Office Bitch

I had a call last week with the client I work with on the German project. (She is American, by the way.) I was hoping for some feedback for her on the articles I'm supposed to be writing -- something along the lines of, "This is why we're writing about X, this is the angle we want, this is the value for our readers."

Instead, she didn't bother to prepare for the call. She wasted my time for an hour, rambling on and thinking out loud about how to cover Eastern Europe in the "Country Spotlight" section. (Yes, I know Eastern Europe is not a country. This gives you an idea of how fecked ep this project is.)

"Hmmm.... Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary...." she said. "I don't really know anything about these countries. Are they near each other?"

I explained that the countries were all in the same region, they were all former Soviet satellite states, that they had certain historical/cultural traits in common, etc.

"Well, I'm looking at a map here," she said. "It looks like most of them border on each other."

(Long pause while she she thinks. She doesn't think very fast.)

"Hmmmm... Maybe they're all Muslim countries?" she suggested.

This woman is at least 10 years older than I am -- in other words, she grew up during the Cold War and was probably in her 30s when the Berlin Wall came down. How could you think Poland is a MUSLIM country? WTF???

You know what's even more enraging than the fact that such an idiot is in charge of this project? The fact that she makes six figures and drives a BMW.

The Myth of German Efficiency

In my day job, I work with Germans a lot. And for the most part, while perfectly pleasant to work with, they totally conform to the stereotype of being incredibly anal and hidebound.

But efficient? Not a chance. In fact, I would say they prefer to make work for themselves -- and therefore, me -- than do things in a faster, easier way.

Here's an example I wish were NOT typical. Someone I interviewed for an article said she had some emails from her colleagues supporting some of the points she'd made in our interview, and that she could send them to me. So while I was putting the article together, I emailed her requesting them.

In a couple of hours (efficient), she sent back an email containing 3 attachments. They were jpegs. Odd, I thought. But I opened them anyway. Each jpeg contained a single quote -- the promised quotes from her colleagues (not efficient).

So I opened each jpeg separately and tried selecting the text, copying it and pasting it into another document where I had all my notes for the article. This was a very cumbersome process and it took about 15 minutes to get all 3 quotes into the section where I wanted them.

Then, the next time I opened that file, they weren't there. Instead, there was some kind of error message saying they couldn't be "read."

So I started all over again, opening each jpeg individually, this time transcribing them into the document so I could be sure I didn't lose the information. So a task that normally would have taken less than a minute had wasted about a half-hour. (And this doesn't even include how much time it took to create these mysterious jpegs in the first place.)

Is it just me, or is this incredibly inefficient? Wouldn't it have been easier to just send the quotes in the body of an email?

I'm counting on the one techie who reads my blog to post a reply that will explain this.