Through The Looking Glass

This week, my project count was 54.  19 of them are compliance related projects, meaning that they require a weekly status meeting and updates, as well as roughly twice as much work as a normal project.

On Thursday, my boss took me to lunch.  She told me that she was picking up a major new strategic initiative that is going to take up roughly half her time.  I now have people reporting to me, and have picked up the responsibility for all the coordination meetings with the rest of the infrastructure group, as well as daily “office hours” for the rest of our portfolio managers.

I get to work at 6 AM every day.  I work until 5 every night, in the office.  I work several hours every night after I get home.  I reserve one day every weekend to help around the house and spend time with my husband – the other day I work.  I’ve got no more hours to put into work, but I have about another 15 hours a week of responsibility.

Delegate, my boss says.  OK, I can delegate.  All I have to do is find someone who’s working fewer hours than I am.

To be fair, she’s buying me a consultant.  That will help.  But man, I’m tired.

So – we had our first homeowner thingie.  90 degrees yesterday, and the AC went out.  Breaker wasn’t blown, thermostat was programmed correctly, compressor just didn’t come on.

But, we are a fortunate homeowner!  The house came with a warranty on all the major stuff.  Called the insurance company, they called the subcontractor, and 12 hours later the offending capacitor had been replaced.

Wonder if they’ll let me keep that insurance?  Boy, was that a relief!  No tragedies in our first year, it’s a rule.

When we lived in rental places, things irritated the crap out of me.  The edge of the carpet peeling up.  Ugly brick.  Cheap cabinet door inserts.  Stuff just in the wrong freakin’ place, like light switches on the wrong wall.  Weeds in the flower beds.  Loud bathroom fans.  It was just maddening, really, to be surrounded by stuff that Wasn’t Quite Right with no chance that it was ever actually going to be fixed.

It funny how things change when it’s my own place.  It’s not irritating at all – now it’s one more thing I GET to do to my own place.  Any way =I= want it.  Don’t like the fake crappy brick on the fireplace?  I can paint it.  I can peel it off and replace it.  I can put something over it.  Don’t like the crappy carpet?  I can put ANYTHING I want on the floor. I can tile or look at wood.  Light switch in the wrong place?  I can fix that.  Fridge hinged on the wrong side?  I can fix that too.

Not that I can afford to DO all that stuff, at least not all at once.  Not that I have the time to do it all, at least not all at once.  But I can do any flipping thing I want.  If I want to tear down the fireplace brick and just leave it ugly for a year, heck, I can do that.  I can peel up the carpet in the corner, figure out how they stuck it down and what’s underneath, decide what I want instead, then save up my nickels and dimes and do ANYTHING I WANT.  I can paint.  I can tear down walls, and put up new ones.  I can refinish the cabinets, or paint them, or replace the hardware.  Anything.

I know lots of people who get stressed by all the things that have to be done.  Home ownership just doesn’t work for some people.  But to me it’s not a pile of honeydos, or an insurmountable list of things that gotta be done – I don’t HAVE to do anything I don’t want to, as long as stuff basically works.  But I CAN do anything I want.

It’s amazing how much less irritating it is when I can move that light switch if I damn well want to.

I want to start out by saying I love my job.  Then I want to tell you all of the reasons I want to quit, at least today.

I’m really, really good at what I do.  I’ve got a couple of graphics I’ll put up when I figure out how to edit them adequately to protect the guilty – we’ve got a team of something like 15 people, and I do more work than the next three.  Together.  More project count (51, at the moment, running).  More servers.  More on every single metric they can think of to measure, by an order of magnitude.  I’m just flipping good at it.  I keep track of it, manage it, don’t lose things, keep things going.

The trouble is that because I’m really quite good at my job, I keep acquiring more jobs.

This week, it was work on an acquisition.  I have a completely full schedule, and a whole set of customers of my own.  But because I’m very good, when the latest acquisition, which belongs to another program manager, was failing dramatically, my boss asked me to step in.  The failure was a direct result of someone not paying attention and not following up, but these are dates we’re legally obligated to make.  So I dropped everything and we fixed it – at the cost of two full days on my schedule.

Today, it was a project that the PM hasn’t been completely um… forthcoming with to his management.  He’s been reporting that everything is just hunky dory to the boss, and now, here we are down to the last possible minute and he’s got to deliver the bad news, and we have to figure it out because this is another one we just cannot miss.  too many dollars at stake.  So I have to drop everything and run around, begging and cajoling, to bail this terminal dipshit out not because HE deserves it, but because it’s actually important to the business.

I go to work at 6 AM every single day.  I’m never home before 5.  I work another several hours at home, every night, and at least one full day on the weekend.  Sometimes more.

And that’s ok, except that I’m at my limit.

I can tell, because every time I get a new email, or a ping from some dipshit who’s mismanaged his project, my very first impulse is to get a lump in my throat.  I’m so, so tired, that every new problem feels insurmountable.  But see, I always figure out SOME way to make it all happen, so my workload keeps increasing, and there aren’t any no-brainers in the mix.  Every project I pick up, these days, is troubled and needs real attention.

I had this discussion with my boss.  Well, I’ve actually had it a couple of times.  Help is coming, she says.  We’ve got a plan, she says.  But my workload keeps increasing and the months are creeping by, and there’s no help in sight.

I love my job, but I’m tired.

I hear runners all the time talking about runs where they go out and get in the “zone”.  They go out, start running, and then magically they’ve appeared at their goal and hardly know how they’ve gotten there.

Not me.  Just about every step is a battle.

I keep waiting for the “zone”, that magical time when you just stroke along, smoothly, no pains or aches, no inner battle, just cruising.  I keep waiting, but so far it hasn’t shown up.  I do have runs that aren’t as hard as others, and times during runs where I’m running better – it’s a little easier – but it’s never effortless for me.  There’s no runner’s high.  If I have a “zone”, well, I don’t have a map for getting there.

I got to thinking about this because I read a quote from a guy who said the “zone” is why he runs.  He couldn’t imagine continuing to run if he never hit the “zone”.  It’s his payoff, the way he knows that all the training is paying off.

Hmmm.  I wonder why I keep running?

And just when I think there is absolutely no hope for the customer service world, somebody comes along with a great, responsive attitude that really serves the customer.

Today, I decided to send an email to our local gas and electric utility to find out if it was possible to find out what the utility costs were on our new house last year.  I figured I’d get a form back to fill out, or a note that they couldn’t give me that information, or something - and I figured it would take a week.

Ten minutes! later, I got an email from them listing the average bill for the last year, and with detailed instructions for changing our service when the time comes – and a nice “congrat on your new home” at the end.

YAY, WE Energies!

If you’re a confirmed hater of the financial services industry, you needn’t read this.  You already know they’re incompetent bastards.  If you read on, there’s a sort of happy ending, or at least so far – as far as I can tell from the non-communications we keep getting, we still maybe/probably/could have a loan.

So if you ever decide to borrow money using Quicken Loans, you need to know that, like all financial services companies, they 1)lie, 2)exaggerate, 3)hide the real terms, 4)communicate with roughly the clarity of granite block, and 5)can’t find their asses with both hands and a map – on a good day.  On a bad day, well, it just gets worse.  Be prepared for the numbers to be dramatically wrong and to have dramatic last minute changes, and for them to demand that you IMMEDIATELY respond to their changes in the agreement, even though they’ve waited until the very last possible moment to let you know know that their “good faith estimate” had no relationship to what they actually intended to do.

It’s pretty maddening.  So far it’s manageable, but it’s maddening.  You definitely don’t want to get into this process at the very limit of your financial resources, because whatever they tell you in the beginning, expect to be blindsided with fees they didn’t tell you about, bad estimates, and costs they didn’t fully disclose.

Oh – and definitely don’t assume that the person engaged in the underwriting analysis of your loan actually knows anything or can read.  I know at least one person in the underwriting business and she’s exceptionally smart – but sadly, she is apparently the exception to the rule.  You’ll be inundated with demands, for example, that you PROVE that the company you worked for in 2007 is the same as the company you work for now, even though your pay stubs clearly show it’s the same company.  You’ll get to send many copies of your asset statements, and then be asked questions about your assets that are clearly documented in the statements you sent.  You’ll be asked to release previous years of tax returns to be reviewed – and then asked for numbers that are on the tax returns they’ve got in their hands.  They’ll have you fax, email, and/or upload documents, acknowledge receipt of those documents – and then ask for the same document again, a week later, in a curt way that implies that they’re WAITING on you.

I hate financial services companies.  Really.

So, the very worst part of buying a house is the WAITING.

Part of it is our own fault, of course.  We were willing to be flexible on the closing date because the folks selling the house have a couple of kids and haven’t managed to find a place to live yet, so we agreed to a mid-June closing.  But the rest of it is that damn mortgage company.

See, there’s just no way to know what’s going on.  At first, you think there’s a lot of communication.  There are faxes and emails and phone calls flying around, and apparently lots of activity – but when you think about it, they never actually TELL you anything.  Nobody ever says “you’re all set!  stop worrying now.”  You do get a nice little note saying that this piece of paper is being reviewed, or you notice on the website that another piece of paper has been “completed”, but nobody every says “all done.”

At first that wasn’t a big deal, but now, weeks into the process, it’s beginning to wear on me.  Presumably they wouldn’t waste this much time and effort on a loan they’re not going to make, but that doesn’t keep me from worrying that some unforeseen thing is going to leap up and get me.

So, there are six steps to their process – we’re on step three, but I don’t know why, as they’ve had the last thing they requested for a week…

Application Documents are Ready
Reviewing your file for underwriting approval
Loan has been approved with some conditions
Ready to schedule closing
Closing package is ready
Closed

I’m sure at some point in there things are actually done, as in the loan is approved, but I don’t see it.  I’m committed; but the bank is apparently still thinking about it.

I hate bureaucracy.  Honest.

Part of it is that I’m really excited about this, in a way I haven’t been excited about anything in a while.  For some reason, the idea of owning a house has captured my imagination.  I’m watching home improvement shows and landscaping on hgtv.  I can SEE us living there.

Part of it is that the process is maddening.

Part of it is the delay we built in.

But all together, it’s driving me NUTS!