Change is Good

Too tired yesterday

And been too busy today - the trouble with taking a holiday is the work that piles up in your absence. On top of that, new site manager, with no understanding of what we do or how it's managed. That would be fairly predictable, but the new one seems sadly addicted to form-filling, and meetings: the first communique I had from him was a weekly report that is to be filled out & sent in every Monday, so he can see what we're doing.

Given that my work is not really susceptible to being divided into weekly chunks, and I don't have projects with weekly milestones, I can see that I'll be expending some of my creative energies on this every week, to try and fit in.

Also, and to my extreme dismay, this includes a section on 'Business Opportunities' or somesuch, which, well .... that ain't me. If I see something that we could extend into, I will pass it onto my boss, but given the type of maintenance role I'm in, plus being located 500 miles from the users I deal with, the idea that I could come up with weekly or monthly business openings is just silly: plus, I ain't a salesman, and I ain't about to start being one, and any attempts to press me into that role is going to lead to a brief but forceful reply of simple Anglo-Saxon*, followed by a decided deterioration in interpersonal relations (probably from both sides).

And when I was mostly caught up with the emails (at least), I get sucked into an hour long teleconference (well, for me - 90% of the teams were there face to face), featuring endless somnolence inducing promulgations and declarations by our new site bosses (2 of them). It all made sense, but both displayed a talent for using 20 words where 3 would have done: and apparently this is going to be a regular feature (weekly no doubt), in order to familiarise the teams with each other.

Which might be fine for those who are face to face, but I have no idea even who 90% of the participants were (i.e. all those that didn't speak, and about half of those that did as well), so I didn't perceive any actual familiarisation going on: I suppose that is just meant to be part of the warm fuzzies we get by getting consulted by our bosses.

Wow, that was all fairly victriolic - I have to chalk that up to a combination of disappointment at losing a really great (and informal) boss, and bitter past experiences (many many experiences) of bosses who don't know how to manage people, just paper.

Cat appears to have gone into shock over actually getting our Green Cards ?! - I'm not sure why, but the prospect of actually having to get a job at this point seems to be seriously freaking her out: I guess because she hadn't really identified what she wants to do now - she has a fairly serious longterm aim of setting up her own business in the interstices between floristry, home decoration, and botanical art (I think that's the best description anyway), but how to get there from here, and whether Little Rock is the right Here, is yet to be determined.

I daresay she'll come up with something, tho: it's too important to her goals, for her to remain stuck for long.



* or not, there seems to be vigorous debate over the point