The Week That Was
It had been my intent to start this blog around May 1st, in the caesura between leaving my old job and starting my new one, but lethargy, mild illness, business, and the indignities of modern society (more on that in the next post) have delayed me until this inopportune hour. There's probably going to be a flurry of posts over the next day or two as I try to squeeze out everything that, in my head, I thought I ought to blog when I get it going. I've tried blogging before, but it shouldn't be hard to turn this into my most sustained effort in the medium (at least my most sustained quasi-public effort). Anyway.
Left my old job, amicably, at the Medium Sized Law Firm (MSLF) in Chicago [I decided that playing coy with my residence was silly and unsustainable]. I may write more about this old job in the future. I have started a new job at a Government Agency Concerned With The Poor (GACWTP), also in Chicago. I did not come by this job completely honestly, which is to say that in qualifications I am capable and I deserve it (or so I think, so far), but in practice I got it through a family connection, and a much more direct one than that which yielded me the previous job. GACWTP has for many years contracted out one of its major functions to private consulting firms, and after roughly twelve or so years of one firm monopolizing this project, a company half-owned by my father competed for the most recent contract and was after a lengthy process awarded roughly 35% of the project, while the incumbents get to keep the other 65%. There's a lot at stake for My Dad's Company (MDC) (this one third of a contract is the biggest contract in the brief history [between one and two decades] of his company), for The Other Guy (they want to prove the GACWTP wrong and take the whole thing back), and for the GACWTP itself, since they feel (correctly) that they'd completely lost ownership of this important component of their mission. Into this mix I've been dropped to basically do I'm not sure what, other than be clever and observant.
It should be noted that though my dad is currently around a bunch and will be intermittently in the future, it's his business partner (50/50) who is directly monitoring this contract and even she is not the full time person in charge. This other lady is, most properly, my boss, and so far my job has been to impress on her that I'm not just trustworthy due to being In The Family, but that I'm actually capable of doing whatever she wants me to do; so far I think I've done a better job convincing her of this than myself. She was out of town last Friday and today (should be back in the office tomorrow) for an extended Mother's day trip home, and in her absence I didn't get accomplished quite everything I was supposed to, because basically my ingenuity and inquisitiveness ran up against my meek acquiescence in a new environment. There was a body of information I was supposed to gather, and while I gathered it, I could and should have done more; there is a lot of information that will be necessary to MDC that, right now, it's not entirely clear where it is. We need maps, for example, maps which break down things like zip codes and census tracts and alderman's wards, but it's not clear who has these maps or when we can get them, so I wasted too much time on Friday dicking around with what passes for a free zip code map of BMC available online. Similarly there are various sub-programs and initiatives wrapped up in this contract which are at best ill-defined in the official documents, and I don't know or didn't want to get out there and ask The Other Guy to help me out on this.
My sense of things right now, as we gear up to officially take control of our share in a couple of weeks, is that we're Getting Ready to Get Ready. I think on the actual start date we'll be ready to get ready to do the job, but too much of the focus right now is necessarily on things like hiring all the necessary people and making sure we've all got network logins and making sure we didn't extend a job offer to anyone who lied on her resume so that we need to rescind it and asking for more chairs because really we need more chairs. There's some agitated headless chicken action going on, and most of the people currently in the office are concerned with getting the human and logistical infrastructure in place for us to do our jobs. Since I don't have a defined job yet and I'm floating around like a free agent, I'm pretty much the only person I've met whose primary concern is the informational infrastructure we'll need to conduct our jobs, and I'm not the guy to just whip that into shape without some support. We'll see.
Left my old job, amicably, at the Medium Sized Law Firm (MSLF) in Chicago [I decided that playing coy with my residence was silly and unsustainable]. I may write more about this old job in the future. I have started a new job at a Government Agency Concerned With The Poor (GACWTP), also in Chicago. I did not come by this job completely honestly, which is to say that in qualifications I am capable and I deserve it (or so I think, so far), but in practice I got it through a family connection, and a much more direct one than that which yielded me the previous job. GACWTP has for many years contracted out one of its major functions to private consulting firms, and after roughly twelve or so years of one firm monopolizing this project, a company half-owned by my father competed for the most recent contract and was after a lengthy process awarded roughly 35% of the project, while the incumbents get to keep the other 65%. There's a lot at stake for My Dad's Company (MDC) (this one third of a contract is the biggest contract in the brief history [between one and two decades] of his company), for The Other Guy (they want to prove the GACWTP wrong and take the whole thing back), and for the GACWTP itself, since they feel (correctly) that they'd completely lost ownership of this important component of their mission. Into this mix I've been dropped to basically do I'm not sure what, other than be clever and observant.
It should be noted that though my dad is currently around a bunch and will be intermittently in the future, it's his business partner (50/50) who is directly monitoring this contract and even she is not the full time person in charge. This other lady is, most properly, my boss, and so far my job has been to impress on her that I'm not just trustworthy due to being In The Family, but that I'm actually capable of doing whatever she wants me to do; so far I think I've done a better job convincing her of this than myself. She was out of town last Friday and today (should be back in the office tomorrow) for an extended Mother's day trip home, and in her absence I didn't get accomplished quite everything I was supposed to, because basically my ingenuity and inquisitiveness ran up against my meek acquiescence in a new environment. There was a body of information I was supposed to gather, and while I gathered it, I could and should have done more; there is a lot of information that will be necessary to MDC that, right now, it's not entirely clear where it is. We need maps, for example, maps which break down things like zip codes and census tracts and alderman's wards, but it's not clear who has these maps or when we can get them, so I wasted too much time on Friday dicking around with what passes for a free zip code map of BMC available online. Similarly there are various sub-programs and initiatives wrapped up in this contract which are at best ill-defined in the official documents, and I don't know or didn't want to get out there and ask The Other Guy to help me out on this.
My sense of things right now, as we gear up to officially take control of our share in a couple of weeks, is that we're Getting Ready to Get Ready. I think on the actual start date we'll be ready to get ready to do the job, but too much of the focus right now is necessarily on things like hiring all the necessary people and making sure we've all got network logins and making sure we didn't extend a job offer to anyone who lied on her resume so that we need to rescind it and asking for more chairs because really we need more chairs. There's some agitated headless chicken action going on, and most of the people currently in the office are concerned with getting the human and logistical infrastructure in place for us to do our jobs. Since I don't have a defined job yet and I'm floating around like a free agent, I'm pretty much the only person I've met whose primary concern is the informational infrastructure we'll need to conduct our jobs, and I'm not the guy to just whip that into shape without some support. We'll see.
posted by medrawt at
00:32
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