Anxious Boss is Anxious
I am NOT pleased that I’ve had both heartburn and insomnia this week. It’s a sign of how badly New Boss Writer’s level of anxiety is affecting me. Sitting next to someone that anxious all day, and being pressured about all the things he wants to know (NOW) is really harshing my mellow.
A couple of examples from yesterday.
We’re translating Shiny New Product (don’t get me started, I think it’s a waste of money at this early stage in the game). So I wrote up a whole checklist of things to do to clean up the project (best practices, having a “Do not translate” condition, removing draft files, removing unused screen shots, etc.). And then yesterday we walked through how I prep a project to send to the translators.
One of the things I learned over the past year or two is that translation vendors are not in the habit of helping you to save money. They will translate whatever you send them. So, one way to save money is to not send them anything you don’t want translated. The doc set for Product A is 10 or 11 docs, but we only translate five of them. So one of the steps in my process is to delete the folders and files that we don’t translate before I send the project to the translators.
We started out by making a copy of the entire project, and then start deleting files that we don’t want to translate. Flare throws up a bunch of warnings when you delete things, to let you know when a topic is linked to other topics. So we had to work through all those warnings as we made our deletions. I had to reassure NBW at least a half a dozen times that “It’s a copy. There’s no way you can screw this up.” And even if it did? You can restore from the Windows Recycle bin. Worst case scenario? We could check the project out of source control and start over. But, and this kills me, when we were finished, he had to go back and open the original project to make sure it was OK. Dude, there is no way in hell that deleting files in a copy will affect the original project. Trust me.
Wow, that is some serious anxiety there.
Then, after he sent his files, we got an out of office message because the Project Lead for our translation vendor is on vacation for two weeks. Which got us talking about vacations. He’s already saying that he doesn’t think he’ll be able to take two week’s vacation this year. I told him that even before the “unlimited” vacation policy went into effect, we all started with three weeks, and that he should take three weeks. He’s worried that he’s going to get behind, or that we’ll have a release, or that it will be at an inconvenient time. I told him to go ahead and schedule his vacation, there’s no way to predict what’s going to happen around here. Last year, L’Enfant Terrible was gone the two weeks right before a major release, and that was a right pain in the arse, but I’m sure that when he scheduled his vacation, the release hadn’t slipped to that date yet. There’s just no way to predict. So take your damned vacation man!
And then he’s saying that he’s worried that because he’s going to MadCamp (Flare training ) for a week, that he’s worried he won’t be able to get his work done for the next release of Shiny New Product. And that I might have to help him with it. If I have the bandwidth. Um, dude, I am not doing your homework for you. If you can’t keep up with Shiny New Product, how the hell do you think you’re going to manage both Shiny New Product and Product B? And I’m not only beyond busy with Product A, but I’ve got half a dozen Integration Plug-ins just waiting for me to have time to write them up (half of which have already been released to the download site without proper documentation). So when the hell do you think I’m going to have time to do your work for you? Seriously dude, WTF?
And then we were talking about the CEO’s idea for a “freemium” product. Sort of “here’s a free taste, now buy our stuff.” They’ve been kicking the idea around for a couple months now of what we could build that would be 1) easy for us to build (not cost a lot of development effort and $$$) 2) provide value to the customer (so they want to try it) and 3) directly tie into our existing products, so we have a way to suck them into a sale. It’s still very early in the discussion phase, I wouldn’t even say we’re to the design phase yet. But because he just had a conversation about it with the EVP, all the sudden he’s all hot to talk about the documentation requirements, and which one of us should write it up. Um, the Integrations team has been discussing it (and the Integrations Product Manager is in charge of it), I know more about it than you do, and I’ve been watching the “freemium” page in the Wiki, so every time it gets updated I get an e-mail. I’m all over it dude. “Well, because it’s the CEOs idea, it’s important.” No shit. Got it. You want to impress the CEO, so we’re going to stress about this too.
If he hasn’t calmed down after he comes back from training, I’m going to have the difficult conversation with him and suggest he consider medication for his anxiety. Because I’ve known people who were medicated for anxiety who did not manifest the levels of anxiety that he does. I mean, the Wasband was super anxious (I told him if he was a superhero he’d be Neurotic Man), when we went to couples counseling the counselor suggested anxiety meds, and the Wasband wasn’t nearly as bad as New Boss Writer.
A couple of examples from yesterday.
We’re translating Shiny New Product (don’t get me started, I think it’s a waste of money at this early stage in the game). So I wrote up a whole checklist of things to do to clean up the project (best practices, having a “Do not translate” condition, removing draft files, removing unused screen shots, etc.). And then yesterday we walked through how I prep a project to send to the translators.
One of the things I learned over the past year or two is that translation vendors are not in the habit of helping you to save money. They will translate whatever you send them. So, one way to save money is to not send them anything you don’t want translated. The doc set for Product A is 10 or 11 docs, but we only translate five of them. So one of the steps in my process is to delete the folders and files that we don’t translate before I send the project to the translators.
We started out by making a copy of the entire project, and then start deleting files that we don’t want to translate. Flare throws up a bunch of warnings when you delete things, to let you know when a topic is linked to other topics. So we had to work through all those warnings as we made our deletions. I had to reassure NBW at least a half a dozen times that “It’s a copy. There’s no way you can screw this up.” And even if it did? You can restore from the Windows Recycle bin. Worst case scenario? We could check the project out of source control and start over. But, and this kills me, when we were finished, he had to go back and open the original project to make sure it was OK. Dude, there is no way in hell that deleting files in a copy will affect the original project. Trust me.
Wow, that is some serious anxiety there.
Then, after he sent his files, we got an out of office message because the Project Lead for our translation vendor is on vacation for two weeks. Which got us talking about vacations. He’s already saying that he doesn’t think he’ll be able to take two week’s vacation this year. I told him that even before the “unlimited” vacation policy went into effect, we all started with three weeks, and that he should take three weeks. He’s worried that he’s going to get behind, or that we’ll have a release, or that it will be at an inconvenient time. I told him to go ahead and schedule his vacation, there’s no way to predict what’s going to happen around here. Last year, L’Enfant Terrible was gone the two weeks right before a major release, and that was a right pain in the arse, but I’m sure that when he scheduled his vacation, the release hadn’t slipped to that date yet. There’s just no way to predict. So take your damned vacation man!
And then he’s saying that he’s worried that because he’s going to MadCamp (Flare training ) for a week, that he’s worried he won’t be able to get his work done for the next release of Shiny New Product. And that I might have to help him with it. If I have the bandwidth. Um, dude, I am not doing your homework for you. If you can’t keep up with Shiny New Product, how the hell do you think you’re going to manage both Shiny New Product and Product B? And I’m not only beyond busy with Product A, but I’ve got half a dozen Integration Plug-ins just waiting for me to have time to write them up (half of which have already been released to the download site without proper documentation). So when the hell do you think I’m going to have time to do your work for you? Seriously dude, WTF?
And then we were talking about the CEO’s idea for a “freemium” product. Sort of “here’s a free taste, now buy our stuff.” They’ve been kicking the idea around for a couple months now of what we could build that would be 1) easy for us to build (not cost a lot of development effort and $$$) 2) provide value to the customer (so they want to try it) and 3) directly tie into our existing products, so we have a way to suck them into a sale. It’s still very early in the discussion phase, I wouldn’t even say we’re to the design phase yet. But because he just had a conversation about it with the EVP, all the sudden he’s all hot to talk about the documentation requirements, and which one of us should write it up. Um, the Integrations team has been discussing it (and the Integrations Product Manager is in charge of it), I know more about it than you do, and I’ve been watching the “freemium” page in the Wiki, so every time it gets updated I get an e-mail. I’m all over it dude. “Well, because it’s the CEOs idea, it’s important.” No shit. Got it. You want to impress the CEO, so we’re going to stress about this too.
If he hasn’t calmed down after he comes back from training, I’m going to have the difficult conversation with him and suggest he consider medication for his anxiety. Because I’ve known people who were medicated for anxiety who did not manifest the levels of anxiety that he does. I mean, the Wasband was super anxious (I told him if he was a superhero he’d be Neurotic Man), when we went to couples counseling the counselor suggested anxiety meds, and the Wasband wasn’t nearly as bad as New Boss Writer.