Deep Sigh

Okay: work.

Holy cow. I know new experiences are supposed to be good for me, and I know it's hard to learn new stuff, and all that. Intellectually, I know that.

But emotionally, I feel like an idiot--and if I see another spreadsheet, my brain is going to crawl out one ear, steal my car keys, and take itself out drinking. Heavily.

One of the guys on the team moved on to another job a few weeks ago. He had the second- or third-highest seniority of anyone on the team--five years, I think it was--and as such, he was one of the higher-level repositories of knowledge about what, exactly, we do. He was in charge of a number of reports, and when he gave his notice, responsibility for the reports was parcelled out among the other members of the team.

I'm not sure whether it was the luck of the draw, or they saw that I had very little else to be doing, or whether they maybe gave me a little more credit than I deserved; at any rate, I inherited a whopper of a report. It involved three different interfaces, five workbooks, eleven worksheets, a bunch of vertical lookups, and more shit I don't yet get. It goes to the Chief Financial Officer once a month, via one of the other higher-ups, who acts as a liaison.

On his very last day, at 3:45 PM, the guy whose job it was to do this fool thing before me took me into his office and attempted to train me on how to do it. By 4:45 when he left--they were going out for drinks--I had three pages of handwritten instructions and absolutely ZERO idea as to how it worked. And a week later, up comes Liaison-Guy, asking for his report.

I did my damndest, really I did. But...people, this thing...I have no possible way to convey the godawfuliciousness of this process. I did it once and he brought it back--there were problems. I did it again, fixed those problems, sent it back--nope. On the third run, I spent four hours just zeroing out bad formulas at the end. By HAND. Tab-zero-tab-zero-tab-tab-zero-enter. Tab-zero-tab-zero-tab-tab-zero-enter. I had a nice little rhythm going, by the time I'd gone through all eleven sheets.

Before I sent it back the third time, my uber-boss--Best Boss Ever, about whom I've said nothing so far but damn, this guy is a GREAT manager--told me that if I was still having trouble after that, he'd help me. And when it came back the THIRD time, still with some problems, I waved the white flag and went in to see Uber-Boss.

I spent, in the following three days, probably eleven hours sitting with the Uber-Boss and about three with Liaison Guy, walking step-by-step through the previous guy's process for running this report. The Uber-Boss is like, amazing. He cut whole chunks out of this process; reduced it from five workbooks to one, from eleven worksheets to six, and totally eliminated one of the interfaces entirely; then he went through and automated all the crappy, stupid stuff like zeroing out the bad results, and changing all the dates. What was taking me an entire day to get wrong, which would have taken me about four hours once I knew what I was doing, will now take me maybe half an hour to do. I am THRILLED, needless to say, and absolutely impressed by my Uber-Boss. He then went on to spend about four MORE hours with me, working on a different spreadsheet problem, which even he couldn't solve and which hangs over our collective heads for Monday, but whatever. He's a total opposite of Beverly, from Place Where I Used To Work; you couldn't have PAID her to actually get down in the trenches with HER workers.

But all is not well.

I have never worked in a manufacturing environment before. I have no idea about business concepts--purchasing, inventory control, formulation, etc. I don't know the first thing about "safety stock" or "shop packets" or the difference between finished goods vs. manufactured goods. It doesn't make a lick of sense to me yet, because no one has really taken the time to orient me to the language or the concepts; the guy whose job it is to do so is my immediate boss, and after three months I've concluded: he's a bit of a flake.

But all these are concepts I need to understand in order to do the documentation, which is one of the main parts of my job; and so I sit in on these long, contentious meetings with various departments and Immediate-Boss says I should be "documenting" these things, which I don't understand. So during these contentious meetings (made more contentious, and much much longer, by the fact that Immediate-Boss has not bothered to check the recently-imported data before coming into the meeting, necessitating forty minutes of correction by the departmental staff who already think the I.T. department is a bunch of idiots. Immediate-Boss reminds me, to a small extent, of Database Guy from the last job--he jumps into implementing shit and doesn't necessarily consider the implications. Uber-Boss reins him in, sometimes, but Uber-Boss doesn't always get accurate info about what's going on, I think) Anyway, during these contentious meetings, Immediate-Boss turns to me and asks me if I understand what's being discussed. To which I reply, quite honestly, that no, I do not. And he then tells me "Well, you have to ask me questions, then."

The problem here--and I've conveyed it to him as well--is that I am so far over my head that I can't even FORMULATE questions. I would ask, if I knew what to ask, but I don't. I need to be started waaaay back at the beginning, with definitions and terminology, which I should have been oriented to in my first days. And when I tell Immediate-Boss that I can't even figure out what I need to know, he tells me "well, then you have to meet with me."

Which would be grand, if it were even remotely possible. He is absolutely inaccessible. That was the problem during my first weeks there, and it continues to be a problem, and while I'm trying to glean information from my colleagues, there are some things that are his domain specifically, and most of them are the ones I need to do this documentation.

So as you can imagine, I'm pretty well frustrated with that part of my job. I think this is a good place to be, though--there's the opportunity to learn a lot, and my lessons with the Uber-Boss kinda convinced me that, if I wanted to, I could have a future in programming. I don't know if I want to, though...in fact, I sorta know I DON'T want that. My future isn't going to involve tech support, I don't think, or programming or any of that. I don't want to do that for the rest of my life.

In other news, though, I got my business cards for my bakery yesterday. I love VistaPrint....free stuff is good.