-t! I am about to send you yet another email about the trip. We might still be able to get the excursions if we let the travel agent know today.

t nag

Maybe it would help if you thought of her emails as being read by an excessively polite British person? (*Is she*, in fact, an excessively polite British person? Because this seems like it might explain so many of the communication issues.)

(Although it took me months to realize that when she says "feel free to..." she really means "DO THIS." As in "feel free to remove the comment boxes before you return the file" means "you should remove the comment boxes etc."

That's not you, Steph. That's her not being clear in her instructions.

Maybe it would help if you thought of her emails as being read by an excessively polite British person? (*Is she*, in fact, an excessively polite British person? Because this seems like it might explain so many of the communication issues.)

She is excessively polite and soft-spoken over the phone (and I assume in person), though not British. Unless she ditched her accent. But yeah, she really is excessively polite.

(Although it took me months to realize that when she says "feel free to..." she really means "DO THIS." As in "feel free to remove the comment boxes before you return the file" means "you should remove the comment boxes etc."

That's not you, Steph. That's her not being clear in her instructions.

Okay. I wasn't sure if "feel free" had a connotation in business that I was missing. It would be easier if she just said "Please remove the comment boxes." But OTOH, I was SO PROUD of cracking that code!

Yay for the good BoA news, Maria!

I'm sorry for the folks having difficulty with their jobs at the moment. I seem to be on the opposite side of things. I've always been the type of person who thinks the best time to go after a new job is when you don't need it, because it give you the upper hand in negotiations. In that spirit, I just submitted the last piece of application material for a job that would be a big deal and a big career shift for me. Let's see if the search committee thinks I am suitable for a round of interviews, and then I get to see if I think this job is the right thing for me to pull the trigger on a major career shift.

In parallel with this, my company has moved onto the next phase in the process for winning a long term contract with a new business unit with one of the big corporations that is already a huge client of mine. I should know by the end of next week if we got it.

I also just got a call about a bid to upgrade a large system installation here in the city.

Lots of balls in the air right now, and I think all of them good. It's just a lot to keep in my head.

It took me years to figure out how to communicate with my boss. Srsly.

Fingers crossed, ND

Lee! Haven't checked my email yet but - today like by 5? I don't know if I will have a chance to even look at it until I'm off work, but that should be 3:30. I don't want to miss out on excursions though!

Wow, ND, that sounds exciting! Good luck.

Every boss has idiosyncrasies that you have to figure out on the fly, Tep. Go you cracking that "feel free" code, that sort of thing really confuses me. If it's required, don't make it sound optional.

Best wishes for ND!

I'm dealing with a woman - not my immediate superior (although she doesn't seem to realize that), but above me in the office hierarchy - who refuses to deal with electronic communications. We do a weekly electronic newsletter, for which I compile information and send it over the vendor who distributes it for us. When the draft comes in (she refuses to review the material before I send it over), she prints out the draft and marks it up. Same thing for PDFs - she prints them out and marks them up. Ditto for the emails we send out.

This means that, when I try to explain something that's being dealt with electronic, I might as well be spouting gibberish. We went through something last week where she'd pulled information from several Word files, cutting and pasting into one document. There were sections that had been numbered and, with Word's auto number function, they were numbered out of sequence. I pulled the info into an InDesign file (for layout) and asked about the numbering - if it was the automatic numbering system going wonky or if she'd meant for them to be numbered out of sequence. We were discussing it and she was huffing, "well, if you CAN'T fix the numbering" ... and I had to try to translate it into something non-electronic.

sigh ....