C Board > Community Boards > A Brief History of Cprogramming.com > AAGGHH!! I'm not a secretary!!!
View Full Version : AAGGHH!! I'm not a secretary!!!
So here I am, lead developer for 5 proprietary software suites used on all of our vessels and offices worldwide. And the day that we spearhead a major upgrade to our Viper software (our ships' management system) our new VP calls and asks me to come to his office.
"Hey, we've got this budget meeting on Monday and I've got to present the quarterly breakdown of revenue by vessel to the board. I just emailed you the spreadsheet with the data. I need this charted out for tomorrow."
Can't say no to a VP. So I either delegate out the stuff I was working on or just put it on hold and in 30 minutes I've got a sheet of pretty colored pie-charts to show him.
"Nah. I'm not liking the pie charts anymore. See what else you can do."
Back to the drawing board. 4 charts later he's finally picked a chart style he likes and now we're in the process of perpertual tweaking.
2 days lost on making charts for a meeting that I'm not even remotely involved in. At least our VP is cool about it.
And I guess it could be worse. Could've been "Hey we've got some customers coming to tour the office and the janitor is sick. Can you go clean the stalls in the restroom and wax the floor? They'll be here in 20 minutes. Thanks."
Y'know - that skirt looks nice on you.
sounds like he came to you because he wanted it done right.
Point out the cost of your time, and the cost of a delay per hour on the project you've shelved to help him. Offer to produce a graph of such costings and suggest the most efficient way he can send it to his boss, be helpful, offer to do that for him.
He finally settled on a chart style and layout, so it's done. He was cool about it the whole time. The biggest headache was that he didn't really give me any direction. Just a bunch of revenue figures per vessel class per quarter and basically said "Make something that'll look good at the board meeting."
Why couldn't he just make the charts himself? I mean... we did charts in Excel way back in High School, not to mention just about every business class I've taken in college has had me use spreadsheets and make charts!!
That's just it. He didn't care that my current projects got put on hold. As for as he was concerned, since this was a budget meeting with the BoD at the start of the new fiscal year, nothing else took priority.
And since we recently had a major restructuring, I fall right under him on the org chart, so even though he has nothing to do with our IT department and I only see/hear from him once (if that) a week, he's my direct supervisor.
The best part of the whole situation was that even though I could have easily have done this in Powerpoint and connected his laptop to our new projector for the meeting, he had me print up old school slides on our color laserjet so he could use an old overhead projector for the meeting. "I like that traditional feeling", he said.
Maybe you should get a job description written up.