All Hail the IT department!

I don’t have an IT department. Sometimes I wish I did. In fact, if I ever decided to grow my company beyond just me, an IT person would likely be my first hire.

Because, even though I write about software all day long, and feel extremely comfortable installing new software and playing with it, I know absolutely nothing about hardware. And when things break — as they often do — I find myself staring at the screen, wondering what dialog box I can open or what button I can click to make things better.

Sometimes this works.

Often, it doesn’t. And then I start to whine. And sometimes cry.

And then I pretend like I don’t really need that thing to work anyway.

For instance. Several years ago, when I started my business, I set up my “office” in a guestroom. I bought the cheapest little desk I could find, and an equally cheap chair ($25 at Staples!). What I spent money on was a really nice laptop, some vital software, and a good printer. I went for an all-in-one printer that would allow me to print, fax, scan, copy, and bake brownies (I wish). And, get this, it was a wireless printer! Yeah, that’s right! I could print to it even without it being physically connected to my computer.

200 years ago they would have accused me of witchcraft for claiming such a thing.

When I set up the printer, I read the instructions carefully, took an afternoon (yes, it took that long) to go through it all step-by-step, and it worked. I printed wirelessly to my heart’s content.

Not long after that, we had to move out of our house for six months, and I set up my office in our temporary home. Wireless printing suddenly wasn’t working, but I was in a hurry, so I plugged the printer directly into the computer and decided to worry about it when we moved back home.

We moved back home. I had my spiffy new office. I couldn’t find the original cords for my printer. Nor the detailed instruction “poster” I had followed so religiously all those months ago. So long, wireless printing.

Then I upgraded my computer. For whatever reason, the printer drivers got confused when I reinstalled them. So long, faxing (which I didn’t really use). So long, scanning (which I did). At least it still printed, as long as it was connected directly to my computer via its cable.

Meanwhile, our family added other computers to the household. And since they were not in my office, directly connected to the printer, they were cut off from the joy of printing.

Last weekend, my husband (after hearing years of my whimpering about the printer situation), picked up an inexpensive all-in-one printer. A tinier, shinier version of the printer we already had.

It took a day out of his life, but let me tell you, any time I want, I can click the Print button and print whatever I want, from whatever computer I’m using. Wirelessly. Effortlessly.

He’s hired.

When I grow up

Every now and then someone asks my kids what they want to be “when they grow up.” Actually, no one asks that any more. It seems politically incorrect. We’re not supposed to push. People usually ask, “And what kinds of things are you interested in?”

My son typically launches into a soliloquy about cars and how he wants to design them or maybe be a valet parker and run them in and out of garages. I focus on the “design them” and chuckle to myself about how high tuition at MIT will be by the time he enrolls in the mechanical engineering program.

My daughter usually says that she wants to be an Egyptologist (a word which, when said just the right way, rhymes with “unemployed”) or an artist and live in Manhattan across from the Museum of Natural History. I’m going to have to leave the real estate section of the NY Times lying around so that she can adjust either her intended occupation or address.

It makes me wonder what my mother would have thought if I’d ever voiced my plan to be a freelance writer.

Frankly, little girl from the middle class suburbs where everyone’s dad worked for General Electric, I’m still stunned myself that I can make a decent living as a freelance writer/marketer. Sure some months are more decent than others but, overall, this is a good gig.

Last week, a friend who actually is an artist and actually does live in Manhattan (not across from the Museum of Natural History but in a really nice apartment) gave me a heads up on his boyfriend Jeff’’s Today Show appearance. Jeff is an actor, the mother of all freelance positions.

Here’ s his Today Show appearance. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/33618078#33618078

Did Jeff make money doing this? I don’t know. Will this little Today Show bit snag him all sorts of lucrative acting work. Who knows? That’s for his mother to worry about. For my part, I love knowing that people spend time doing things like this. Maybe I’ll be an improv singer when I grow up.

What the…?

Time really flies. The last few weeks have been a complete blur with all sorts of new work and work arrangements. I’m not one of the leading economic indicators but if you were to look at my desk you’d say that things are looking up.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a client who runs a medium-sized manufacturing business. I didn’t come right out and ask him how business had been this year but it came up in conversation that “flat is the new up.” I loved that phrase. Flat is the new up.

I think that’s what I’m feeling now – business wise. Clients all hunkered down last spring when the economy was on the fast slide down. They found ways to save money by cancelling and postponing projects. The projects that stayed on the table were scaled down. Anxiety attacks and restrategizing dragged things out. Everyone was being strategically quiet and slow.

Then late summer and early fall came along and everyone seemed to look around and say, “Hey, we’re still here. We thought our sales would tank but they’re merely flat. Maybe if we did some marketing we could do a little better than flat. Let’s Go!”

And now I’m pleasantly swamped.

October was a crazy month of recalibrating – everything. I’m back to one cup of coffee. I’d been doing a lot of recreational coffee making - two cups for myself and then a pot for the carpenters who were outside residing the house. I read news sites during a quick lunch break rather than first thing in the morning so that I can get right to early morning email to Europe. I figured out how to get the kids resettled after school so that I can squeeze in some more work time before dinner.

Now that I see that written down it doesn’t seem like a very big deal but let me tell you, cutting back on the coffee making and drinking was excruciating. And getting the kids to stay out of my hair after school…we’re going to be in therapy so we can process that process.

But now I’m all reset and ready. And if the recession kicks in again, no biggie. It’ll take me and the kids about a minute to completely backslide.

Friday fun: A little in-joke

Apparently, Google’s tech writers won the thumb wrestle this week.

How are you today?

There’s this little shop I like in town. It carries a great selection, the quality of the products is excellent, the prices are reasonable, the shop hours are convenient, and there’s parking nearby. I usually find just what I’m looking for, plus a few other fun things I hadn’t seen before. Every time I plan to go, I get a bit excited thinking I’m going to find all the things on my list and have fun browsing the cool little extras they also carry. But every time I go, I get a bit bummed out, and I’ve noticed lately that sometimes I leave without buying anything, before I really take the time to browse.

So what’s the problem? The shop has what I want for prices I’m willing to pay. So why do I hurry out? Or feel unhappy shopping there?

The problem is the owner. Or, more precisely, the owner’s attitude. She’s chatty and friendly, and she knows her business and her products like the back of her hand. If I have a question or need a special order, she’s polite, knowledgeable, and quick. But she’s an Eeyore. She has a complaint about everything, and she’s not afraid to let you know. You know the kind of person who, when you ask, “How are you?” will say, “Well, I’m okay, but my back is kinda hurting and I just had a bad phone call with someone and…”? That’s her.

Usually, her complaints are about suppliers or slow business or product quality (or the weather). But she’s also complained (to me) about other customers (she doesn’t name them, thankfully). She’ll toss off a complaint, and smile and wink at me, like I’m in on it and understand her plight. Honestly, I do understand, but it still makes me feel bad — and uncomfortable. And it makes me wonder what she’s saying about me to the next customer.

I think about this nearly every time I have a meeting or interaction with a client. It’s really easy, after you get into a long-term relationship with a client, to relax into thinking you’re buddies and can share all your life’s ups and downs. Sometimes you do become buddies, but not always, even if you’ve worked together for years. And if you do, the time to share those general complaints about life is probably not at your next status meeting with the director of development.

It’s easy to get a reputation as a downer or a complainer if you tend to show up with a sour look and a negative response to things more often than not. Obviously, you need to be honest, and you need to point out problems and issues where they exist, but if that’s all you ever do, even if your work is stellar and you deliver on time, your clients might opt for another “shop” in town.

How am I today? Fine, thanks. And you?

No sexual harassment here

This weekend I bumped into a friend of a friend who also runs her own little enterprise. (She’s an interior painter/plasterer.) We traded notes on current workloads and then listed various benefits of being on our own. We both confessed that it would be hard to sacrifice the schedule flexibility we enjoy as sole proprietors.

This past week, David Letterman’s confession that he had sex with women on his staff (an, um, that doesn’t sound quite right), reminded me of another benefit of working alone. No sexual harassment.

Only the hopelessly naive think that David Letterman is the first boss to have slept with his staff. Sexual harassment is still common enough.

Whenever I think about sexual harassment I get an immediate mental picture of Mr. Ick (not his real name) and the  stench of Polo cologne which he was routinely doused in. Mr. Ick was the store manager of a department store where I was a management trainee.  I was just out of college and rabidly feminist but I don’t think I was being oversensitive in objecting to his touching my thigh while he delivered my performance review.

Turns out, Mr. Ick had put his arm around another trainee during her review, stroked the shoulder of yet another, and sat waaay too close to the fourth. We all complained to our group managers – who were both women – and were told that he was harmless. We should ignore it. Ah, those were the days.

I don’t know where Mr. Ick is now, but I’m here in my office and no one like him is anywhere in sight. And that is such a great thing.

How’s the writing going?

Whenever someone asks me “How’s the writing going?” I know that they don’t understand what I do. They think I’m selfishly toiling away on a mid-life crisis inspired novel, failing to contribute to the household coffers, and quite possibly ignoring my children.

Since I know that’s running through their minds (I’m not paranoid, I can see it in their eyes and hear the quotation marks in their inflections – How’s the “writing” going?), I quickly attempt to explain that I’m not a novelist or poet. I write business and marketing communications – things like press releases and white papers and web sites.

“Websites?” they often ask. “You “write” websites?”

I then try to explain that, contrary to popular belief, website content is not randomly generated.  It is written in a special way by a writer (no quotation marks) who thinks long and hard about the many, many things that have to be said and then struggles to say them in 5 words or less because studies continually show that “people don’t read.”

There are relatively few frustrations in my job but the two that crop up the most are:

1. People don’t seen to understand that a person writes the things they are reading.

2. People really don’t read.

More and more I blame Facebook and MySpace and Twitter. The content on those sites is generated by the readers themselves – everyone on Facebook “writes” websites.

And those websites limit people to a certain number of words and encourage abbreviations. “I made meatloaf today! LOL!” “I made meatloaf today too! LOLACOMN!” (laughed out load and food came out my nose).

The other day my daughter wandered into my office and found me entering copy into a client’s content management system. She asked what I was doing and I said, “Watch this.” A couple of clicks later a new web page appeared in all its glory and I said, “See, that’s a new web page on this site. I wrote that. All those words. That’s what I was doing.”

She said, “That’s what you write?” I think she’s bummed that there’s no novel.

Friday fun: Cheese or Font?

Maybe it’s because I love both typography and cheese, but I find this little game pretty amusing, and harder than I thought it would be.

Filetta. Cheese or Font?

I got it wrong.

It’s a cheese.

Now, where was I?

Some weeks ago, my routine was kicked out of bounds by summer vacation. I fully intended to keep writing here, but, as the saying goes, things happen. They happened all over my routine. I had to quickly offload some ballast to keep things afloat, and the first things to go were the things I do just for myself. Such as writing here. The things I do for my family, for my dog, for my house, and for my community kept on getting done, but I have hardly written a word here, or on my own blog, or in that journal I was for sure going to start this summer. Yep.

It’s weird. The summer (at least the summer of my childhood fantasy-memory) is supposed to be free-form, schedule-less, impromptu, with lots of time for spending enough hours in the pool that your entire head turns blue, or literally watching the grass grow, or twirling lazily on the swings, staring at your feet.

Turns out that’s not the summer the grownups have. The grownup summer is jam-packed with schedules: camps, play dates (wow, I still hate that term), lunch dates, massive art projects, snack making, shuttling little people here and there. As much fun as us grownups are having in the summer, we breathe a collective sigh of relief when school starts. The days and weeks suddenly open up like big expansive prairies. With tumbleweeds. It’s quiet. Too quiet. It feels lonely. We want our summer back.

But then….

While my daughter is starting school and getting used to a new schedule, I’m looking at my day and thinking, giddily, “I don’t have a THING scheduled until 2.45 this afternoon. Not a thing!”

Yeah, there’s work, interspersed by conference calls and emails from clients, but, heck, I was doing all that during the summer madness. Now that’s all I have to do. That and walk the dog. And stare out the window at the glorious view. And get some words on the page.

Can you smell it?

Don’t you love the smell of a new computer? Something chemical happens when the plastic casing heats up just so.

I’m high on the off-gassing of my new computer. Isn’t it so lovely? Do the letters I’m typing look crisper? Is it just me? And how nice it is to not have that red line running through my field of vision. You have no idea.

I have gone on a bit about this new computer thing. It seems awfully one note of me, then again, this computer is my entire business life. What if a brain surgeon’s tool thing that she uses to poke through a brain wasn’t working properly so she had to fix it with twist ties and bandaids until the new one came in? Wouldn’t everyone be excited to see the new shiny tool without the stickum all over it?

The other day I was chatting with a carpenter who was about to start some work on our house. He’s a guy I know pretty well and I started the morning’s conversation with one of my old standby conversation starters – What’s new?

He said, “I bought a new wedge!” (Actually he said he bought a new something something of some specific dimension wedge but it meant nothing to me.) I think his answer was part joke but he did light up a bit at the mention of the wedge and he said he already knew when he was going to use it first.

I remember once getting my haircut with a very brand new pair of scissors. My stylist was out of her mind happy about those scissors. Weren’t they so sharp? See the clean cut? And feeeeeel them! See how they were weighted? Didn’t they feel great in your hand? I mostly thought about the crappy scissors she had been using during all my previous haircuts but she did have a point. Those were some fine scissors.

We have great appreciation for the tools of our various trades: the artist’s brush, the landscaper’s spade, the mason’s trowel, the electrician’s thing that he uses to tell how many watts are coming out of the wall. We work in the new tools, make them ours, treat them with care and respect, and then, when they wear out, we replace them as fast as possible because there’s work to do.