Stay in School Forever

This big contract that I've been unceremoniously forced to donate hours and hours of time towards got cancelled today. The owner of our company walked in, saw that the contract would lose us millions of dollars servicing a project we don't have the capacity to service, and told us that this wouldn't happen.

This wasn't really surprising. It's been a little-kept secret that this contract has been one of our Senior VP's ways of looking busy and getting to go on nice lunches on the company account. All of the actual work on this dog has been done by me, to meet the VP's deadlines, on weekends and late at night.

Cut to today, when this barking dog of a contract is finally, blissfully, put out of its misery. The VP calls a meeting with her cronies, and they come up with this eleven-page buzzword-filled document that says, in essence, "we don't want this contract." Why they even feel the need to submit a document saying we don't want the contract is beyond me. If this VP is really that desperate for something to do during her workdays she should take up miniature ship building or something.

The senior VP pulls me out of a meeting about a contract we might actually win to format and spell-check a document turning down a contract we have no hope of winning, then send it back to her in her company-paid New York apartment (she, like most of the VPs, sort of porked the owner, who has a taste for waitresses) so she can email it to the entire company. It takes me an hour and a half to format her illegible document, incorporating the changes of six other people she also cc'd it to. I do it at the sacrifice of all the other projects I'm now going to have to stay late to finish.

This, for a contract we don't want. No business. No net revenue. This is me pissing my time into a black hole for an hour and a half. I send off this document to New York.

Five minutes later I get a phone call from the VP. If it's not too much trouble, could I spend a further half hour changing the font colours, changing the fonts on the titles, removing the underlines on the headers, and fixing a few other cosmetic details on this dead project worth no money?

My sly retort: "Yes, ma'am. I'll have that back to you in 20 minutes."

To the people reading this still in school: STAY IN SCHOOL FOREVER.