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blonde_apocalypse
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Name: Barbara
Gender: Female
Interests: Languages (Italian, Spanish, German), American Military, British History
Expertise: I'm a CPA, so there are a lot of folks who HOPE I'm good with money
Occupation: CPA
Industry: Construction
Message: message me
Member Since:
10/24/2006
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| So, it's been a while, ya? With learning the new job and training for the old one and drama, yadda yadda, I've been scarce around here. Pictures of the remodel project... this is an upstairs bath that we actually finished a couple of weeks ago. I apologize for the picture quality. I couldn't find a place in the room to get a good shot. Trust me, it's a beautiful room now. Start with Old and Busted: 
The air was filled with sawdust. Sorry 'bout that. But it's pretty representative of the gloom of this room. 
If you're wondering "Why is there, like, a WALL totally one foot inside the door that blocks the room?" It's because there was a wall totally one foot inside the door that blocked the room. When they decided to put in plumbing, instead of putting the shower along the back wall (so that it didn't take up the whole room, then you'd have a frosted window inside the shower, but that would have been nice), they built two walls inside the room to run the plumbing and hang those tacky glass shower doors that were huge in the 70's that were ALWAYS off the tracks and leaked on the floor. So there were two walls that jutted out into the room: one to block the entrance door and one to block the window. 
Rule number one of house remodel: do not build walls in front of the windows. Don't do it. 
The wall in front of the window made this useless dead space between the wall and the window. Then: New Hotness Paint, new floor, wallpaper border 
We took out the glass shower doors, one wall and part of the other (couldn't eliminate it entirely because of plumbing) and installed one of those bendable shower curtain rods that can be made to fit any shape of tub. 
and built some shelves next to the potty where the dead space was. 
Ok, well, my phone won't send any more pics, so I guess that's all you get. | | |
| I earn the majority of my income by giving advice. Yes, I do tax returns, crunch numbers, etc. But the reason people are willing to pay me the 4x level of the thinker instead of the x level of the functionary is essentially a resource allocation issue. The choice is they can scour the tax code, the legal cases, the bank histories for years and come to a conclusion or they can pay me for the shortcut: what is the bottom line of your years of looking at these things? This comes pretty easily to me. I can retain and process huge volumes of data and identify patterns better than most.
They are also paying for certainty, and the truth is, they are better off with certainty even with issues where there isn't any. George Patton said that a leader's primary duty to his subordinates is certainty, even if he doesn't feel it, because as long as they are certain of which direction to go, they will find the solution. Even if the leader's decision isn't right, certainty will spur the doers either to find a way to make it work or work to prove conclusively that it should be changed. If what the troops get is "I think we might ought to think about maybe..." then the wheels never go up, the caravan never leaves the parking lot.
I recall a hiring tool GE used on intern engineers to test how much time they would waste on an impossible project before they admitted it couldn't be done. They asked various teams to design a light bulb that produced more light but used less energy, an idea that at the time was viewed as contradictory to the first Law of Thermodynamics - conservation of energy - because "light" and "energy" were viewed as synonymous. What they got was 25 teams that said it couldn't be done and one team - who assumed that if their far more experienced senior engineers said it could be done, then it must be true, so "we just have to figure it out" - that successfully produced a light bulb that produced more light with less energy. It revolutionized the light bulb manufacturing industry. Without that assumption of certainty, that confidence in the knowledge of the better-informed, they would never have succeeded.
This is one aspect I need to practice more as a professional, and it isn't because I'm un-confident. I'm actually more guilty of giving uncertain answers now that I'm sure of what I know and have nothing to prove - and therefor nothing to hide and nothing to pretend - than I did when I was wet behind the ears. It's because I respect a business owner's ability to make his own reasonable decisions, and I genuinely believe a company (privately-owned, non-subsidized. The issues are different for others.) exists exclusively for whatever purposes the owner wants. He's the man who took the risk, had the ideas, withstood the trial period and now that the money is there, if he wants to spend it on hookers and racehorses, or he wants to pay some guy $65k a year for no other purpose than to sit quietly and take a weekly ass chewing, it isn't anyone else's business to say those aren't valid uses of his resources. I don't know how many times I've told a business owner, "If you want me to take your money out in the parking lot and light it on fire, I'll advise against it but at the end of the day, I will be out there with in the parking lot with a match and a gas can." Because it isn't my money. I'm not the one assuming the risk. It's not my decision.
But I'm starting to see I serve these people less well by my habits.
This article talks about the effects of "non-power" statements.
It talks about the loss of confidence in a person's opinions when they are expressed with a lot of modifiers. Obviously, opinions delivered among um's, well's, I'm pretty sure's, I think it might's do not inspire confidence, and I'm not guilty of those at all. But what I am guilty of is "It isn't my money, so it isn't my decision, but if it WERE my company, I would..."
I need to deliver my opinions with "No. Don't do that, and here's why..." Or "The best use of your resources is..."
And then pick up my matches and my gas can on the way out to the parking lot.
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| Because the weeping and gnashing of teeth has begun.
It seems the owner of this business has begun the process of realizing the value of what I do for him and how difficult it will be to replace. The longer I was here, the easier I made things by improving the processes, the less he valued my efforts, until it got to the point that he actually thought he could hire any ole body off the street or fob off all my duties on the secretaries who were already pushing the outer envelope of their abilities by answering the phone without swearing or coughing into the phone. Not that a couple of them aren't perfectly functional employees. But they have to be told what to do. He's forgotten that I neither needed nor would have tolerated being led by a leash.
That's the constant dilemma. The more self-sufficient you are the less people appreciate what that involves and the less they value it.
Anyway, at least once a day somebody storms back to the VP's office to cry about how she can't be expected to do what I do or even know what it is that has to be done.
I don't take any joy from causing people distress, but sometimes it's only by depriving someone of the things you do for him that cause him to appreciate them. Why is that?
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| Two of the new birdies hatched yesterday, but alas one of them was dead before I got home to see. And the other one is difficult to catch on camera for three reasons:
1) He/she rarely peeks out from under Mommy's butt
2) Dad is SO angry that I try to see it and throws himself into fits of rage when I come close
3) God colored him so as to make him difficult to see
But I did get one very inadequate pic. You can barely see him sitting under the overhang of the birdie house to the right of Mom's head. That mass of ruffled feathers in the bottom right is Dad, and he cannot contain his rage that I'm this close. He nearly managed to bite me through the fence.
If he survives, he shall be called Cleo. This little guy is the first time our bird population has closed the loop. Three years it's taken to figure out the vast mix and balance of elements that allow the population to be stable and happy enough to reproduce. I wish cockroaches were this particular.
Mom's still sitting on other eggs so I don't know if more offspring are to come.
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I've seen the whole of China from atop the wall, I've been astounded by the works at the Medici palaces in Florence, I've seen the amazing clarity of the Caribbean, rafted the raging waters of Iceland, trekked the rain forests of Costa Rica. But I look up the driveway at my home and think I've never seen any place more beautiful. I'm sure to everyone else, it's just a house, a couple of trees, and a driveway that could use some work, but I see the years of meticulous improvements I put in lovingly with my own hands. I mowed every blade of grass, mopped every corner, cleaned every window, painted every wall, planted every tree.
I gave notice at my job today. I have a new job opportunity and I'm leaving here in two weeks. I expected that it would be a difficult conversation when I gave notice, but it was like, "Ok, whatever. Have a nice life." Granted, I made a special effort to be sure I would leave after the "crunchiest" part of the year was behind me, made provisions to handle whatever needed to be done to ensure a smooth transition so as not to leave them in a bind, and the truth is nobody (even the people paying me) ever actually understood what I do for them, so it's predictable that they won't feel the pain of my not doing it until it's too late and the damage is done. But still. 12 years and not so much as a "What could we have done better?" I know I've busted my ass to make what I do seem effortless, and seeing that I've achieved that holds some gratification, but still that edge of not being appreciated still cuts. I know if I'd done more bitching and whining, made a bigger production of the complexities of the systems I designed, reminded people of all the things I did without being asked that nobody even knew had to be done, allowed more of the things I did to blow up in disaster...in other words, if I'd done a worse job, they might have appreciated the work I did better.
It's all in the perspective. You only truly value that for which you know the cost.
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