Adore her...

Friday we had a staff meeting at work, then we left to have a "Pot-luck Back to School Party" at my director's house. (BTW, I love her house, I want one!) My one coworker is finishing her degree, my other is starting a post-master's certificate, and I'm starting grad school in two weeks - so the timeliness of the party was great.

I was talking to one of my new coworkers, Judy, and I really value her. She brings an insight and an experience to the table that not many could. She's very introspective, and now that I'm learning more about what OD is, I think she encapsulates the true theories.

We were looking at a magazine on the coffee table, one of the many sale books from the local stores, which was selling bed spreads. I saw a black/white one that was extremely classy. She asked me about the colors, and I mentioned that I did my ex's bedroom in those colors. She is going through a divorce, and asked me about "ex", and I explained that we weren't married, he's an ex-boyfriend. She asked me what happened, and I explained it to her, and she told me a little bit about why her marriage, after 30 years, is no longer.

She then said something very interesting, which caused me to reflect a lot this weekend. Judy said that she has a lot of friends/family who have relationships that don't work, and she wondered why some do. So she started studying her friends that had working relationships and she noticed a common theme: the man in the relationship truly adored the woman.

I guess I looked at her funny, and she went on to explain that it's more than love. The man puts her every need ahead of his own, which makes her happy, and in turn she is loving and nice to him, which makes him happy. But if the man doesn't adore her, care about her needs, or see value in their time together, it never works.

I was watching my director's boyfriend, Tom, who is an old-world gentleman, and I saw what she was saying. Her wish is his every command - but it's not as gross, annoying or stupid as many young people think that would be. He's not "whipped" as some people would say, he is just happy when she is happy. So that comes out as doing small things for her - for instance, before she gets out of bed in the morning, he brings her a class of juice. She never asked for that, she doesn't need it, and is perfectly capable of walking downstairs herself to get it, but he knows it would make her happy, so he does it. Sometimes he just looks at her with so much love in his eyes, as if he's a truly lucky man.

It's those little things that women are looking for, that more and more men don't seem to give them. Believe me, I'm a strong career woman, with a 5 year plan for success. Yet, I'm still woman enough to want to be adored too.

Agonizingly horrid

Work today was agonizingly stressful.

Apparently, I have to throw out 6 months of work, and in the 11th hour re-invent the wheel. Why wait so long to say something? I like how one circumvents those involved and makes unilateral decisions without knowing all the facts. Oh, and it's needed by the middle of the month... why do you think something that took us over 6 months to build and is just one webpage is going to be faster to complete when it's 8 pages and needs to be built within 3 weeks? Am I missing the logic?

Should I be surprised? No.

One more example to add to the books...

I'm too tired to even complain about it.

saga day 2

Well, it's day 2 of the bowling saga, and I am still walking around in a daze. Not that I am naive, but it's just something that doesn't seem to happen on a regular basis. It's almost an "April Fools" joke.

My friend Ryan went on the MD Judiciary website, and was able to determine that he's charged with 14 different counts of things. Considering that we have a copy of the warrant for his arrest, we have his personal information. The guy goes by the name Ken Lane, but his real name is William Kenneth Lane.

My mom is going to talk to one of the reporters at work, because talk about poor customer service. AMF basically washed their hands of the issue, but they lost about 100 customers in the process... plus all the people we'll tell. If I was in charge, I'd take the personal hit on my books at the bowling alley, and give the people their money. We came to the alley in good faith, and were basically abused. AMF got a cut of our money every week, so it wasn't like they were not getting financial gain from that. If anything, they should give us their cut back.

I feel bad for the bowlers on the league who are really good, and were counting on their sanctioning status to bowl in tournaments, which have some big money in them. They are DQ'd for all the upcoming ones, as they don't have their proper qualifications.

Today was an early one for me, as I had another intervention to facilitate with my problem client. This was the cream of the crop of the group, so the meeting was very short and to the point. They really didn't have an development areas for their relationship on the team. I wish they all could go that way!

Stolen from at Bowling!!

So, this seems to be the subject of a made for TV movie, but it happened to me!

We started bowling at Country Club Lanes 15 weeks ago for their summer league. We paid $20 to get "sanctioned" which means that we are recognized as official bowlers with the national bowling associated. Weekly we paid $16 to bowl, where the AMF took their cut, and the rest went to the pot for the payout at the end of the season.

Fast forward to tonight:

We were supposed to arrive and get our payout, as the league ended last week. I arrived with my fellow teammates by 5:30pm, and there was no sign of the President or Secretary of our league. The Secretary is usually the first one there, and it was odd not to see him.

At about 6:15pm, they called us into the meeting room, and we knew something was up. Apparently there is reasonable suspicion to believe that the Secretary ran away with our money. This is what they said:

Bill, the President, and Ken, the Secretary showed up on Friday to get the check from AMF. One of the workers told Bill that there was reason to be suspicious of Ken, but he could not go into details. He also said, "I wouldn't give him the money." Bill went with Ken anyway to the bank, cashed the check, counted the money, and gave it to Ken to hold until tonight. He thought the problem was just between Ken and the guy, and didn't think anything of it.

A woman showed up, named Sharon, to the bowling alley a few weeks ago to tell them that she is looking for Ken, as she has a warrant out for his arrest - he apparently took her for $3,000. She was there tonight, with copies of the warrant. They were trying to track Ken down tonight, and all information he has is disconnected. He's totally MIA.

My anger is directed toward Country Club Lanes. 1. If they knew a few weeks ago that this man had a warrant out for his arrest, why would they not call the police and have them come get him - he's there every Tuesday. 2. If they knew that there was reasonable doubt that he shouldn't be given money, why give it to him?

There is a police report being filed - but there is nothing that we can do right now. Especially because he never filed the paper work to get us sanctioned.

Of all the dumb luck!

36 weeks

Last night I started my new bowling league, and I have to tell you that I was surprised. We thought it was just 15 weeks, like the Summer League, but no, it's 36 weeks - which takes us through April. Not too shabby!

Although, I think this league is much better managed, and there seems to be more of a group atmosphere than my previous league. They do a weekly 50/50 raffle, and there's a Holiday Party thrown in as well. Well, they called it a Christmas Party, but Ryan was offended because he wants to celebrate Kwanzaa this year, so I renamed it in my head to Holiday Party. I'm going to start covert tactics where I call it 'Holiday Party' whenever I hear someone mention it, in hopes that the new terminology will catch on. It seems to work ... I have a whole population of people saying "Oh my!"

We bowled really well for our team. But I think we are clearly out maneuvered, as this league has been bowling together for a really long time. We are also the youngest group, so I feel like a bunch of whipper-snappers who can't hold their own against the big dogs. So, this time we aren't in it for the money, we're in it just for fun! hehe :) But we have 36 weeks to improve! My fingers are crossed!

My body is craving gym time. I wasn't able to make it this weekend, nor last night, so hopefully I can get there tonight. I have a meeting with my past league to collect the prize money, so hopefully we placed high enough to get something! Or at least break even. Paying almost $20 a week, plus buying all the equipment, I'd like to see some of it back.

Aside from taking a cruise next year for our 30th birthdays, I think Ryan and I are going to have an old fashioned bowling party. Party like we're 10! hehe :) All the friends and family are invited, so start planning for Bowl-O-Birthday 2009! Coming to an alley near you in April/May of that year.

html overload

I thought I retired from this line of work, but apparently not so.

I finished it - the webpage stuff that I was complaining about on Friday. I actually finished around 1pm, and then moved on to the "nice to have" pieces. I didn't mentioned the "nice to have" pieces to anyone, as then they become "must haves", which just stresses me out.

I'm very proud of myself, as I learned how to jimmie-rig the system. He told me that I can only have one webpage with links on it to static documents in a Lotus Notes database (ie PDF, Word, Excel, etc.). He failed to mention then a Notepad created HTML document can be uploaded as a static document, and in essence, becomes another webpage. Making the experience much more user friendly for the user, so they aren't stuck with a random Word document that opens.

Now that my side is working well, the database side with the query is down. I don't have control over that piece, so I can only hope that they are working on it, thus why it's down. I have a call in about that... let's keep the fingers crossed!

I got my new bowling ball over the weekend, and had it drilled. It's beautiful! Purple and white swrilies, and it glows in the dark! I even got a pretty bag, so now I'm bowling in style - watch out!

Let the saga continue....

on the edge...

So, I officially went over the deep-end at work today. Many months ago I blogged about my boss coming out of her office and sitting under my co-worker's desk... at about 2:30pm this afternoon, I went under my own desk. Actually stretched out, and laid there for 5 minutes.

I was pretty much done, and the last straw was poking me in the eyeball. We've been working on getting our website out (let me be honest, I've been working on getting our website up), and it keeps getting pushed back month after month. The last push was due because she wanted to wait until the new person was hired, so they could rework some of the learning map documents that we created to be put up there.

Now, please understand, I'm going where no other client in the history of my company has gone before. I want dynamically generated reports that I can update components of on the fly on our intranet site, which is Lotus Notes driven (need I say more to the techies in the room?). That's the only way to keep over 200 pieces of paper updated quickly, building out the components in a database. The normal solution is they make you upload 200 static documents that have to be pulled-down, fixed, and re-uploaded... which I don't have the time or patience to do, when I just have to add 2 words to a column.

I built what I wanted in Access, to give the intranet team an idea of what I wanted the database to do. I didn't want to confuse them with building it in sql, as that would just be over the top. Then I had to coordinate with marketing on the look and feel of the html based user interface. They are actually a joy to work with... whereas with a certain IS team, their response to me was, "I'll give you the basics, and if you can prove to me that you have high traffic, then we'll build you something else." Somehow that seems counter productive. People aren't going to repeat visit a piece of crap. But I got my basic database, however ugly and clunky it displays.

Do you know how many fake "go lives" I've had with this thing? Let's see, I started working on it before Thanksgiving last year, so that puts us at about 5. She finally agreed on a date... I knew exactly what I was supposed to do, and I was precisely going to have it done for Sept 2.

Yeah... then the world got involved. Suddenly this is more high-profile than she ever mentioned, and how many times I've said that they only gave us one page, we can't put the world on it, seems to fall on deaf ears. So what's that mean? It means I'm stuck trying to make the thing jump on it's head and spin, while still making it visually pleasing and not gaudy.

Then she felt "out of the loop", so suddenly, I now have to spend all of my time writing elaborate plans, and meet just to meet so that everyone can understand the plans. All the while the clock is still ticking down to Sept 2.

I finally talked them off the ledge, as my coworker finished writing the maps ahead of schedule, and I was imputing them at a rapid rate... I actually finished all of them today. We also had a HUGE discussion on what I've been calling Phase 2 - and how we can put more bells and whistles in that.

But - this morning, for some reason, SOMEONE couldn't recall having that HUGE discussion about putting certain things in Phase 2, even when 2 of her team members said the opposite. Finally I said, "LOOK, it's 9:30am, I have a 2 hour meeting beginning at 10am, then an interview from 3-4:30 with a new applicant. We have user testing on Tuesday, I need to finish uploading my main priority in the 2 hours I have to work on it this afternoon, when I'm not attending your meetings. If you can get it to me by noon, I can begin prepping for all the work I need to do on it on Monday - if not, it doesn't go in." I never saw them move so fast.... one was so stressed she scheduled a massage for this evening.

So what's the problem, why is this taking so much time? Well, using Lotus Notes databases to upload content and display it in an html fashion is time consuming. Here's my process:

There is one document that lists 22 leadership competencies. Each competency has it's own behavior assessment - 22 behavior assessments. But, there's 5 levels of leadership, so multiply that by 5. As lotus notes databases work, I have to upload each behavior assessment individually, creating an entry into the database. I then have to go to the web, access the generated webpage, and find the specific URL for that document, it's not displayed when the entry is created. I then have to go back to the one document listing the 22 competencies, and link the assessment field to the uploaded behavior assessment. This is so that the user can access the main webpage, see the list of competencies and click on the assessment links for each one and have them displayed to be printed. Plus, there are random changes that need to be made to the main user page, and now they want all of these additional features, including a document library.

What put me over the edge, is that when I was moving around the leadership assessment, which is in Word, the lines on the table would not line up. I had to add a column, but there were header rows. To add the column without messing up the header rows, I had to delete them. When I went to put the 3 rows back in, they would not line up with the rest of the table. It was less then a pixel difference, yet I know that it would be the first thing my boss noticed.

See, she doesn't understand technology, so she doesn't get the process I just described or how much work that is, all she cares about is if it's pretty. So, that would be the first thing she noticed. To fix it, I would pretty much have to delete the entire table, and recreate it from scratch with the additional column already on it. Here I am, doing more work than necessary, because SOMEONE didn't remember that this whole stupid assessment thing was supposed to be PHASE 2.

Don't even get me started about usability. Maybe because it's generational, but some things on the web are just obvious to me. Like when there is a red asterisk next to a field, and down below a red asterisk next to the word "Required". Somehow I get that you are supposed to enter data into that field.... but no, they want a long narrative explaining it. So I wrote the long narrative to explain it in the directions at the top of the page... but now they claim that people don't read directions, so now they want the words right next to the field, along with the long narrative at the top, and the continued red asterisk thing... sigh...