Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Understaffed at home

Ever feel like you could use a couple more hands? A couple more hours a day?

Yea, me too. Well, what the hell am I blogging for then....

In the next 5 weeks I am taking a trip to NYC, Shanghai, and then having a baby soon afterwards. Work has just completely taken over my life. I feel this need to accomplish things and instead I attend meetings where we decide on actions and then I don't get any time to execute on them. Is this what every job is like? What's the point of having an action if I can't accomplish it? I've started skipping meetings. Now when I do that, people call me on my desk, on my cellphone and tell me I'm missing a meeting. No Shit. That's the reason I'm not there is to get away from all you people so I can actually get something done.

Then I get passed random assignments that are way bigger than what I could possibly do:
- Perform due diligence on our latest acquisition -- No idea how to evaluate an acquisition.
- Examine our 2006 prospects and which countries I want to do work in -- yea, as if I have time to do research
- Create roadmaps for 4 different product lines - HA! Who has time to create a roadmap?

Then I get reamed out from sales reps who tell me that the tools they use are difficult to understand. And this is my problem? Did I tell your sales managers to go out and use a crappy quoting tool? "Maybe you should write a FAQ or a tip sheet on how to use it" suggests one sales person. Yea, that sounds like my job description, "help you use your own tools". Oh and did I mention that this is the only salesperson having the problem? Everyone else seems to be able to use the tool just fine.

Always great to see that we hire the best and the brightest.