7 Quick Takes Friday #64

See more 7 Quick Takes Friday contributions at Jennifer Fulwiler's Conversion Diary.

Yowie! What a brutal end to a brutal week! I finally crawled home from work at 9:00 this evening -- exhausted and hungry. Too hungry to make my own dinner, so I called Donnie and he called in for pizza for dinner. I picked it up on the way home and then pigged out. So much for the diet! And so much for a peaceful stomach; it is now complaining. I did not think I had the energy -- brain is a bit fried -- to think about one quick take, let alone about seven anythings, but I seem to have been able to concentrate long enough to do so.

1. Program reviews. I did a program review at our Nebraska site last week. This week I did two program reviews. They absorb much energy. The team leaders have to present all aspects of the program to me, analyze the reasons for both their failures and successes, and identify what kinds of support they need from me or my bossery. One pleasant aspect f the Tuesday review -- my deputy who recently retired came in for the review! He had put a lot of energy into the program and wanted to be part of this important annual event. There is something especially warm, refreshing, and comforting to have someone do that.

2. The giving of cups. We recently had to release 15 people whose project had ended. I was able to arrange for 12 of them to be employed in another division. The remaining three had performed poorly, so it has been difficult to place them. Likely, they will be out of work. It is difficult to watch them run from one manager to another, pleading for a job. On the other hand, they made the choice to perform poorly; the problems were all associated with behavior, not with the skills. When people are misbehaving, I wonder why they don't look forward far enough into the future to realize that they may be limiting their own longevity in the firm. I enjoy working with and helping difficult people, but in this case, they are dependent upon others loving impossible people and that does not often occur. When employees leave us, I give them a coffee cup that says, "Bon voyage! Thanks for making our organization a better place." Everyone really likes them in spite of the sad part: it means that they are leaving. This week, I handed out several cups and several hugs to those who had been able to find new jobs. (Still working on those other three...)

3. Sakai. I have been at the mercy of one of tech directors -- in the positive meaning of that word. I am *not* tech savvy, yet we are going further and further down the road of technification (hm, my dictionary does not think there is any such word, but I know that it is happening to me). Our most recent ventures have been into the use of Sakai for training and Elluminate for meeting. More and more of our employees are teleworking and more and more of our meetings are taking place virtually. All this tech is a piece of cake for employees who are my children's age. As for me, I am at the mercy of patient employees who are willing to spend considerable time getting me to learn to use programs that are anything except transparent to me.

4. CEO's meeting. We don't have CEO meetings often, but we did have one Wednesday morning. That was very odd because the CEO was on leave! (It is bad enough to have these long, boring, tell-us-what-everyone-already-knows-you-are-doing meetings which require me to drive another 10 miles, park very away [I can never find parking at headquarters; cars are always packed in, leaving no space for visitors], and hike 15 minutes uphill to the CEO's conference room. Doing so without the CEO even present makes going through the motions even less fun and desirable.

5. Sick leave. I took sick leave Wednesday afternoon, just in time for a sanity break. I was not sick -- Donnie needed the car to go to the hospital for follow-up on his infected leg -- which is nonetheless a sick leave absence at our organization. I guess people did not realize what was going on. Since I am almost never sick, people, worried, started emailing me "get better soon" wishes. I did "get better soon" because I was able to spend almost eight hours working on my various writing projects, including the forever-forthcoming book, Believer in Waiting.

6. Union president. I had one lunch this week. Seriously! That is how brutal the week has been -- no time even to eat in spite of trying. Moreover, the one lunch I had was a working lunch! At least, though, it was pleasant. About once a quarter, I have a relaxed lunch with the union president -- no real business, so calling it a working lunch is not quite accurate. It is a way for us to relax together without thinking about us being on opposite sides of some questions -- actually, we are not. We are both on the side of employees; we just come at the questions from a different perspective.

7. Editorial committee. We are publishing an in-house journal, the first ever. I got permission, then rounded up my most literate people into an editorial committee. We put out a call for articles, then reviewed them, picking the best for publication and sending most of them back to the authors for some level of redaction. We are about three months out from having the journal together. The editorial committee met this afternoon to take the penultimate steps. There was an air of excitement and pending accomplishment -- not a bad way to end the afternoon (after which I had to wade through more than four hours of administrivia).

And that, my friends, constituted about 25% of my week!!!

And now I am going to crawl from the sofa to bed. I wish you a pleasant weekend!