, he offered me a job. He knows that my knowledge of Visual Basic and programming in general is non-existent (though I think/fear he believes that I’m simply being modest when I say, “I don’t know any of this stuff.”), but he’s willing to train me/have me trained. He feels that I would be more of an asset to the company working on the tech side.

I really didn’t know what to say. It was like being offered a job to translate Russian literature: it’s something I’m interested in, but I don’t know the language in either case. And of course there’s the issue of abandoning Rob. First, I don’t want to because that would be immoral. And Peter expressed qualms about this as well, wondering aloud how quickly another editor could be hired. Second, I don’t know that I want to stop working on this side of the religion project. It’s really starting to take shape and it’s exciting to be see it happening. Third, I don’t know which would be better for my future plans. I want to get back into teaching at some point, and I don’t know which would be more advantageous for such a goal — most likely, my present job.

I still haven’t talked to Rob about this. I was going to mention it today — this afternoon, after we’d talked about modules — but I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to. I know he’s not going to be thrilled that I’m even considering it, even if I explain that I’m going to be working extra.

And that’s my initial answer: I want to do some overtime and perhaps work two or three hours a day (or more) on tech stuff after fulfilling all my editorial responsibilities. I talked to Peter briefly about coming in this weekend to begin learning a little Visual Basic, and he seemed to indicate that Sunday would be possible. So I might end up working six days a week, ten or more hours a day.

But let’s assume I do that. That would be twenty hours a week extra, and compensation for that would certainly be greater than the $15 an hour I was getting while working part time as an editor. Let’s say it’s $20 an hour. Then that’s an additional $400 a week (before taxes) which would wind up being something like $1,200 more a month. I could handle that. If I could keep up such a furious pace that long, I could pay off my entire undergrad loan in a year — or less, possibly. If it’s $25 an hour then that’s $500 a week, or $1,600 more a month (after taxes). At that rate, I would pay off my loan in a little more than six months! Who knows how long I could keep such a pace up, though.

This morning I woke up and I was barely able to think, let alone read, so I wrote a letter to Lidka and Bogusia — and I wrote it by hand, something I haven’t done in ages. I’ve been thinking that I should write to Halina again because I don’t really know if I answered her question, or rather, whether I gave her adequate advice as she asked for. Anyway, I was thinking about writing that letter by hand as well. What’s this world coming to, anyway? Gary, of all people, writing letters by hand?

I received a letter from Bogusia and Lydka (last year’s IIIB) — all in Polish, but I’m grateful nonetheless. They didn’t tell me much about school except to say they’re busy. No mention of Adam. In many ways I think that’s best because I don’t really want to get upset after reading a letter. And any time I hear about Adam or think about him, I want to strangle him. A perfect stranger.

Things at DLG are getting annoying. In a sense, anyway. Rob is incredibly opinionated, and while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s grating on my nerves simply because he’s to the point that he sees many of his pronouncements as fact. He read over an “Overview” that someone (Jim, I think) had written and said it was simply awful: bad idea, bad writing, bad everything. And he was a little vocal about it — embarrassingly so. Since he’s writing the overviews, I’ll tell him he should just discuss it with Kali.

And that’s another issue altogether as well. She’s just as opinionated, I think, and that can be a pain in the ass as well. Not too bad — she’s not as bad as Rob. Or even Adam — though Adam does listen to your point of view a bit more willingly in a sense. Back to Kali — she wasn’t pleased with the work that Peter did on the linking tool because it doesn’t spit out gloss and bio lists. That’s easily enough solved, and to be honest, I did describe that in my initial proposal to/discussion with Peter. He was talking to me about it, somewhat perturbed for having spent time on it that could have been spent on the professors’ site. Oh well — such is life. Miscommunication.

Anyway, I guess I’m discovering the nature of what Dad was always complaining about when he came home from work: stupid work-place bureaucracy. Everything is discussed, discussed, discussed — until I’m not sure I can talk about it anymore. Today, for example, in the editors’ meeting I didn’t say much of anything until we were discussing the biography issue. And that was settled with merciful ease: we’re going to rename it “important figures” and then we can dump anyone in there.

I can just hear Rob talking about how awful “important figures” sounds. “That’s so bad. It’s vague. It’s just vague.” If he says something, I’ll just tell him, “Rob, I’m not the one with whom you should be arguing your case — talk to Kali about it.” He is just really critical of almost everything. But, to his credit, a lot of the things he says are quite pertinent. It’s just his method that’s a little askew at times. At least that’s what often puts me off.