"Work" related: just really really need to rant

The BBQ Pit
1

“Work” in quotes because for all that I’m putting up with, all of the work I’m doing is pro bono at this point. That may change at some point in the future, assuming the money starts coming in (a good incentive to do my “job” – i.e. marketing and outreach – well).

For the love of god, quit raising objections to things that we discussed extensively – including discussion of these self-same objections, along with explanations of how to address them as we proceed – two months after aforementioned discussion, well after we have mutually agreed upon a marketing plan and concrete steps to implement it, and have in fact implemented said plan already. I put two months of work into this thing. I explained how it would work to you before we decided to go ahead and do it. Why are you now questioning whether or not it will really work, especially when I’ve already told you that our tracking reports are way better than expected?

For the love of god, quit listening to D. She’s the one raising all of these objections, which we did, in fact, address and explain two months ago, before we ever decided to proceed. She is also an idiot who very clearly has no idea how to use blogging and email as marketing tools. Why are you listening to her when you’ve got someone with almost five years of specific work experience in this specific niche of marketing in the room? Why do I have to explain to you again what we’re trying to accomplish, and why, and how?

No, we’re not going to reduce frequency of our primary email publication – the ezine which we have already promoted as weekly. Why on earth would we do that?? What could we possibly hope to accomplish?! Or to put it more succinctly: are you fucking serious? Are you on crack?

I am very very annoyed that I had to spend nearly an hour last night writing yet another email explaining for the gagillionth time what we’re doing, how, and why. If you can’t retain this information, maybe you should write it down somewhere, so you can refer to it as needed, so I don’t have to waste time doing something that I’ve already done 3, 4, 5, or more times. I have real productive work to do. I also need to do work, and find work, that actually pays me money. I don’t have time to waste on this crap. I wouldn’t even be spending the time ranting about this if it weren’t having an impact on my productivity.

Look, your lack of detail-orientedness is fine and cute when all it results in is getting introduced to the same guy, thus far, every single time the three of us have been in the same room together. Yes, we’ve met, about a dozen times so far now. It is not so fine when I waste an hour of time dealing with this idiocy, when we’re on deadline for your marketing materials, and that extra hour generally comes from my own damn personal time – which means I’m sacrificing sleep, or exercise, or an hour searching through job boards for something that might pay me money so I can afford to continue doing your crap for free.

I want the Center to be a success. I really do. That’s why I stepped into this role in the first place – it’s a huge role for an unpaid position. I want to have a good working relationship with you. I want us to be able to discuss the merits/demerits of new marketing ideas, sort out the best way to proceed, actually make decisions and then implement them, without this near constant second-guessing and reversals of direction, which always happen at the very last minute or, you know, after we’ve already done what we decided to to. YOU ARE WASTING TIME.

And I have now made it clear, in that hour-long email, you are no longer allowed to waste MY PERSONAL TIME. If I spend that extra hour explaining something I already explained two months ago, upon which you actually based your decision, that time comes out of YOUR time. This means I won’t be able to do that banner image re-design right now, and it will be put off until I have an extra free hour of YOUR time to work on it.

That is all.

2

I think you should quit beating around the bush and tell us how you really feel. :smiley:

Seriously, that sounds frustrating as hell. It’s very difficult to work when the decision maker won’t (can’t?) make a decision and go with it.

3

Pro bono means “done while contemplating no monetary profit, motivated solely by the good of humanity.” It does not mean “working on something that does not yet provide a revenue stream but may in the future; a start-up.” This is especially true if the “good incentive to do your job” is the opportunity to cash in on your sweat equity.

When an attorney or a doctor works pro bono, this incentive is absent. The indigent client is not ever going to pay you. If, on the other hand, the client you bill decides not to pay you, that doesn’t mean you worked pro bono, you’re just writing off a bad debt. When the restaurateur takes her chances and opens up shop, she is not working pro bono. If you want a Romance language word for what she is doing, she is an entrepreneur.

And this is obviously the source of your trouble at work. You took a pro bono gig and now are surprised that it really is a pro bono gig. Live and learn, I guess.

4

laughs There’s always one, isn’t there?

No, that’s not the source of my trouble, you may note (well, all right, you clearly missed it) that no part of my rant had anything to do with whether or not I get paid. It had an awful lot to do with wasted time, and lack of commitment to previously-made decisions. I think I reiterated the phrase “wasting time” about half a dozen times. I get pissed off about wasted time when I’m paid for work, too. (This happened a hell of a lot at my last corporate job. It drove me nuts.)

But hey, if you want to respond half-cocked on things that you haven’t even read, be my guest.

5

Yabbut you have to admit, he nailed the fact that you misused the term pro bono. :rolleyes:

Anyway, does that hour-long email you spoke of mention these issues to your correspondent (particularly the reasons why you feel this person should “stop listening to D”)?

6

OP, every time this comes up, instead of composing a new email, simply forward one you already wrote with the preface that this is what we discussed and agreed to earlier.

7

It’s just Kimmy’s way of finding something in an OP that allows him to tell us everything he knows on a subject, declare himself right and the OP wrong, and feel superior to the rest of us. Even if it’s not the point of the OP.

8

No, I think doing real-deal pro bono work is an important element of being a professional, and I hate to see people use the term in a self-serving way (to mean “I’d like to get paid for this, but I might not”). What happens if she does eventually get paid for it? Is it still pro bono work? Was it right, in that case, to ever have called it pro bono work?

If she had said, “This goddamned start-up I’m working for can’t make a fucking decision! No wonder they’re not making money! I need to think about cutting my losses,” then I would have no problem with the rant. But working at a start-up doesn’t quite have the same moral contours as performing pro bono work, so people like to say they’re doing the latter when they’re really doing the former. Because I want professionals who do charitable work to be recognized, I resist conflating the terms.

9

Well, it’s not a start-up, it’s a non-profit org, a 501©3.

I also fully acknowledge, and always have, that they may very well go under before I ever see a dime. I’d like them to not go under for any number of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with money in my pocket, but with things like wanting an arts venue and spiritual center to exist, especially when it’s become so central to my spiritual community. I’m not really expecting to get paid. It may happen in the future, but that’s chancy and nebulous and not even worth spending a lot of time thinking about, much less counting upon. (Hence my need to not waste time, actually… I need time to look for and do paying work, since I’m not getting and not expecting a paycheck for the volunteer stuff. She may want me to work it as a fully part-time, 20-hours a week thing, or more, but she ain’t gonna get that, because I need to pay my bills. I’ll treat it as a job while I’m doing it, but it’s not going to expand to take over my entire schedule, because I do need to get paid by someone.)

To add to the rant…

Good lord woman, what are you thinking?! Unfortunately I was unaware of the background of this poor woman at the time, or I might have said something – but honestly, you can’t figure out for yourself that asking a chemotherapy patient to go pounding the pavement for us is a rather spectacular faux pas? Really??

(She asked someone who happened to be there at the time if she would go walking around to local restaurants – like, ten of them – to try to establish neighborly relations and ask for food donations for our fundraiser. Dude, having been there, chemo patients do not just go walking around the neighborhood for a couple hours, because they can’t. Jumping jesus h. christ on a pogo stick. I was mortified when I found out.)

10

I find it amusing how sidetracked we got, simply because I decided to explain why “Work” was in quotes. Ha. :smiley:

(And yes, she responded positively to the hour-long email, but while she’s good at the Big Picture, she’s quite the bubblehead, and I’ve had to, again, tell her No I Can’t twice so far this week for the same additional project that she wants me to take on. I’m not sure why she thought my No would change in two days’ time, but she did. And I’m re-explaining some things decided upon two months ago, but which did not make it into the hour long email, because good god it was an hour long and that was enough.)

11

As a total aside, people that use terms like “sweat equity” are an example of everything that is impure and vile in the business world. They tend to have “paradigms” and to “utilize” things. They spend time wondering what color their fucking parachutes are and who moved their goddamn cheese. That is when they are not throwing fish at each other or some shit.

12

Curious, some people might say the same thing about trotting out the same “business buzzwords are crazy!” joke that dates to what, the Truman Administration?

13

Nice fucking try. Get real. That form of communication does absolutely nothing but confuse things and try to avoid directness and any form of taking responsibility. To put in a way that you might understand: The take home here is that there is no value add to this way of communicating. Try to get your arms around that if you can. I will ping you later too see if you have internalized this. :stuck_out_tongue:

14

Are people really confused by the distinction of paid-in capital equity versus equity obtained through work effort? And since your putative concern is understandability, how do you distinguish between these two forms of ownership acquisition?

15

no u