For the past few days my daughter and I have been enjoying doing things on our own schedule. So far our only time constraints have been to be in San Diego at 10 a.m. yesterday for round one of house hunting and a 10:40 a.m. doctor's appointment today.
I could get used to this.
It is so different from my life as an editor/reporter where deadlines were everything. Despite the long and crazy hours, I loved the freedom of being a reporter -- to be able to come and go as I needed. While I didn't always like the late nights, it was never boring.
This new-found freedom I am enjoying today is a seriously different environment from the quasi-corporate world of being a marketing writer for one of Michigan's large universities. Taken as a whole, I would much prefer the long hours and low pay of a newspaper to that of a marketing writer. But absolutely nothing beats being foot-loose and fancy-free.
For the uninformed, marketing people are hated almost as much as the media. The difference being in the marketing world it's co-workers from other departments who can't stand you rather than the general public. Having a supervisor that was quite adept at setting non-departmental co-workers on edge sometimes made touring the building in search of birthday food a dangerous proposition.
In my five-year tenure as a marketing writer we had to take part in two time studies. These were done basically to justify our existence to the rest of the staff in our corner of the university. I should also mention, for the uninformed, the politics that go with life at a university are unfathomable. The workload for the worker bees is mind-boggling and the ladder climbing for the higher-ups is unbelievable. That's not even touching on the arrogance of those with the alphabet soup behind their names. (Ph.D., Ed.D, Spec. MA, MS, ASPCA, ASAP, etc.)
That said, time studies are taken fairly seriously . . . by most. Since I didn't really care for marching to their drummer, I found them tedious, demeaning, boring and stupid. My thoughts on the matter generally shone through.
A typical time study requires the subject to write down everything that is done throughout the work day. My record looked something like this:
7:50 a.m. - arrive at work, boot up computer, go get coffee
7:58 a.m. - arrive back at cubicle, coffee in hand.
8 a.m. - computer is still booting
8:02 a.m. - start going through mail while waiting for computer to boot up
8:03 a.m. - since all correspondence is done via email, there is no mail. Read flyer regarding concert on campus
8:04 a.m. - check voice mail
8:07 a.m. - computer crashed, called IT, placed on hold
8:10 a.m. - notified by supervisor computers are down campus-wide, will be around 11 a.m. before they are up and running again
8:12 a.m. - dusted cubicle and watered plants
8:15 a.m. - wandered the building looking for birthday party food days
8:30 a.m. - production meeting
9 a.m. - non-smoking cigarette break to complain about production meeting with smokers
9:10 a.m. - write out copy for new brochure long-hand
10:30 a.m. - wander building looking for typewriter
10:37 a.m. - potty break
10:45 a.m. - find old typewriter, start typing copy, realize it still has to be typed into computer system and give up
11 a.m. - notified by IT will be about another two hours before system is fixed.
11:05 a.m.- leave for lunch . . .
And my mother wondered why I did't last long at the university.
No comments:
Post a Comment