October 21st, 1999

The zany-tied investors have been here three days out of four, sitting around the conference table with jeff, going over paper after paper. I watch them most of the day and report to other, surviving wings of the office about their silent movie goings-on, inside of that glass-walled conference room.

With the rest of our time, we talk about the small matter of there being nothing much else to do. Apparently as we learned on Tuesday, the IntroSpect client pulled out due to their being appalled by the shabby state of the Administrators manual that we already delivered, some stuff in there was allegedly blatantly wrong or something, and the last three chapters were basically transposed completely from a different manual by mistake. No one is really sure how that happened exactly, but anyway, the guys who worked on that section were all fired on Friday. So in short, for now, there is nothing more to be done on the guides, unless Jeff can break away from the zany tie guys and make some calls, to convince IntroSpect to give us another chance. Which I suspect he'll get around to, being as they are our only client.

Today I looked through the paper for other job openings around town, and saw some stuff about a temporary position covering an available paper route (apparently adults do this kind of thing now), and something about getting up at 4 am to bake rolls for a grocery store bakery, three days out of five. In both cases, related experience was required.

October 18th, 1999

Its as Monday as hell here in this depressing place, Jeff is in there in the glass-walled office with some investor people, there isn't jack for work to do, I am sitting here with my feet up on the extra desk between the cubicles, writing in the diary. These guys look like investors because they have those dress shirts on with the faux shiny material, and these zany ties. I am not sure why, but this is the accepted code of dress for investor types that come in here to talk to Jeff.

Pete is over there in the other conference room, I can see him from here, freaking out and "whiteboarding" this new project having to do with Web site design consultation or something, where you go out and find a site that sucks, and flame the site owner about how you could fix it. He's hanging on by his fingernails but needs to accept that the pink slips are coming on Friday. Although you know, that's just another one of those weird empty expressions now, like "rule of thumb," there is no slip, you just pass your badge across the desk, and walk out with the escort, with your cardboard box of crap.

Since the techwriters left, we have a couple of user manuals for IntroSpect that need entire chapter rewrites by the end of this month, to have anything at all to do with version 6 of the software, which is coming out shortly, and I suppose for this, my final week, I'm a techwriter now, and should just get in there and start faking it. The thing is, --the dirty secret of this place-- is that I have never even seen IntroSpect software for real, and have no idea, really, what it does, something about acronyms, BLOB or OLE or something-- I mean, I have formatted text and graphics for the thing in five languages for a year now, and still have no idea what it does.

All I know is, I am getting ten bucks an hour to move these callout lines around, to point right up at right angles against some picture of a dialog box, and that sure beats answering the phones at the weird-smelling place, where that office manager comes out and inspects whatever shirt you have on, and picks lint off the back of the hem, although for the rest of the day, you won't see another living soul.

PRIOR ENTRIES

October 15, 1999

October 17, 1999