"Do your magic!"

I used to work for a managing editor who would end all of his requests for rush editing jobs with that statement.

Given that I always managed to come through for him, I suppose it's possible that he viewed me as something more than a mere mortal. Probably not.

Persona non grata (yet one more last time)

Ten days to go before I leave my hellish FT job, so perhaps there will be another similar entry. But for today, we have this little, telling story.

In the weekly staff meeting, my MoronManager announced that today is the last day for one of our proposal coordinators. LR came in as a temp-to-perm, has done a bang-up job, and is yet another competent professional driven out by, among other things, the gross incompetence of my IdiotManager.

I am leaving next week, but my MentallyChallengedManager said nary a word about my imminent departure.

Oh, how I'd love to be around when the first big proposal blows up in her face. A proposal center without a FT editor; makes perfect sense in her world, wherever that might be.

Persona non grata (one last time)

I turned in my resignation on Monday. My final day as the government proposal editor for the IT company will be 9/11. I picked that date for its obvious symbolism. It changed our lives forever. Leaving this god-awful job will do the same for me.

When I told my manager, her only words were, "I was just getting used to the idea that you were going to be around for a while."

I could not have hoped for a better, more representative, ending statement from this dolt whom I have endured since January '08.

After twenty months, she finally realizes that I'm actually there. Well, not quite, because as she puts it, it's merely "the idea" that I'm there.

When we means me (and certainly not you)

(Update to entry immediately below.)

The most senior (and influential with executive management) proposal manager and I had a back-and-forth in which she essentially argued for the "grammatically correct but inconsistent appearing" approach and I repeated my recommendation.

She wrote, in part, "I say we talk about it next week and make a decision that we can work with."

For twenty months I have been told repeatedly, "You're the editor. You decide." Most of my style recommendations has been rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with style rules or logic. In total, those rejections have rendered completely meaningless, my role as the "gatekeeper of style."

That resistance and unwillingness to grant me the authority that should go with my responsibility, flows almost completely from the inability of the proposal center manager to tell our stakeholders in no uncertain terms that the editor who has twenty-six years of experience will make decisions of this kind.

Feed me! Feed me!

I read an article many years ago in which a psychiatrist wrote that the reason children steal from their parents (e.g., money from wallets/handbags, expensive cosmetics) is that they're not getting the love they need and want, and the object they steal is a surrogate for the missing love. That article came to mind the other day in the context of free lunch in the office.

The proposal center has more "war rooms" (i.e., meeting rooms for proposal development teams) than we actually need, given the small number of proposals in the works at any given time. So folks from all parts of the company frequently use those rooms for meetings. And they usually ask our AA to order lunch for them. So there's often lots of good food in the office. This is why most of us are dieting!

Since we're not getting the "love" (read: respect, management, leadership, bonuses/good raises, and truth) we need from our manager, we're "stealing" it. Like long-lost desert wanderers spotting an oasis, we rush to the kitchen as soon as the catered lunch arrives, stealing some of the food before the meeting folk get to it.

This prompted our manager to fire off this missive:

"If you are not a participant of the meeting being conducted, please do not take from the catering before checking with me first.  We have received several complaints that the food has been picked over before the attendees have had a chance to eat. Others can eat only AFTER ALL of the participants from the meeting have taken their food."

My response to my coworkers reflects the group's sentiment:

"I guess WE THE UNWASHED probably shouldn’t even COME OUT OF OUR CAVES AND POLLUTE THE AIR until the Lords and Ladies of the Manor are safely ensconced in the Castle Towers.

"Humbly,

"I remain Budrick, the unworthy and filthy servant of My Beneficent Lady of Fairfaxshire"

"All you've done is editing."

I had a so-called mid-year review with my manager last week.

Her assessment was peppered with language about being a team player, chipping in, stepping it up, and so forth. Not a word was uttered about my editing.

Her view is that the editing workload in the proposal center is generally very light. She is one of the unenlightened who thinks editing takes no time or effort. Thus, she broached the subject of redefining my role.

She said, "Looking at your resume, I see that all you've done is editing." The emphasis is hers.

This trivializing and undervaluing editing is not uncommon. But I have never worked anywhere as an editor (since 1983) where this view was as prevalent as it is in my shop.

It is very likely that the name of this blog will change in very short order.

What is it about "unavailable" that you don't understand?

Yesterday our new temp-to-perm proposal coordinator (who, incidentally, has more energy and enthusiasm than most of us can stand) sent out an update on where a few active proposal projects stand. In her email she mentioned that there might be some weekend work and asked us to let her know if we would not be available for any of the next several weekends.

I responded by telling her that I would not be available for weekend work in the foreseeable future. (Given that I have one foot out the door, I'm not giving them one extra minute of my time or effort.)

She responded, copying our MoronManager, by asking me to make sure to put that information on the group calendar, which I had already done.

This morning MM came to me with a hard copy of my email to the proposal coordinator in hand, with "I will not be available for weekend work in the foreseeable future" highlighted in bright orange.

MM asked me if I could elaborate on my message. "Sure. I'm busy and unavailable." She then asked me to put that on the group calendar. "I already did that." And I thought, "Why don't you look at the f**kin' thing, you dolt!"

Considering the notion that everything happens for a reason, I think I've come up with why I've had this god-awful job, for a year and a half now. It's so that as I soon ease into semi-retirement—that is, transition out of FT work (read: quit!) into several PT freelance jobs—I can look back at this job and not miss having a FT office job one tiny bit.

Hi. My name is Bud and I have a problem with illiterates.

There's a Seinfeld episode revolving around the fact that Jerry's Catholic dentist, Tim, has converted to Judaism. Tim immediately starts telling Jewish jokes. Jerry takes issue with Tim's conversion because he believes Tim converted just for the jokes.

He shares this with a priest, who asks him, "And you are offended by this as a Jew?" Jerry answers, "No, I'm offended by this as a comedian!"

Which brings me to real life.

My illiterate manager sent an email this morning alerting the team that she'd be out today. Me and one other person were omitted from her message, which a coworker passed along to me.

I sent her an email inquiring about the obvious omissions.

Here's her response, verbatim:

"Regardomg tje notice of me being out today. This was not done intentionally, since I was sending it through my blackberry and I did not get the spelling of everyone’s last name, I sent it to those that their email was in my inbox."

Putting aside the fact that she doesn't have all of our addresses on her BlackBerry, just look at that writing.

Does this offend me as a member of her staff? Sure. But it really offends me as an editor!

RIP Telecommuting (d.2009)

I love telecommuting—Tuesday's at home in the comfort and quietude of my apartment. (Note re quietude: I know, the word choice could have been better. I just wanted to use that word for the first time in my life.)

Our manager performed the coup de grâce on this cherished benefit last week. Her fiat read, in part:

"Over all, to stop complaints to HR about how some people have more privileges then other (working from home being one of them), I have decided to discontinue the telecommuting." [grammatical errors hers]

So, in her typical, clueless fashion, rather than lead and manage the Proposal Center staff toward more respect and teamwork and thereby create a more equitable environment, she decided to punish everyone.

It's also noteworthy, and oh so telling, that she specifically states the reason for her decision is "to stop complaints to HR."

I miss the '60s and '70s. Back in the day, I had more than one job where staff would have organized to get rid of a manager who did more harm than good.

What are those guys doing over there, playing games?

As the editor for the proposal center, my responsibilities include editing all graphic elements of a proposal. These include a variety of tables, charts, and figures. Many of them are very complex multicolored and layered images done by our graphic artists using memory-intensive software applications.

The graphic artists' repeated requests to have faster computers with increased memory were finally acted upon, and their new PCs were ordered.

When they arrived, the mailroom staff refused to accept delivery because the wording on the boxes included words to the effect that the PCs were excellent for gaming.

Despite being apprised of this by our production manager, our manager took no action to deal with the situation. So the graphic artists plod along and do the best they can.

When this was discussed at a recent staff meeting, the production manager, not our manager, said that when the graphic artists' PCs crash in the face of a critical deadline, he'll tell someone upstairs "I told you so!"

The proposal center manager sat in silence, as is her wont. Not providing any leadership or management is one thing, but actually getting in the way of staff is a horse of a different color. Such horses should be sent to the glue factory.

Trifecta

I hit the jackpot yesterday. I did not thank god for this particular Friday, on which all of the following transpired.

Win: The Telecommuting Policy

We’re allowed to work from home one day a week. (My day is Tuesday.) However, when we’re under the gun and a proposal deadline is posted on our Big Board, that policy is suspended. The application of the policy is as clear as mud. To wit:

From one proposal coordinator to staff: “We only have 3 weeks to support this effort. The following weeks will be busy weeks—lots of graphics, DTP, etc. So please do NOT plan on working from home starting next week till due date.” (policy #1)

From the proposal center manager to me (in response to my question, “If no editing takes place next week or the week after, can I work from home on 5/12 and 5/19?”): “If you cannot see how you can help during this time, then you may work from home.” (policy #2)

From our second proposal coordinator to staff: “There’s no working at home the week a proposal is due.” (policy #3)

Place: The Acronym List

One of my responsibilities is to put together a list of acronyms and key terms, extracted from a Request for Proposal as soon as we receive the RFP. The list is a style guide for the proposal writers.

I spent a few hours on Friday doing a list for an upcoming proposal effort. I sent it to the proposal manager for his review/approval.

His response to me: “We will probably not use 50% of the Acronyms on this list in our proposal. . . . Go through our Pink Team folder, through each of the drafts, highlight those we use; we can later delete the rest.” So, first, writing has commenced before anyone asked me to provide an acronym list and, two, the proposal manager (a contractor) has decided that we will abandon our procedure of using the RFP as the basis for the list.

Show: Memory Like a Sieve

The proposal center manager asked me to do a “quick edit” (i.e., one hour) of a 45-page white paper for corporate HQ. First, I already edited it, a couple of weeks ago. Second, I have told her repeatedly that, for obvious reasons, no editor can edit 45 pages in one hour!

The Wall knows and demands, "Feed me!"

We just learned that one of our proposals won, to the tune of $49 million.

The proposal center manager sent us the following message:

It looks like we won are on a roll. [Yep, she omitted "and."] We need to put the cover of this proposal on the wall.

A continuation of no thank you's, no bonuses, no attempt to get us raises, which have been postponed indefinitely in light of the economy. But, by all means we must add the proposal cover to our "win wall."

My response to her email, copied to everyone in the center, was:

I’m sure the wall will be very pleased to receive additional compensation, of a kind. And if it could speak, it would utter a great big "THANK YOU."

Intro to Mismanagement 101

Our proposal center manager is the most incompetent manager I’ve ever known. And that is saying something—I’ve been working since 1966!

We are in the final stages of completing a proposal. The Gold Team (i.e., final) review has been completed, and I checked to see if the desktop publishing specialist had properly made their edits. What I saw in my review is evidence of what could be a case study in how not to put together a proposal.

Here are some key steps (there are many more) the proposal center manager should have taken to ensure an infinitely better product than the one we are about to submit.

1. Hold a kickoff meeting with all writers and reviewers to describe in detail the writing and review processes.

2. Distribute and review the proposal style guide.

3. Bring about a consensus on which reviewer is the final arbiter on content changes.

4. Meet with reviewers to capture how each of their changes could impact the material reviewed by others.

5. Meet with desktop publishing specialists and graphic designers to define style, and to agree on consistency guidelines.

6. Properly screen the temp editors.

7. Provide me (the lone staff editor) the opportunity to review our proposal style with the temp editors.

8. Ensure there is a mechanism in place to track changes that would be the target of global searches/replaces just prior to production.

The above touch on just a portion of what needs to be done on a writing project that involves multiple writers and reviewers. This is fairly obvious to those who have edited in just such an environment.

The proposal center manager, however, has chosen not to manage—by any stretch of the imagination—any key area of our operations. Rather, she busies herself by cleaning the whiteboards in our conference rooms, hassling her direct reports, and holding worthless weekly staff meetings during which she utters platitudes such as, “We’re all a team here,” “We’re all adults here,” “Remember to do your timesheet daily,” and “Do you want to have a pot luck lunch?”

She is universally regarded as a joke. Yet she survives. None of us can figure out how.

Persona non grata V: Sisyphus reporting in

For the current proposal, I developed (based on the Request for Proposal) an extensive list of acronyms and key terms. The list represents the style to be used by the writers.

Among the acronyms are a number that don't need to be spelled out even on first occurrence; they're that well known to the proposal reviewers.

I started editing the proposal today, completing the executive summary and one section of the technical proposal. It took about six hours, at least half of which were devoted to cleaning up the acronym mess—that is, spelling items out the first time they appear. (I bet you're getting tired of reading that. Me too.)

As I was wrapping up my work, I mentioned to the proposal coordinator that the writers had not, despite my list, spelled out many items at all. She told me that the proposal manager had given his writers a list of about twenty acronyms that could stand on their own.

I had to go back through the documents to undo much of my work; for about another hour.

Neither the proposal manager (a contractor) nor the proposal coordinator (a coworker) gave a thought to yours truly—who is responsible for ensuring consistency)—and the fact that his style decisions and list would have an impact on the editing process.

The rock gets heavier and the hill steeper—exponentially every single day.

Mas o menos?

This is a continuation of "Editors should be seen . . .," 3/9, below.

The context here is the requirement that each employee develop, in conjunction with her manager, business-related and personal development goals for the year. The manager has the option to add goals for the employee.

E-mail to my manager:

The following goal (your addition) contradicts our discussions regarding my author queries.

You added: “The number of proposals that should have identified more items for author review/approval than what was provided during the proposal process, also based on third party post reviews of submitted proposals.”

You have told me that there has been feedback (undocumented) from individuals (not named by you) that I write too many author queries. Again, and as I’ve tried to explain to you, I believe that my level of queries is appropriate.

It seems to me that defining a goal related to author queries can’t be done unless we agree on this critical editing function.

My manager has not yet responded.

4/7 Update: Still no response.

Phone home!

Tuesday is my FT job’s work-at-home day.

My manager told me yesterday that I’d have a “messy, cut and pasted” 10-page document to edit this morning.

I sent her two emails last night—one via Outlook, the other by gmail—requesting that she call me when the document was ready. This, so I don’t have to plant myself in front of the computer—waiting, waiting.

Not having received a phone call, I checked my email at 10:15. She had sent a message with the document attached at 9:30. I responded (at 10:15), “OK. Here goes.”

She called me at 11, telling me that I hadn’t attached the edited document to my 10:15 message, and inquired where it was.

The document turned out to be a particularly messy 15 pages, as expected, and yet she expected that I had it finished in 45 minutes.

Remember Cool Hand Luke? “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

I don't do windows weekends.

Proposal submission deadlines are written in stone. If a proposal doesn't arrive at the funding agency on time, it isn't even read.

As a proposal moves through the development and production process, it's quite common for interim milestone deadlines to be blown. That results in a compression of the remaining steps and their completion dates. If there is significant slippage in adherence to the original schedule, editing—which essentially is the final step prior to production—must be done quickly and at the eleventh hour.

Such is the case, again, in my office. Our staff has bitched, among ourselves, about the fact that on many proposal efforts no one that we support has any respect for our processes. Our manager appears to be powerless to resolve this ongoing problem.

So what is one to do in the face of ineffective management? Exercise the power that is available to each of us as individuals.

I sent this email to the appropriate proposal manager yesterday:

From your Proposal Description, it looks like editing will take place over the April 4-5 weekend.

I’m going out of town that weekend (Friday night through Sunday night). So you might need to line up a temp editor.

Disjointedness: An Email Exchange

Bud – Trying to refresh my memory from what was discussed during our Team Development session at the Marriot, weren’t you supposed to update the style guide? Reason I ask is because we have new writers for the EDF proposal and they have asked me today to provide them a copy for reference. Just let me know where it is saved and I will take care of printing it. Thanks.
------------------------
Gloria [one of the two proposal coordinators in the Proposal Center],

I finished my work on it several weeks ago and turned it over to Ellen at that time so she could review the DTP section.

Also, I made some changes to the acronym section; I'll finalize the acronym section when Sue reviews the list I made of acronyms that never need to be spelled out. You might remember that was one of my action items coming out of our team building session with Bryn. I did that list immediately after that session, but as of a couple of weeks ago Sue had not yet looked at it.

Marshal Will Kane

I just watched High Noon (1952).

The parallels between that film and my life at work are striking. For that matter, most of us who work for someone else all are lone gunslingers going up against a gang bent on doing us in.

Here’s a portion of High Noon’s plot summary found at IMDB:

Will decides he must go back and face Miller. However, when he seeks the help of the townspeople he has protected for so long, they turn their backs on him. It seems Kane may have to face Miller alone, as well as the rest of Miller's gang, who are waiting for him at the station.

And now my rewrite:

I decide that I must stay and face up to my abusive, incompetent manager. However, I know that when I seek the support of my cowardly coworkers that I have supported for more than a year, they will turn their backs on me. It seems I may have to face my manager alone, as well as the rest of the managers and supervisors, who always close ranks when one of their own comes under attack.

Theater of the absurd: two characters, one act (Persona non grata II: 2/23 update)

Me: I've finished revising the style guide, except for the acronym section. I can't complete that until the acronym list is finalized, you know, the list I sent to you a couple of weeks ago.

Proposal manager: I haven't looked at it yet. [Nor did she ever acknowledge receipt of it.]

Me: Well, I guess in the grand scheme of things, in the context of the proposal center, you should give it as much attention as it deserves.

PM: I'll try to look at it tonight.

And I'll try to not be bald.