Teleidoscope

Thu, Mar 13, 2008

Contracting

Posted at 11:27 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Well, I've worked 4 days so far this week. And done about 3 days of actual work, net. Maybe only two. It wasn't my fault.

I spent a good chunk of Monday and Tuesday implementing some specific infrastructure they specifically asked for. I sent emails asking 'are you really sure this is what you want, and these are the right names for things?'.

"Yes, this is how it should be. This is what they want."

Late Tuesday afternoon, someone higher in the bureaucracy noticed: "Oh, these names are wrong and don't conform to our standards. You need to redo the setup."

Simple renaming was not an acceptable option -- everything is very interlinked and they did not think that the renaming woould propagate completely to all the places it needed to go.

So I spent much of Wednesday implementing the stuff again with the new names.

I spent part of today cleaning out the stuff that had been created with the old names.

And I spent another part of today sending LOTS of emails trying to verify that what I was told to do in the late Wednesday conference call was really what the someone higher would find acceptable. (The answer: probably not, as I expected.)

Part of tomorrow (and probably early next week) will be spent trying to figure out what really needs to be implemented. And trying to finish a few other tasks.

I have to say, based on experiences at a few different clients now, that women from India are smart and detail oriented, so they are good at the administrative side of management. But before American companies put them into any kind of position of authority they really need to be given assertiveness training so the idea of saying 'No' to really stupid ideas is less alien to them. Sticking to established standards despite a human happening to ask for something different might also be a useful skill.

I'm glad this is only a 6 month contract. I wish I trusted that it would not get extended. Now that I'm mostly over the crud, I have the energy to be cranky at the flailing, not just exhausted and miserable and disoriented by the constant changes in direction.

But I've started taking St. John's Wort again, after months without it. I don't think the insomnia earlier this week was just because of the time change. I suspect the crud tweaked my brain chemistry and I need to rebalance it.

And at this point I'm really wishing Google had had an opening in Colorado when they asked to interview me last year.

This job as a consultant has been going on for nearly 8 years now: about as long as my previous stint of consulting, and longer than I was a regular employee (at two different companies) in between. Maybe it's time to start considering alternatives.

One of the benefits of consulting that balances the uncertainties is supposed to be that you aren't stuck in a working environment you can't stand, but I'm now on my fourth contract with these same bozos since August 2004: 10 months and 7 months actually living in Boston, half of last year, and now 2 months and counting working from home. More than two years out of the past four. It seems longer.

I can't afford to not work, but I can't afford to break my health or my brain-chemistry either. I took more actual sick days last month than I did in 2005 when I was having radiation treatments. (Though I did take some time off in June 2005 right after I had surgery, a month or so before the radiation.)

And being a part-owner of the consultancy is starting to feel more like a trap than a benefit.

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