| profile entries archives refresh |
 �what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux "i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes note random entry image credit design by : ilazarn ikmal powered by : diaryland |
the tracking sheets.
2019-09-18 @ 9:17 p.m.
it's me again. boss today was being so fucking annoying! i was getting pretty short with him by the end of the night. this guy is terrible with money. he has always had it, a lot of it (he was once describing to me what it was like when things were "really bad" for his family when he was young but they still had a fucking cleaning lady and shit like that), and just has no concept of math or budgeting. he constantly complains that he is losing massive amounts of money (true) but puts the blame in a lot of other places besides himself. he also costs himself a lot of money because he is constantly losing track of things, paying penalties for paying things late, etc. we have this huge cube organizer thing in the corner of the office that he has always had filled with the absolute most random shit you can imagine, none of it anything that we EVER fucking use. there is one cube that had a bunch of blank photocopied forms that i use a lot for the township and whatnot that i used to go into often, but then he started stacking this giant mountain of files up in front of it (which he refused to move) so i lost access to the one useful space in it. so these forms for the township just ... don't get filed because he says we'll wait to do it until we can get to the forms (?), and we get late fees and shit and he's like oh, well. you might be thinking, why don't you just move the shit around and get what you need? why don't you organize it? but he is one of those people who goes nuts if you "mess up the office" and "move things to where i can't find them!" in the past when it would get to the last minute on some things i would take the initiative and write the check and have it ready to be mailed/dropped off/whatever and he'd be like no! there's no money! we'll wait til later! he NEVER let me pay or do things unless he approved it personally so i figured you know what? i'm not stressing for another person. i learned long ago with him that what he wants me to do is sit there and be ready to do whatever pops into his head as soon as he wants me to. so if he doesn't care about the late fees, i don't either, because it's not my money and not my problem. so tonight we're there paying the tax and sewer bills which come quarterly. i keep a tracking sheet of all of our properties and when we pay a bill, i enter in the check number and amount in the month it was paid. there were a lot of things that weren't paid from like may, or august, that he insisted we paid. and i said boss, we had this conversation last time. we didn't pay it the first time. and then for whatever reason, we didn't pay it last time. you either said we had no money or we'd do it "tomorrow," but then you get so busy and distracted with other shit that we don't end up coming back to it. and he's like, no! it can't be. it's something in your tracking. we need a better system. i said yo man, there is no fucking different system that is going to help you. the problem is that we never sit down and actually finish anything, you always want to pay everything on different random days of the month so there is no consistency, and YOU never check the tracking sheet! the fucking tracking sheet. when i first started working for him, he tasked me with making tracking sheets for each property. he had 8 or so at the time, so i made these grid sheets that had a column for mortgage, taxes, water bill, etc. he liked it, but after a few months he said he didn't like how every property was on a different page. because he was acquiring so many new properties, it was getting to be a lot of pages, and sometimes he'd miss stuff. and since he paid everything at different random times of the month, i was constantly having to print new updated pages. he needed something where he could see "an overview" of all of his properties. so i made another chart and printed it out with all of the properties on one sheet. he liked that, but "it's too small. i'm old. can you make it bigger?" boss, i can't make it any bigger than this, you have a lot of properties and a lot of things you want to keep track of for each. hmm. okay. then, since he pays everything on different random days of the month, and also because he is so fucking disorganized, he didn't like how much paper i was wasting having to print a new one every fucking day, but also he constantly misplaced his. [tinea], can you make it on the computer somehow? like email it to me so i can look at it while i'm home, and also so i can always find it. so i make a goog doc of this spreadsheet and share it to him and put a link on his fucking desktop and a bookmark in his browser. it's color coded and beautiful. i can update it in real time. he can literally watch me typing. the peak of control and voyeurism has been reached. but tinea, i'm having trouble opening it on my ipad and it's just so small and i don't like that i have to scroll down to look at the previous months. and i am always on a different laptop and i don't have bookmarks on all of them. i beg him (for several years) to switch from ie to chrome where i have all of his passwords and bookmarks and calendars saved and synced and it will display for him exactly as it displays for me. he refuses, because he likes ie better. okay. he gets on a whiteboard kick and finds a giant one in storage and decides that the goog doc is too difficult and this would be better because he can see everything at a glance and since it'll be fucking huge and right there in the office AND i can update it in real time it's the perfect solution. he tapes off rows and columns and i say that's not a great idea because you buy a new house every few months. we're almost already out of room. no, it's fine. we'll re-tape it when we get a new house. okay. again, i make it beautifully organized and color coded and neat, exactly what he asked for. he comes in and immediately starts erasing and changing things. he decides he doesn't want the mortgages to say "autopay" when they are because someone might see the board and realize that it's a mortgage payment. just put a checkmark there. in fact, just put checks in the column instead of the check numbers and amounts because people will see all of my business. boss, then why the fuck did you buy a 4'x5' whiteboard and mount it on the WALL? so then, he starts erasing literally every number i put in and changed them all to checkmarks. i'm like wtf? and he says well i don't want people to see how much i'm paying. i said but the WHOLE POINT of the board was so YOU knew how much YOU are paying! the point of this was to keep track of it! and he's like well yeah but you're going to keep tracking on the goog doc, as well. so i'm like so why am i doing this twice? and he's like, the board is just there for ME to keep track of what we need to pay. just so i know if we did it or not. okay. so people come into the office, as they fucking do at a place of business, and immediately their eyes are drawn to this GIANT WHITEBOARD FULL OF NUMBERS AND CHECKMARKS that has suddenly appeared. every single person, without fail, stands and studies it and says, "what's all this?" boss immediately freaks out and is like omg people are seeing all of my business (!!). so he wants me to erase the column headings so people don't know what they are looking at. i said boss, then YOU won't know what YOU are looking at. just an address with an empty column header and a checkmark? so he's like shit yeah. okay, let's cover it up with a curtain (!!). i'm like boss, you're never going to look under there. it's defeating the purpose of the board. no, this is a great idea. so he finds this ridiculous piece of fabric and we tack it up to the wall. people come in to the office and see a giant curtain hanging on the wall. they immediately say, "what's under this?" and look underneath. no good. we need something ... like a sign. yeah, a big fucking sign. curtain comes down, sign goes up. it matches the business so it just looks decorative. no one questions the sign. okay. except a couple months pass and he has never looked at this fucking board under the sign once. not ONE TIME!! i diligently maintain the goog doc. he's like yeah, the board is no good. i just need you to print me out a new sheet every time. but print it out with no shading because it's hard to read because it's so small. okay. a couple months pass, and here we are now. this has all been developing over the course of our working relationship. all of it leading up to tonight. when this fucking guy says to me. he fucking says, "you know, i think i'd really like it if you put each property on a separate page. i just feel so overwhelmed by this sheet." i was like boss, are you actually fucking shitting me right now. that is how we did it when we first started doing this and you said it was too many properties to keep track of on separate pages. then he starts to argue with me about it, how it's a better idea because he keeps losing track of things. i start kind of yelling at him that the problem is not the format in which the information is presented. it's the fact that you don't ever fucking check anything and we need to pay EVERYTHING at the same time so things don't slip through the cracks. he's like no, no. that's not the problem. i just really need you to do separate pages, we've never tried it and i think it's really the way to go. i was like BOSS. THAT IS WHAT WE DID WHEN WE FIRST STARTED DOING THIS. WHY DO YOU SO AGGRESSIVELY RESIST MY EFFORTS TO GET YOU ORGANIZED. and he's like, i don't remember that at all. i said YOU YOURSELF fucking said that it was too many pages to keep track of, and that you needed "an overview" (i even did fucking air quotes) of all of your properties!! and he's like, "oh yeah. that does sound like something i'd say." OKAY. in other news, i feel antsy! fall is coming. i can't wait for the leaves to change. it was beautiful again today. i like being able to wear jeans, a cardigan, and sneakers. that's like, my iconic look. i found some great new music since i've been home. can't wait to get on the road and just let my mind wander. i need that, badly. alright that's enough from me today. enough already. bye. |