Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek

I'm explaining the formula for KEI Rating, used for calculating likelihood of a given site being found by a a user on a search engine. An excerpt from the conversation:

Me: So take the square of the users searching for the keyword...
Boss: Say that again?
Me: The square of the number of users searching for the keyword.
Boss: My math's rusty. What's "square of"?

This is the guy in charge of budgeting the company expenditures.

I remember the Rifts campaign I once ran... or attempted to run, that is. There was so much to see and do in the Rifts universe. New areas added all the time, etc. I couldn't resist snatching up every book I could find (most of which are still sitting in the closet; must remember to unload them via eBay someday) and imagining how I might incorporate this latest feature/area/whatever into the campaign. Well, as you might imagine, I went into ferret shock over the entire matter. Couldn't focus on one thing at a time. Wanted to do everything, so nothing got done. I think I actually GMed one adventure with a clear plan of where I was going with it, not counting those already planned out in the books. The rest were at best improvised all the way and at worst never got started. Not surprisingly, the campaign died a slow death.

That's roughly how my boss seems to run this branch of the company. With the added bonus that I sometimes have to explain to him the equivalent of why it would be difficult to have a Mechanoid and a Kittani on the same team.

He means well. He's got some really great ideas. But I wish he could forget about all of them for the moment and pick one project to focus on, because right now we're still getting started with this branch -- only five employees and no clear procedures for anything -- and we've got enough to worry about without implementing a whole new set of features. I find myself strapped for time handling the technical side of everything he tosses at me (multiple websites, digital designs for ads, autoresponders, scripting, technical writing...) and he certainly doesn't have the time to do his share (between clients and investors, he barely has time to check his email).

When most of your benefits are stock options, you have a vested interest in making sure the project at least gets off the ground. I can't fight the nagging doubt that in all the confusion, we'll never get that far.

We've got everything hooked up at the new location, with one little snag: no phone/DSL. And when I say no phone, I mean NO PHONE. Someone failed to tell us that this particular office doesn't have a single operable phone jack.

Seems that until recently this entire cluster of offices was one big office. Also seems that whatever our pair of rooms were used for, phone lines weren't required. A little notice would have been nice...

Well, we needed to wire the place for networking anyway, so as of this moment we've got all the lines we need in place except for the one that counts: our connection to the outside world. That'll involve running one down the hall and to the nearest phone box. Phone guy says that can be handled tomorrow.

Other than that, we're back in business. Not completely unpacked, though -- lots of files and folders boxed up here and there -- and knowing the boss, it'll probably stay that way for a while. (If you're familiar with the Myers-Briggs/Keirsey scale, my boss is a strong P. Who pretends to be a J but isn't fooling anyone; the best he can do in that regard is to plan carefully at the last minute. -_-;)

I was sitting at work, thinking about all the fun stuff I could be doing instead -- all the games I want to finish, all the anime piling up unviewed on my hard drive, all the books I picked up at that last library booksale but haven't touched, etc. But I consoled myself with the thought that I could put a good dent in that to-do list come spring break.

...I meant summer break.

...Crap.

Well, first full week of work completed. It's nice to be paid, but let me be honest about something... I have never had a job that required me to show up regularly at any time. The closest was Trident, which required a full 40 hours a week... on flex-time, which meant I usually drifted in around 10 am. Now I'm having to adjust to being up before 8 if I'm to be clean, dressed, coherent, and in the office by 9. I haven't had to be up that early since my last 9 am class (about two years ago), and they didn't care if I was shaven. So it's an adjustment period right now.

My boss is friendly and usually casual, though he tends to jump around in his thought processes. This can get confusing at times: he'll talk for a bit about something he's been working on or something he has, then say "Well, can you do it?" without ever specifying what he actually wanted me to do. I'm sure he thought about my instructions and was convinced he stated them at some point, but he rarely does, and I'll have to ask him to back up and clarify. This disorganization also shows in the office, though to be fair they moved in here pretty recently.

Perhaps related, perhaps not, is his tendency to show up five minutes before I decide "getting late, nothing left to do, time to go home", and plop something in my lap that keeps me there for an extra thirty minutes or more. Technically, I don't have an official check-out time, and I probably clocked under forty hours this week, but it's still a little annoying when I just spent a couple hours doing more or less nothing.

Despite all that, it's a pretty good job so far. Largely I've been creating digital versions of various forms that they've been photocopying for ages... the originals are lost somewhere in the LA branch, I guess. Making the letterhead was especially enjoyable; got to flex some artistic muscle (and practice on Illustrator). Sunny was also really impressed by my redesign of the pricing sheets. Glad to know I'm proving myself indispensable; job security is a handy thing. And I've got high-speed Net during lunch hour and slow moments. Which is, err, probably why I'll eventually need that job security. ("Okay, so maybe I did spent three hours in the middle of a busy day reading webcomics and online forums...")