Catching Idle Butterflies

Cooling off.

Some of you know I despise confrontation. I will avoid it whenever possible. I discovered yesterday this can be a good thing.

Work yesterday frustrated me. When a company is owned by two partners, many times their agendas clash; their clients and work take precedence over anyone else’s. This can cause the employees many headaches, because they are forced to choose one boss over the other. This happened to me yesterday. Harvey gave me a list of 18 things needing to be done. Ron came by not ten minutes later and tells me we need a plat done by Friday.

I asked myself, “Is this stress worth it? Do I really want to go through the rest of my working days dealing with this?” As I ate my lunch, I seriously considered dragging the two of them into a meeting (whether they had the time or not) and giving them the what-for, and an ultimatum. Either we start having weekly meetings putting together a schedule and sticking with it, or they may as well find another drafter/surveyor/engineering tech. Life is too short to put up with all that crap for years to come. No amount of money is worth that kind of stress and frustration.

Wendy then comes by as I’m thinking all this and I vented to her. With that out of my system, and that little voice telling me not to confront them, I calmed down and never said anything.

I still think I should, though, but be calm about it, and less inclined to threaten to quit if they refuse.

I don’t believe having the bosses and the other full-time employees spending 1-2 hours every Monday putting a weekly schedule together is too much to ask. How many other companies do that, taking as much as a half-a-day every week to schedule and go over other company business? If not, well, I’m simply going to have to put a master schedule of my own together, and if someone comes along wanting something, I will point at the schedule and say, “Write it in wherever there’s room. If it can’t happen for two weeks to a month, it’s not my problem. That’s my schedule, and it ain’t changing.”

We’ll see.