MORNING
I have a long entry today, mostly work related, so I will leave it to the end. First the fun parts of the day. I unexpectedly got the afternoon off when Don proved incapable of lining up some work that would last more than a few minutes while he went out for a few hours. You’ll see if you read on, but first the day.
Home Depot put me back two hours. I walked out of there after waiting another twelve minutes in a lineup. Do not shop at the Hallandale Beach branch, they plainly do not pay enough to attract quality staff. So I came home and refilled my own ink cartridges. This is fun and I have the kit. Duh, if I have the kit, why did I go to the store?
Here’s the deal, I’ll answer that question, then you get to explain why you thought it was a good question. Good luck. My reason is that it is a new printer. The smart money says to have a second cartridge already refilled and ready to go. I went out to buy that second cartridge. The stupid part was thinking I could dip in and out of a Florida store. Now you explain your part.There was another refill because somebody swapped out my Internet rental with an empty. Mike says he’ll know the guy if he comes in again. I spent a few hours working on the network and will have to spend an entire day at it soon. A couple of business types came in and were flabbergasted by the toothpick display. I told them I had done the work, what I needed was marketing. They are putting together a package where we sell the rights to each toothpick for $5, on the premise that we will buy raw land in the rain forest to prevent logging.
Okay, guys, put it together, but I get the first million, and of course, this rain forest property would have to be on the coast to, er, cover the entire ecological system. It would also have to be administered and patrolled, preferably by someone who understood the significance of having one million dollars in your typical tropical country.
By the reaction, it seems people around here have never seen a man riding two bicycles. (They lots of cases of two men riding one bicycle "really fast".) I was delivering the one-speed to the cancer guy [Steve] for spoke repairs. You can’t actually ride two bikes, it just sounds more of a feat when I say it that way. Lots of black dudes on bikes would see me and yell “trade ya!”. I woke Steve up and he is not doing well, far weaker than just a few days ago. He lives alone with his cats and moves around wearing a blanket as the cancer causes severe sores on his knees. I paid him in advance in case he was short some food or anything.
A call came in around 3:00 PM. The guy who ships oranges over by the Thrift store has computer woes. I biked over there to find out he has a series of bad cables, some horribly fragmented drives and a server that is 91/107ths full. No backup copies of anything. I suspect the drive is so full that when he uses any program that requires virtual memory, it is clashing. I believe virtual memory requires a contiguous block.
I’m going back tomorrow to start getting all the non-text files off that drive. What’s the bets I’ll find a ton of porno on there? There aren’t very many other ways to fill up a 107 GB hard drive in such a short time.
NOON
On the return, I got a call from Gilou, the Moroccan lady. This is the danger of call-out home visits (unnecessary call-backs from things they don't understand), and why I insist the client watch everything I do. It seems she could not get onto her email today. When we were there, I watched her do it, and she has some strange email called bobot.name. I am unaware of any domain like that, but I saw her do it. Today she could not get on. Sure enough, her husband, who was not there, says that I must have done something wrong. The both of us quickly rejoined that we had not done anything but fill out an on-line application. Do you think he is convinced? I’ll ask at the shop because I think what may be happening is he used bobot.name to redirect his mail to another site and the link is lost. Either way, I’ll fix it but he’ll have to pay handsomely now that he’s made a false accusation. He thinks his wife is dumb, thus I must be even dumber to work for her.
Here is some wild speculation. I have long since determined my inability to sing is based on some childhood embarrassment I can’t recall or understand. I’ve been secretly practicing singing. I am lousy, but at the same time, it is lousy trying to find a reliable vocalist in this town. I can croak some old tunes on key. I have to concentrate so hard that I forget the words. The point here is that I would rather do a bad job and be out there than to not even try. If nothing, I could be so bad I am good. Man, I would give anything to be able to sing. I would have no problem standing on stage playing bass to prerecorded guitar lines. People do the opposite all the time.
NIGHT
Thinking it over, I have decided not to continue working with Don, the publisher. We just do not get along on basic issues, and today he made the comment that I could not “multi-task”. Suffice to say when somebody calls me that, there are irreconcilable differences at play. I called him on that one, saying to explain exactly what he meant by that (by going over a procedure he had once explained before).
From this, oddly, it emerged that from his view of multi-tasking, he was right. I divide complicated work up into discreet units, and complete each one of those units before moving on. I have done this in situations that others would find nightmarishly complex. It is evident that Don has a system in place that does not mesh with my ability. This may surprise those who recall that my skill set seemed to do okay when I was single-handedly and simultaneously running the site administration at four of the tallest buildings in South Florida. (The Continuum, Espirito Santo Plaza, The Four Seasons and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.)
Don clearly wants somebody who jumps all over the place doing this and that as his schedule demands. That is a big problem, because he has allowed the paperwork to grow so cumbersome that the moment he stops, it begins to catch up with him. If he stops doing it his way, he begins to get behind and miss deadlines. It is impossible to improve such a situation without expensive major surgery. I had the impression he hired me because he knew his system was broken and wanted me to fix it, instead I am here to prolong the agony.
Something else important was when he went over again the procedure for filing the foreign rights, I was astonished that he did not realize he was telling me an entirely different procedure than the one from last week. He was instructing me to do things he had earlier said not to bother with. When he left for the first two weeks, I thought I could really help out by setting the record-keeping in good order. He does not want that to happen, or in the alternative, wants it only if it can be done without hindering his existing activities. The moment you try to correct something, which takes time, another priority crops up, and he has these priorities in endless supply. Understand that from his point of view, I was not getting it and he was having to explain a simple process to me a second time. I have seen this before.
This happens because his former people were not “getting it” either. Oh, they were nodding and telling him that they understood. In fact, the way his system is set up, they were clearly lying to him. He has 68 authors and about half that many different ways of recording their accounts. (The logical mind instantly rejects any “system of exceptions” because such systems not work. The trained mind will try to correct it, which takes time, and that is precisely what he does not want to spend.)
It is beginning to make sense why we don’t get along – nobody else in his experience has apparently had the confidence to tell him outright like I do when something is grievously wrong with his way of doing things. Don thinks nothing of flying up to New York to resolve a client complaint yet begrudges the few dozen hours it would take to make all the statements correct in the first place. He would rather that dozen hours be spent now doing the statements wrongly just so they look like they are done. The statements he designed are pragmatic but would not pass Business 101 muster. They do not even show if the previous balance has been paid.
Thus arose the curious situation of a guy who runs a simple distribution business convinced that because I could not fathom his logic that I therefore must have difficulty grasping computer bookkeeping fundamentals. That, plus his last person was better at “multi-tasking”. I’m not making this up.
Not only that, he has severe misplaced trust in his CPA, which mystified me because it is a profession with its head stuck firmly in the sand of the last century. I was tempted to inform him that it is still possible to become a CPA without ever touching a computer. It was also clear that he does not know what a CMA does, but that is not uncommon in Florida. (You must be a CPA and have at least one additional post-graduate computer degree before you are even allowed to start the CMA program.)
The contention today was that he had given me two accounts last day, one for Russia and one for China. I logged them, then he switched me to distribution reports which contain no data about distribution, but are rather income reports based on the result of selling distribution rights. If you follow that, you did better than I. To no avail, I have asked him for clarification on numerous points like this because I cannot possibly understand his connotative report titles. In fact, I have more difficulty than someone who has no clue what the words mean. They are not distribution reports, but reports containing financial data to an entity who is a called a distributor but does not really distribute anything.
He did not explain there were a total of eight of these distributors, only those two, but yes, he had mentioned the others but no, he did not give me any source documents for them. I vaguely recall him saying the “others” were done, I did not do them myself and thus have no recollection of them being done or otherwise. He wanted these reports filed, whence I discovered he had no naming convention for the reports. I proceeded to do one called Bancroft or BrB, I had time to look at, sort and name these reports only. Today, he was somehow expecting all eight were done without explaining how this could have happened so instantly. Furthermore, he said that he had asked me if they were done, and that I had said yes. See the catch?
Was he asking me if the two reports he gave me were done, if all eight reports were done (I did not even find out there were eight reports until later), or if all eight were done and sorted and filed. He has asked indistinct questions like this on several occasions and refused to allow me to clarify the answer. He does not want to hear any explanations because he is too busy and explanations interrupt him. Furthermore, several of the reports he said I had told him were done were, in fact, reports that he had specifically told me to ignore and not do (because they were bankrupt, out of business, being sued or could be done later), and had squawked when I tried to record those words at the time. Even when he assigns work, he tends to stand over your shoulder making constant exceptions. At one point I outright told him I could not be responsible for reports produced this way. That seems to have been conveniently forgotten.
He first said that he wanted an on-line database filled out with catalog information. This takes hours to do right. Within a minute he said not to do that and to do something else. Well, which? I balk at fits and starts. He cannot decide if he wants the system streamlined or not. The solution is to let him run with it until it collapses and he is forced to start over. That will likely happen the first time a client asks for anything that requires an audit trail. He will have to go back and mentally reconstruct all those exceptions, which will work until he gets a client to wonders why it is taking so long.
Either way, Monday next is the last day. He wants the reports "hand-made", only looking like they came off a computer. Man, hire a secretary.
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