New Family Member

Loyal Stella readers will be familiar with my existing former colleague/office mate/most excellent dog, Bettie (pictured here demonstrating her mastery of the "high-five" for last year's science fair project). Well, we've managed to convince ourselves that Bettie is lonely and also managed against the odds to locate a dog that is, dare I say, Bettie in Miniature. Meet Freda, a half wire haired dauchshund, half chihuahua mix. We'll see how she works out, but so far, so good. No yapping. No cat chasing. No biting. Lots of frisky play with our beloved Bettie.

Coping with Crackberry Addiction

A lovely little op-ed today appeared in the Times about tuning out the communication devices and getting more done, including relaxing, meaningful conversations with family, drinking pina coladas, and getting caught in the rain.

I have a Treo for the new job, but because they don't push email to mobile devices I have so far managed to avoid getting a serious addiction going. I think if it was buzzing on my hip every three minutes with new emails arriving, it would be much easier to get way into it. As it is, I have to whip it out, explicitly tell it to go get my email, then wait whilst it painfully downloads it all.

This suggests that setting your Palm-Berry up to work like this might be a good way to prevent or treat addiction.

Because I'm completely representative of the entire world, and my experience should guide everyone else's behavior.

Ummm, right.

They do actually telecommute here

Stella is pleased to note that there are one or two telecommuters in her new Real Office. She is also sad to report that it turns out to be the worst kind of telecommuting. Yes, that's right, these folks are doing the "mommy telecommute". Our full-time telecommuting part-time worker doesn't keep routine hours, doesn't have a dedicated phone line that is business-only, doesn't use IM, and is often minding her two small children while working. (Actually, minding two small children while also trying to conduct non-child related work is more than working. It's just not effective working.) It seems to me that, in fact, her tasks are well-suited to remote work, but if it were my call, I'd insist on the things that make remote work work well for the people who are left holding down the fort, as it were. As it is, it's frustrating to everyone in the office.

What would I change?

1. Regular business hours: The people in the Real Office need to know when they can call and know that they won't be disturbing naptime. Everyone understands that you're working at home with small children, and nobody wants to be the jerk who calls just as the baby is drifting off. Help us out by telling us, "Hey, I'm always working between 8-10:30 on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday."

2. Two Letters - IM: No human being can work off-site without making nearly constant use of instant messaging. I've now managed to get the whole Real Office using the IM amongst ourselves, and will be working with the telecommuter to do the same. That way, we'll be able to see her pop on the system, and know that she's botherable. It's absolutely critical.

3. Tell us what you're doing: I'm not sure what exactly this person actually does. I know she produces some stuff, but I find that she's often doing things that would inform what I'm doing, and I have NO idea. This means that you, as the telecommuter, need to initiate the conversation to tell me what is going on, make an extraordinary effort to show up at staff meetings, and the like. It's not fair that you have to go the extra mile, but that's the price you pay for working in your slippers.

I have an ulterior motive for making the telecommuter more effective and easier to work with. See, if I can make her work a success, that means maybe I can do it to, at least one or two days a week. I'm not as altruistic as I seem.

Surprise, surprise.

Do you ever just skip a whole week in your mind?

I am finding myself becoming mildly disoriented in time and space because I'm skipping over entire week's worth of time because I know that it's all taken up with "stuff" and thus unavailable for getting stuff done. For example, next week there's something or other sitting in the middle of Monday, the office potluck occupying much of Tuesday, no one is going to do anything on Wednesday, then tryptophan-n-football Thursday, followed by finally-take-down-the-Halloween-decorations-and-put-up-luminarias-Friday.

Basically, the whole week is shot.

But then I found myself panicking because I jumped ahead to the week after next in my calendar and looked at what was scheduled there and began conflating the two weeks. Wait, I can't have a meeting with Dr. So-and-So on Monday, that time is all taken. Except it isn't.

I might just be an idiot, though. This possibility has occurred to me.

Okay, I might miss telecommuting a little

I don't want to be an anti-telecommuting bummer, and I realize that I haven't been as positive about the telecommuting as I was in the past, like, when I actually was a telecommuter. So, while I love my new job, I do miss some key things about telecommuting.

I miss the ability to be around the house to get little things done during the day. I love my house and it was fun to spend my lunch doing little yard things and whatnot. I find that even the short commute eats into the day, and now that it's dark so early, I feel like I'm getting less done than I should. This feeling is also probably compounded by the fact that I was traveling last weekend, so I really didn't get things done. We only got one out of three jack-o-lanterns carved, and managed to not take any pictures of Halloween costumes.

I also miss being able to work in a steady and concentrated way. I find myself feeling frustrated by the level of interruption in the real office, not so much for me, because I'm pretty good at focusing and keeping my head down, but moreso for my colleagues. Some days I see folks spending what seems like an inordinate amount of time massaging a project that really should be kicked out the door lickety-split. Or it seems like we veer from coffee, to a two hour luncheon with a prospect, to an afternoon meeting about how we're going to count planned gifts, to quitting time without actually doing anything.

But of course we are doing what we're supposed to do. We in development are at the whim of the donor, the doctor or scientist, the dean. We exist to make those other things happy and fulfilled, and sometimes that means dropping everything to get something done. So this kind of work is pretty different from programming and web stuff, where you have a project, it's mapped out and you hit your deliverables. Getting things done is a much fuzzier area, and sometimes it's hard to tell that you're really working, especially as you dine on a cobb salad at the country club. But trust me, it's work.

I may also be feeling a little negative because there are attempts to rope me into office politics. In the old job I had a long-standing reputation as a relentlessly positive vault. People knew they could piss and moan to me and I

a) would not comiserate, agree, or disagree

b) would not repeat what they said to the person or persons involved

c) would not fink them out to the boss

d) would try to see the best in the whole situation and make the complainer feel listened to and less miserable.

In the new job my attributes are not well known to my colleagues yet, and so they're actively trying to whip me into a frenzy around certain issues. Good luck. I am a rock, and I'm not going to repeat anything out of turn. Although I'm not sure if similar levels of discretion extend upward. But I'm learning to govern myself accordingly.

But I digress. What I'm really trying to say is that I seem to get nostalgic for the liberty of telecommuting and the familiarity of a long-time job when things in the new job get a little sticky. But that's okay.

Because I'm on the verge of raising some money, and that's going to be a nice kick in the pants.

There sure are a lot of shut-ins

This article(?) Op Ed(?) (I'm not sure and I can't quite tell from the labeling, but the tone is pretty opinionated) from the NYT is interesting because it points out some inconsistencies and new ideas in how the government can treat telecommuters and all non-traditional sub-fulltime something-less-than-employees better when it comes to taxes, health insurance, and the like.

What I found most compelling, though, is the graphic that shows how many telecommuters there are in various metro areas as compared with the national average of 3.5%. And 3.5% sounds like a lot to me. But maybe not.

For $260 a night

...wouldn't you think that the nice people at Marriott could throw in the high speed internets, you know, like, gratis? I mean, come on, how much bandwidth could I possibly be using? I'm just a little grumpy right now and not for any good reason.

Well, one or two kind of good reasons.

I was too cheap to pay the extra $10 a day to get the internets sent up to my hotel room, so I didn't get to calculate a potential giving total based on average gift size because I didn't have that data downloaded already. Thanks Marriott.

And because when the Marriott business center drones finally used their eyeballs to look for the package that the printer had overnighted my business cards in instead of their database they actually found the box. (That seems like a good thing, I know, but stay with me.) I opened the box and the printer had spelled both my last name and my email address wrong. Bummer.

But on the way way plus side, I had a fantastic meeting with the one prospect I'd managed to get to see me on this trip, and he was so gracious with his time and with his enthusiasm for what I was there to visit him about. It was truly the highlight of the trip, and it made me really increasingly sure that I've picked the right kind of job for me.

Plus medical conventions have this weird crossover with porn conventions (not that I've ever been to one, but I've seen documentaries on the HBO late night). It turns out that medical simulation is really going for some realism. I watched some med students demonstrate the assisted childbirth simulator, and wow. I think it actually may have been made from the cast of Jenna Jamison, but I could be wrong.

I digress again.

I'm in with the in crowd

If by "in crowd" one can mean "dorks who connect to airport wireless just because they can," then, yes, I am certainly in with the in crowd. I'm sitting here blogging in the Albuquerque Sunport (it's not an airport, but I don't notice the sun coming in for a landing per se, which is probably a good thing).

But I digress.

This will be my first trip with a laptop, and I'm looking forward to watching the first season of Ugly Betty on the flight -- thanks for the DVDs, Margret and Jared. We'll have to see if the benefits of lugging this thing across the country outweigh the...well...the weight. It's gotta be good for more than watching DVDs, I think, to justify my growing feelings of irritation.

I do have a plan for using it -- I need to calculate the gift potential of a pool of prospects that we're developing a strategy for, and so I can crank up a little spreadsheet to generate a nice picture of what five to ten times their previous giving levels would look like. Fun! After that, I can continue to do research in the donor database and on the internets to figure out more about those folks. And, of course, I'll be keeping up with office email to such a degree that I didn't bother to put an out-of-offiice reply on the thing.

I'm not on vacation, and they gave me the Treo and the laptop for some reason, so I can only assume they mean for me to stayon top of things. Seems reasonable.

Does my butt look big in this budget statement?

There is a really interesting piece in the NYT today by Lisa Belkin that rounds up a bunch of the research on perceptions of different kinds of female behavior in the workplace. The gist of it is:

...whatever was most valued, women were seen as lacking it.

On the one hand, the research that she cites seems like real research, and inasmuch as sociology research is science, that's pretty real. The studies are ingenious -- hiring students to play Boggle and telling they'll be paid some amount between $2 and $10. In that one, most of the women accepted the first (low) offer without further question, and most of the men didn't.

Super.

But I was also thinking to myself as I read this article: gosh, all this navel gazing about how we're perceived in the workplace seems like a big distraction from actually getting the work done, doesn't it? I was reminded of the fashion magazines' relentless nitpicking on female appearance. Is my hair glossy enough? Do I have bilbobaggins under my eyes? Should I be thinking about laser surgery? Does my butt look big in this? And I've noticed that if you try not to spend time caring about whether your butt looks big, it frees up your time for fun things like reading a book, enjoying a run around the block with your kids, or blogging.

So the corollary: If I'm spending any of my time fretting over whether I got too angry or not angry enough in that workplace situation, it seems like some of my valuable brainpower is not directed at my work.

Although apparently directing the full force of my brain at work will make me seem like a grind, and that's a negative quality for a woman.

Here's a hypothetical situation

What would you do if you had mentioned to a colleague that you liked literature, for example. Let's be honest: you love literature, and you know a lot about it. You have wide ranging taste honed by years of reading and you really, really know what you're talking about when you make critical comments about things that you've read.

Imagine if you will that this colleague, a nice person who has a lot of skills that s/he brings to the job, starts foisting terrible, awful books on you with the intent of having you read them. And then this coworker for whom you have the highest professional respect begins asking you what you thought of the books s/he passed on to you. And then, after you gently told him or her that they weren't your cup of tea, this person continued to pass increasingly horrible tomes on.

What would you do?

My recommendation is to smile thinly as you accept them, and then don't read them, whilst reiterating the opinion that they're not your cup of tea. Steer strongly away from discussions of precisely what it is that prevents the offering from being your cup of tea, for you will surely launch into a sharply worded and incisive critique of the volume at hand.

But then again, I am an unrepentant liar.

Search engines can yield strange results

I was actually looking for groovy seventies-style tube socks like we had when we were kids for a Halloween costume. I typed in "tube socks" and I got a page full of tube tops, and this handy item: The 2007-2012 Outlook for Womens and Misses’ Finished Anklets, Slack Socks, Crew Socks, and Athletic Socks Made from Manmade Fibers Excluding Sheer Hosiery in Greater China.

Ummm...okay...

How many $495 treatises like this do you think Target moves in its econometrics book section in a month, would you say?

Stella Did It

I ran 13.1 miles and didn't die on the course and/or walk over the finish line. I know, all y'all marathoners are snorting into your Gatorade, but this was pretty far for me. In fact, it's the farthest I've ever "run" (if you can call 11:00+ minute miles "running").

Nevertheless. I did it. Lo hicimos. (Yes, I know that's technically "We Did It" but it's all the accomplishment spanish I've learned from Dora The Explorer).

And now I'm looking forward to not running for just a day or two. My feet are killing me, far more than my legs or any other part of me. It's a small price to pay for a feeling of accomplishment.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to find my Sister Mary Francis shoes to wear to work tomorrow.

Sure I could make coffee at home, but...

Would it be this beautiful? I spoiled it a little bit by putting some sugar in the middle of the design that Andre the coffee cart guy put in my latte foam today. I must say that not only does the coffee really taste great, but the attention to detail makes it worth my time and money to stumble out to the lobby of my building to get it.

Yes, there is free coffee down in the executive dean's office, and it's pretty good, but there just isn't the love that I can taste in the coffee cart offerings. And frankly the "International Delights" creamlike substance doesn't really make up the difference.

Oh, For Pete's Sake

Why-o-why can I not get my LLL (luscious little laptop, not La Leche League, silly!) onto my wireless network at home? I know my router should be able to assign it an IP (especially since I restarted the whole rig so that everything would start at the begining of the IP range on my network). I know that my LLL has a rocking wireless connection because I was able to fork over my ten bucks for five hours of T-Mobile Wireless at the Hyatt a couple of weekends ago when I was working an event there.

Maybe I should become one of those horrible customers and call the IT guys at home on a Sunday night and ask them why some crazy-ass network that they have absolutely no knowledge nor control of is being difficult.

Maybe not.

New Job Resolutions, Revisited

I boldly made some resolutions about the new job. You may have thought, "Good luck with all that, loser." Well. The amazing thing is that I'm actually doing pretty well on some of them.

Managing email effectively: This is something I'm rocking on. My in box has only new email in it, and I'm using folders organized around the different areas of my work. I'm keeping a lot of email for reference because often when I first receive something I don't understand the full significance of it (what with the being new and somewhat confused). But an explicit filing system means I can go back and find it without resorting to searching for a string of words in the message.

The only downside is that when the institutional email server has a major problem with what day it is and archives everything in those folders, it can be hard to work. Fortunately all my email and appointments came back from beyond the grave, so all's well that ends well.

Learning about stuff: This is the best part of my job. I get to learn about the whole organization and get a grip on it daily. Some of it is just because everything is new and so if I'm aware of it at all it's because I'm learning and growing every day in every way. But still.

Not turning into an annoying customer: I think I'm failing miserably at this. Each day the database irritates me in some new and exciting way. And it's not just the database, it's the crazy sloppy data -- like a record with the mailing name "The Such-and-Such Family" that was given the record type "Individual" (which should signify a person. Just one.). I know, I should pop a 'lude. Whatever.

Not turning into a grind: I am eating lunch with my colleagues almost daily, but I'm also not taking time off during the day to do things I want to yet. We'll see how that goes as I get my feet under me.

So not bad. The biggest surprise for me is how much starting out with a firm grasp on my email and not letting it go actually helps me do things. If you're thinking about either declaring email bankruptcy or you have an opportunity to start fresh, I really recommend this.