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 Đ”ĐŸŃŃ‚ĐŸĐ”ĐČсĐșіĐč instead of 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.