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jebbypalAs much as I hate being bored, anyone who knows me pretty well will also tell you that I hate change. I used to have pretty frequent existential crises whenever the family moved, or I was graduating from some place. (I don't miss those).
That being said, work is in flux. Not enough to make me hate it, or make me want to leave since I do still love my direct boss an inordinate amount. But it is.
It started a lot back last march/april when our teammate, JRC, left. She didn't like Ohio boy, and she didn't really enjoy a lot of the work we did, plus hated the travel, so it made sense. I had to deal with Ohio a lot more after that and was definitely frustrated with him. But I still liked the clients, and don't mind the travel.
Things changed more last august when we hired our new client service person, Old D, to replace Ohio on the main account at the client's behest. Old D is nice. An older woman. Who at first reminded me too much of my mother. Now she reminds me nothing of her because my mother has never been quite this spineless. We may all joke that I get my personality from my dad with my inability to play politics etc, but even when being low person on the totem pole, my mom only ever put up with so much shit and she never ever would give the impression of being under water. From the first time I had to work with Old D, there there was always some catastrophe going on that was going to make us look bad. She never communicated it directly to the client, but I didn't appreciate having that noise in the background when prepping ever. But she does her job and does manage projects well, so we settled into a pretty good working relationship.
Then our client left to move on to another job in November, and we played make=do with her two underlings who had timelines changed on them by higherups and were playing one-ups-manship with each other making our job at the last conference of the year painful. But we go through it and it was fine.
Until January when the account was taken over by a French-Canadian Terror-Woman (FCTW). She hails from a pharma company known for its horrendous company culture. She doesn't know the science and doesn't care about learning it. She only likes color/style, even though the things she asks us to do do not improve the scientfic accuracy of the product. For example:
--She doesn't like too much text on a slide. If you can make a bullet 1 line long by abbreviating every 3rd word and turning any word like "increased/improved/decreased" into an arrow symbol, you should
--She thinks using different color bullet symbols aids things. It doesn't.
--She likes the refs at the bottom of the slide to be all in "one line" eg, not left justified in numerical order. Personally, I think there's nothing so annoying as a presentation that I have to read through a bunch of crap at the bottom to finally find the 5th reference. Especially since she wants anything that's not the main text in a font of 9 or lower
--Oh, most of our word documents must be a font of 9 or lower so that the page count is short. *head desk*
--To shorten the citations at bottom of slides, she's had us remove "et al" from the short citation. And we're not allowed to put the full reference in the slide notes.
--She constantly changes style on us and when we ask if this is to apply to EVERYTHING acts like we're idiots because of course it should
To top it off, she has us making fully-laid out complete documents for reprint carriers, flash cards, and slide decks on a paper that we don't know when this year it will be published because the other papers that are to be published at the same time have not been finalized (though they are accepted). As well as the same set of stuff for a paper that is still in first draft and not even been circulated to authors for comment. *head desk x 1000*
Needless to say, Old D is going crazy with this since she has to interact with the woman every day. I don't have to interact with FCTW at all(which is a good thing, because I would not tolerate the yelling and derogatory comments for very long without retaliating) and it drives me batty. Though boss and I are starting to suspect part of the problem is that Old D comes across too conciliatory and submissive on the phone with FCTW which FCTW feeds off of. However, the VP of client services on the account is just all about keeping the account even if it means throwing us all under the bus to achieve it. When boss, Old D, and I have been working almost 24/7 since the woman took over in order to juggle our other accounts with the fact that anything FCTW gives us generally has to be completed w/in 48 hours or less. Even if its given to us on a friday evening.
Tomorrow morning the VP has called a "team meeting" (including our new hire who has never had anything to do w/ these projects). I'm not looking forward to it.
Overall, I'm okay w/ losing the account. It would suck since we've gotten so good and are experts at it, but at this point, I don't think we're making a profit on it, and losing it would free us up to do so much other work on our other accounts with the company. And the longer this goes on, the more I think my boss may start to look for other options. We already know that one of the FCTW underlings is looking to leave (and it's the one we have the best relationship with since his wife is also employed by our company). HE just had twins and after 3 months of FCTW's reign, he's put in to work part-time. Which I don't blame him at all - personally, I'd have resigned a lot sooner.
That being said, work is in flux. Not enough to make me hate it, or make me want to leave since I do still love my direct boss an inordinate amount. But it is.
It started a lot back last march/april when our teammate, JRC, left. She didn't like Ohio boy, and she didn't really enjoy a lot of the work we did, plus hated the travel, so it made sense. I had to deal with Ohio a lot more after that and was definitely frustrated with him. But I still liked the clients, and don't mind the travel.
Things changed more last august when we hired our new client service person, Old D, to replace Ohio on the main account at the client's behest. Old D is nice. An older woman. Who at first reminded me too much of my mother. Now she reminds me nothing of her because my mother has never been quite this spineless. We may all joke that I get my personality from my dad with my inability to play politics etc, but even when being low person on the totem pole, my mom only ever put up with so much shit and she never ever would give the impression of being under water. From the first time I had to work with Old D, there there was always some catastrophe going on that was going to make us look bad. She never communicated it directly to the client, but I didn't appreciate having that noise in the background when prepping ever. But she does her job and does manage projects well, so we settled into a pretty good working relationship.
Then our client left to move on to another job in November, and we played make=do with her two underlings who had timelines changed on them by higherups and were playing one-ups-manship with each other making our job at the last conference of the year painful. But we go through it and it was fine.
Until January when the account was taken over by a French-Canadian Terror-Woman (FCTW). She hails from a pharma company known for its horrendous company culture. She doesn't know the science and doesn't care about learning it. She only likes color/style, even though the things she asks us to do do not improve the scientfic accuracy of the product. For example:
--She doesn't like too much text on a slide. If you can make a bullet 1 line long by abbreviating every 3rd word and turning any word like "increased/improved/decreased" into an arrow symbol, you should
--She thinks using different color bullet symbols aids things. It doesn't.
--She likes the refs at the bottom of the slide to be all in "one line" eg, not left justified in numerical order. Personally, I think there's nothing so annoying as a presentation that I have to read through a bunch of crap at the bottom to finally find the 5th reference. Especially since she wants anything that's not the main text in a font of 9 or lower
--Oh, most of our word documents must be a font of 9 or lower so that the page count is short. *head desk*
--To shorten the citations at bottom of slides, she's had us remove "et al" from the short citation. And we're not allowed to put the full reference in the slide notes.
--She constantly changes style on us and when we ask if this is to apply to EVERYTHING acts like we're idiots because of course it should
To top it off, she has us making fully-laid out complete documents for reprint carriers, flash cards, and slide decks on a paper that we don't know when this year it will be published because the other papers that are to be published at the same time have not been finalized (though they are accepted). As well as the same set of stuff for a paper that is still in first draft and not even been circulated to authors for comment. *head desk x 1000*
Needless to say, Old D is going crazy with this since she has to interact with the woman every day. I don't have to interact with FCTW at all(which is a good thing, because I would not tolerate the yelling and derogatory comments for very long without retaliating) and it drives me batty. Though boss and I are starting to suspect part of the problem is that Old D comes across too conciliatory and submissive on the phone with FCTW which FCTW feeds off of. However, the VP of client services on the account is just all about keeping the account even if it means throwing us all under the bus to achieve it. When boss, Old D, and I have been working almost 24/7 since the woman took over in order to juggle our other accounts with the fact that anything FCTW gives us generally has to be completed w/in 48 hours or less. Even if its given to us on a friday evening.
Tomorrow morning the VP has called a "team meeting" (including our new hire who has never had anything to do w/ these projects). I'm not looking forward to it.
Overall, I'm okay w/ losing the account. It would suck since we've gotten so good and are experts at it, but at this point, I don't think we're making a profit on it, and losing it would free us up to do so much other work on our other accounts with the company. And the longer this goes on, the more I think my boss may start to look for other options. We already know that one of the FCTW underlings is looking to leave (and it's the one we have the best relationship with since his wife is also employed by our company). HE just had twins and after 3 months of FCTW's reign, he's put in to work part-time. Which I don't blame him at all - personally, I'd have resigned a lot sooner.