pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BULLSHITTER Had a realization over the last several days that being a busy manager is largely about honing your ability to bullshit. I never have enough time to do anything thoroughly these days and so serve on a steering committee where I show up with all the other busy managers and surf the proposal in the ten minutes while we wait on everyone to show up after just glancing over it in a rush while I, say, walk to the bathroom to pee. Or I read it while I'm on hold with the technical guys who are supposed to come fix our broken copier. Or I interview a candidate for a new position after reading his resume thoroughly only once, then glance over it again as I walk up to the lobby to invite him to my conference room, and ask a few targeted questions I scribbled on the resume when I first read it, but otherwise just have a bullshit conversation with him, try to assess if he'd be a good fit, personality-wise, if he's a hard worker. Not the way I envisioned being a manager, but it's all I seem to have time to do these days. Yesterday one of my grad. students asked me to serve on his thesis committee. He's examining how county governments market themselves, how they use IT and if they can use it more effectively, and the cool thing is that he's also asked a wild woman from South Carolina to serve on it with me. She's a gorgeous blonde beach mama with a black BMW convertible who wears cleavage-revealing blouses and short, short skirts and impossible shoes, someone you'd expect to see in a wings bar tossing back margaritas and laughing too loudly. Definitely a wild one ... and from my home state. She's also smart as a whip and has just gotten her Ph.D. in IT, with a focus on local governments. She knows her stuff and is a great person to have on committees because she's positive, enthusiastic, and still believes that we can make needed changes despite being saddled with miserly state-budget funds and lethargic state-government employees. We should form a fine committee together. I like the student—his earnest enthusiasm, his smarts. We should be able to tell him good things between us—and he can tell us things too—so I'm trying to think of this as fun and instructive instead of one more task that I won't have time to do well. Okay, to the shower ... I probably won't have time to write again until late afternoon because I have to finish a summary this a/m. before an 11:30 lunch interview before a 1:30 meeting in which I present the summary before I return to my office and finish a policy draft that's due by the end of the day. Somewhere in there I have to talk with a technician who damn well better fix the software problems with our in-house high-speed photocopier today too.
Sigh. Isn't it the weekend yet? Cutting the grass in, say, 101° haze sounds like so much more, uh, fun. 9:12 a.m. - 2005-07-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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