Tell me why (I don't like Mondays)

First, Alan was up in the middle of the night with an earache.  It turned out to be no big deal, but it did keep both of us awake.  I was having a bad night already, thinking about stuff (see below); I did eventually get some sleep, but Claude got almost none.

Second, I'm starting to break the news about no follow-on projects to the staff, one at a time.  This gets a little tricky.  We have people who will certainly land on their feet and find other jobs that are just as good or better.  But we also have people who've come to rely on this project, and who will struggle to find new positions -- not so much because they aren't competent (everyone at the project is competent; most are good, several are excellent), but because it's just hard to get out there and look for a job in Armenia.  It's not a big place, nor a rich one.  So, instead of announcing this at the weekly staff meeting, I'm doing this one by one.

Second-sub-one, I'm trying to figure out how to bring our work to a reasonable stopping point in the absence of follow-on.  Challenging.

Second-sub-two, you know how I found out there would be no follow-on projects?  Caught the knowledgeable person at a social occasion with a few drinks under his belt.  AID didn't feel a burning need to tell us about this officially.  There is an attitude one encounters at AID sometimes, that contractors are all highly-paid experts who will somehow figure everything out.  Not sure if that was at work here, but it's the least annoying explanation.

Third, we have a budgeting issue that is both arcane and deeply stupid and that's going to cause me a huge amount of headache over the next few days.  Short version is, unless someone at AID sends us a short e-mail saying "your budget realignment request is approved", we have to act as if we're on last year's budget.  Because we don't yet have formal approval to do Y instead of X.  So if we do X, officially we're acting without authority and AID doesn't have to pay us for that work. (Note to lawyers: there is no quantum meruit in the AID world.)  We're now seven weeks into the new fiscal year and AID hasn't gotten around to doing that yet. 

Logically, it makes no sense that AID would allow us to work on Y for months and then sandbag us.  Formally, though, we are now "exposed" for all the work we've done since October 1.  The home office has decided that this is an unacceptable risk.  So unless AID pulls its thumb out, we're going to stop doing Y and start doing X again -- even though doing X no longer makes sense.

Fourth, Claudia has been under the weather the last couple of days.  Being up all night with a sick kid didn't help.

Fifth, my home office project manager just told me today that I have to do the invoice support document by tomorrow, because word has come down that all invoices have to be in early this month.  That means I'm doing it at home, tonight, after everyone is asleep.  It's only a couple of hours, but it's a really tedious couple of hours.

Sixth, the internet has been really unstable.  "Unstable" doesn't cover it, really.  It's just off about half the time, and half the remaining time it's so slow as to be useless.  This is partly an Armenia-wide problem, but it's mostly our home DSL cable.  Which the local phone company should fix, but won't.  So, when I finish the invoice support document, I'll have to hang around waiting for a good connection.  Which could be anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour or more.

Okay, this is turning into whining, which I hate.  Mostly I like being a project manager just fine.  There are just some days, is all.

On the plus side, I got half an hour this evening reading books and comic books to the boys.  We have one book that's just a big collection of animal pictures, grouped by theme (hot climate, cold climate, big animals, things with stripes).  We have a game where each boy picks an animal and I have to tell a story.  David picked "owl" and I came up with a story for it right off.  ("Once upon a time, there was a cat who wanted to fly...")  Alan picked "killer whale", which was harder, but I managed.  (Try coming up with a story about a killer whale that will satisfy a couple of picky little boys.  You have thirty seconds and then they'll start to wiggle. Go on, try.)  And then they both went to sleep without further fuss.

So, not an entirely bad day.

Comments

[Will Baird]

Third, we have a budgeting issue that is both arcane and deeply stupid and that's going to cause me a huge amount of headache over the next few days. Short version is, unless someone at AID sends us a short e-mail saying "your budget realignment request is approved", we have to act as if we're on last year's budget. [...] We're now seven weeks into the new fiscal year and AID hasn't gotten around to doing that yet.

HA!

This is disturbingly familiar, Doug! Congress keeps frakkin with our budget with the continuing resolution bit. One, it screws raises. Two it screws purchases (they send us a check that is 1/12th our 2006 budget EACH MONTH. When paying for a $50 million computer, this is, uh, bad!) Finally, whatever your numbers were for 06 are your numbers for 07...08...whenever this Congress gets around to passing a budget. This means that the uptick for our new HPC systems doesn't come. This also means that our archnemesis (Oak Ridge) keeps getting uberfunded when they were supposed to drop in budget numbers. The DOE Office of Science CANNOT simply shuffle around the dinero either. It's killing us, but ORNL is making out like a bandit.

Rather ironic since we're Blue Staters and they...

[Bernard Guerrero]

"Second, I'm starting to break the news about no follow-on projects to the staff, one at a time. This gets a little tricky."

This was going to be my follow-up question from your last post. I imagined both that the local job market is relatively weak and that you have particularly talented local staff that you pay out the nose for (in local terms.) One can imagine that they'd be upset.

My first thought was that the particularly talented ones might look to leverage their connection with a prestigous foreign employer into a way to leave the country.

[Noel Maurer]

Very slick use of a New Wave song title! Kudos.

That aside, it seems very sad. Sure, the "particularly talented" ones will do fine. But those aren't the ones I'd care about, if I were you.

I do not envy you, Doug.

[Doug M.]

We pay, by local standards, top dollar. Which means about 1/4 as much as an American doing the same job in America would make.

That sounds snarky but it's a simple statement of fact. A highly skilled technical translator at our project, someone with ten years experience turning complicated American legal documents into even more complicate Armenian ones, might get between $15,000 and $20,000 per year. In the US that's well below minimum wage; in Armenia, that puts her around the 90th percentile of wage earners.

Thing is, Armenia -- a none-too-rich country with just three million people -- doesn't have a huge market for technical translators. So finding a new job that pays as well is going to be tricky.

Some people have more general skills that will market more easily. But, you know what I'm finding? While the skills are important, personality and attitude may be even more so. I know that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's true. The employees I'm most worried about aren't people with very specialized skills... they're people who are older and less flexible, or who are shy and less willing to go out and do the shake-it-baby self-marketing necessary to land a high-paying job.

Anyway. Will be an ongoing story over the next few months.

Doug M.