Have I Told You About Penelope Trunk?

I really like her blog. She writes about important career-type things from a very interesting perspective. Her most recent post, Your Biggest Career Decision Is Who You Marry, struck me. I agree with her statement "I think it’s mostly that people are happier when they put the requirements of being in a committed relationship ahead of the other aspects of their life. And a career would be the first thing I’d tell you to give up. You can get a lot more from loving and being loved."

That isn't necessarily a popular thing to say. But I agree with it. I think that may be part of why it's so hard to sustain a marriage if you get married young (stats say you're less likely to divorce if you get married over the age of 25) - your expectations for your career path are likely to change in your early to mid twenties. And you made an agreement with someone about how you'd live your lives together, changing career expectations can be a deal breaker. Whereas if you've over 25, you're more likely to have settled into your path, and can make decisions that are more likely to stick.

I had a conversation with a friend recently about how her husband (a grad student) is getting a lot of pressure from his parents to finish his degree (or quit) and make a professional name for himself. But that's not a priority for him, for her, or for them as a couple. It's more important to them for both partners to pursue their interests & passions - and for her her husband, that doesn't include making a professional name for himself in his field (at this point). I'm glad that they're self-aware enough to realize this - that their happiness is a priority, and won't be achieved through his career. Because since we've been told since we were little that "YOU CAN BE OR DO ANYTHING YOU WANT TO!", the expectation is that we will want to - to be the best cupcake-baker-in-space or whatever. And that we'll derive happiness from our career, rather than our relationships. But I don't think that's how it works. The balance between what you need from your career and what you need from your relationship is going to be different for everyone, clearly - but we need to stop saying that careers = happiness. They don't.

And let me be clear: I don't think you need to be married to be loved. Relationships with friends and family count.

Heavy Days

Today, our CIO, Chief Librarian, and team managers are having meetings with library teams to discuss planned staff cuts. There are more meetings tomorrow - but I haven't been invited to one. (This may be because we've got a significant number of empty librarian positions, so I'm assuming that they're going to cut those - if they were occupied, I expect that it would be a different story.) Even though (it looks like) my job is safe, it has still been a rough day - I'm worried for my coworkers, and concerned about the library's new reality once the dust settles.

We've been asked to be sensitive to our coworkers who may be losing their jobs, but I've never been in this situation, and I'm not sure I know the right thing to say. (It's always a problem, isn't it, trying to find the right words in a difficult time.) Things seem a bit surreal at the moment - I'm pretty sure this is what people mean when they say "shit just got real."

Writing Elsewhere

I wrote up a bit about the CLA IM Learning Fair that I attended on behalf of ARMA-NCR, and you can check it out here if you're curious about information management, and where to get more info.

Blast From the Past

So, my friend K was roped into helping a Brownie troupe learn how to hand-tie a quilt last night. She, in turn, roped some of us into it. And honestly? I had a great time! The girls were really quick to learn, and fun to teach. At one point, I helped a girl do a tie, then watched as she did it, offering a bit of assistance, and then she turned to me and said "I'm going to do another one. I don't need your help." Totally matter-of-fact. It was awesome. It was like "Okay 6 year old, sounds good to me!"

AND THEN. At the end of the meeting, they invited all the special guests to join their circle, and they did the Grand Howl (scroll down) to thank us! Holy flashback, batman! It was awesome! I've never had anyone tu-whit, tu-whit, tu-woo me before :) (Also, didn't remember that it's called the Grand Howl, definitely learned that just now.)

Yay, brownies! Sad part: They don't wear the brown dresses anymore. Happy part: Warm fuzzies (did my Good Deed for the week!) and an opportunity to buy a box of Girl Guide cookies!

This is what we looked like when I was a Brownie!

Sh*t Bureaucrats Say and Do

So, if you haven't seen it already, watching the Sh*t Bureaucrats Say video will be helpful for the reading of the remainder of this post. Go ahead, I'll wait.

First, I think the video is hilarious, and the actress is adorable. And yes, I know exactly what she's talking about. But there's some good commentary on this - while it's awesome (and sometimes very needed) to poke fun at ourselves and our jargon, there are indeed some sinister overtones. I've seen it happen to me - I'll be trundling along, minding my own business, and suddenly the most appalling bureaucratese will just pop out of my mouth.

If you know me, you may have been witness to it. More than once, I have stopped in my tracks, felt my jaw drop a little as my brain registered what I said, and have asked myself and/or those around me "Did I just say that?" The need to be polite, subtle, let others read between the lines... in my experience it's definitely an expectation of those working in the Government of Canada, but I do wish we could all just be frank in our work.

"We need to consult wider" often means "we've made our decision, but we have to LOOK like we're considering the opinions of others, so we'll send this out for comments and disregard them, okay?" And that's bullshit - a waste of your time and mine. We should be consulting our colleagues where their input may have value - but the ruse of it isn't helpful to anyone.

So yeah. We should take a good look at the sh*t we say and do, and really get back to our first principles in order to reduce/eliminate the ridiculous - especially in light of the upcoming (later today!) maybe-scorched-earth-but-who-knows budget announcement. If things go the way we fear, I won't have time for your sh*t (or mine!) - I'll be too busy doing three jobs or trying to find a new one for myself.

That being said, I also think we need to remember that this is damn funny.

Just Call Me Herlocke

So, one of the funnest* parts of fiscal year end is the craziness of trying to get all of our invoices tracked down and paid. The way it works (generally) for us is that I will receive an invoice, make sure it's correct, and then send it to our awesome finance person for payment. Then SHE sends it to the departmental finance people, and THEY actually issue the cheque.

Mostly, this works just fine. It's maybe a little slow, but hey - such is the reality of working for a large organization. That being said, there are things I could do to make the process smoother, and I'm working on it.

So when a vendor called me this week to say "HEY! Your invoice is way overdue, and we're turning off your access," I thought to myself "Self, you thought this was resolved back in December, but clearly something went wrong - okay. Tell them you're sorry and will get the invoice paid ASAP." So that's basically what I did, feeling kinda bad about dropping the ball (I did get them to extend our access for another week. Huzzah!).

And then my finance person said she thinks the invoice was paid back in December. I smelled vindication on the winds of change... and promptly fired off some emails to try to help figure out what in the heck is going on with this payment. Because I would love for this not to be my fault... I don't need to assign blame, but I would like to not be on the receiving end of it.

Anyways, I'm finding that with fiscal year end comes a lot of this kind of sleuthing. Forensic invoice paying? I dunno. But I feel like I need a special detective hat. Also perhaps a bubble pipe.

And a magnifying glass! How could I have forgotten?

*Sarcasm, people.

It Never Rains...

So, work has been all fiscal-year-end-y: Where is this invoice? Has that been paid for? Why haven't we gotten that contract in place yet? It's not much fun at all - and yes I know that it's a normal, and expected, part of the job. But I don't have to like it. I'm looking forward to April 1st: fiscal year end will be done, the budget will have been announced, and hopefully I'll be able to spend more time & energy on things I find more interesting! (Like usage analysis of our subscriptions to see what we should renew or not for next year's subscriptions).

So that' s been busy.

This may be me in a couple of weeks.

And then life got all super-busy too. We bought a house a couple of weekends ago, and spent last week working to get all the paperwork/inspection(s) done so we could waive the conditions. Which we did last Saturday - yay! But now we're in full-on "get the condo ready to sell" mode, which is quite the undertaking. It's nothing huge, but now all of a sudden all of those little projects that we've been putting off (like touching up the paint) have to get done pronto. On the plus side I don't think my fridge has ever been so clean!

Anyone want a great 1-br condo?

The house stuff was causing my stress levels to shoot through the roof for a while, but it's calmed down now, and the hubbub and I are working well as a team to get 'er done. And it really was nice of Mother Nature to throw this lovely "warm" spring weather our way right about now - somehow, it makes the whole endeavour easier.

But so help me, this may well be the house I die in, coz holy heck is buying and selling property a PITA!