I see changes, changes, all around me are changes

[austin_dern]

When the office manager announced his retirement the only major question raised about operations was who would run the day-to-day stuff around the company. After all, somebody has to be making decisions about stuff like scheduling and yelling at suppliers for whatever it is suppliers are always doing. The owner said that for the time being, he was taking over day-to-day operations.

You could hear the eyes rolling and the people sighing with preemptive exasperation about this. The owner is ... well, nobody doubts that he means well, but he's also something of an exhausting presence, and he's also prone to disappearing without warning for extended periods even when he hasn't been in a motorcycle accident possibly involving a pig, which happens to him more often than chance would seem to imply. I know, and don't want to undervalue, how hard he works at making the personal contacts a company needs to establish and maintain its customer base, and that he can turn that on his employees to establish what he needs them to do and find out what they need so they can do it.

Still, since he took over day-to-day operations he has been in the office at least for a couple of hours just about every day, which puts him in contact with the staff in a way that hasn't been true for years, and we're watching to see just when his secretary does arrange to have him killed. Also since then I've had a set of personal day requests, to be with bunny_hugger for most of them and for other matters the remainder, and he's replied to about one-third of them so far. I'm taking this week off to be with bunny_hugger; I hope he's read his e-mail so he knows this. I left the form filled out with the secretary who says she's in charge of scheduling now, at least, so I assume even without his express approval all's well.

Trivia: The United States Federal Flood Insurance Administration, created by the Flood Insurance Act in 1956, never wrote a single policy. Source: The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America, Kevin Rozario.

Currently Reading: No Time Like Tomorrow, Brian Aldiss.