Chicago: The Eponymous Thread

You still can't get in from work? I think I type for all of us when I type: W.T.F.?

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seems like a LIFETIME ago already.

bump?

I wish people wouldn't change their handles so drastically when in the Sandbox.

Or whatever. But if you're going to, I'm going to eye you with suspicion and indignance.

hahaha my name was Armando
i forgot

i made a hasty decision, as all of my decisions are, and now i am stuck worrying about being sued by a perfectly decent organization. hooray!

Okay "CrunkleJ".

ay dios mio, pobrecito Jesse!

I keep reading that name as "cacahuate blanco".

You mean "cacahuete"?

"CrunkleJ" was my name during a different period of my life. The last time I used the sandbox, I was in a stinky office in a once-great American city scraped flat by the roller of the deluge and man's apathy toward man.

xp - No, I mean "cacahuate"

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cacahuate

jajajajajaja

Oh LL, the LWV will not sue you because your user name falls under fair use and then also, the first legal step in a copyright action is a c&d letter, and once you comply, they can't pursue it. And even if they do, the remedy is an injunction, not damages.

thank you! i appreciate your expert opinion.

Are you a lawyer giving legal advice?

no way, she is a mongoose giving financial advice

Huh, apparently "cacahuate" is used in Mexico and "cacahuete" in Spain. I guess the latter was what was used in my Spanish II textbook.

Let's call the whole thing off.

I have had to track my work hours for a couple months now and you know, if you put it off, it turns into a huge nightmare. I'm trying to piece together what I did last Tuesday, and I'm just not sure. Eek.

Yeah, that's me basically every week.

I do keep a to-do list, though, so I know what my assignments were during the week, and I can also consult my e-mail to see what I notified people about.

Yeh, I'm going through my emails, but there is some stuff I do that doesn't leave much of a trail. The two hardest parts for me are:

1. It's hard to track how much time I spend playing IT Guy.
2. I worry about accuracy and ethics when the time is billable to a client.

It's concerning when at the end of the a busy 8 hour day, I wind up with a total of 6 hours on my time sheet.

can you develop a template or something?
a list of things you normally do and then check off stuff at the end of the day?

that way you can just ask yourself "did i do this y/n" rather than "what did i do all day"

back when I had to do billable hours (which is the worst work task on the face of the earth btw) I always added 15 minutes to everything I did and, if all else failed, padded the remaining time in my day w/ like "misc. -- time management"

then one day the vp told me they just want it to add up to 40 every week so I stopped caring

Meh, it's not usually a problem b/c I keep an Excel doc open all day and keep a note pad nearby. But last week I was just like, fuck this, I know it's going to suck on Monday, but I truly do not feel like doing my time sheet.

I have certain recurring tasks, but for the most part they're all unique events.

Fortunately I don't actually have to account for all my time every day, only work I do for the firm that does not directly employ me and any billable time.

It's concerning when at the end of the a busy 8 hour day, I wind up with a total of 6 hours on my time sheet.

Oh man YES.

For me, there aren't a whole lot of unique events, but the proportion of time I devote to each event changes from week to week: one week it may be a lot of fact-checking, another week more editing, etc.

I hate having to come up with appropriate wording for billable stuff. Verbs are important.

We had a case that was being paid for by our client's (a corporation) liability insurance coverage and there were certain trigger words that caused them to reject an entry. One was "draft." Our agreement was apparently that they would not pay for "drafts" of written documents b/c they only paid for "work product" and a "draft" was not "work product," b/c it didn't get used. Or something??? It was really stupid! All writing is a draft, FFS.

Anyway, we changed "draft" to "prepare," and that solved the problem.

It's concerning when at the end of the a busy 8 hour day, I wind up with a total of 6 hours on my time sheet.

At the printing company job I had from '98 to '01, my boss had me track my time. At the end of my first week there, my daily totals averaged approx 6:00/day. He looked it over, said "good, good -- that's good productivity" and never bothered me again about my output. That was a good company to work for, until the owner ran it into bankruptcy and then went to jail.

is there such a thing as a customizable personal timesheet with sliders so you can label a task "composing and sending reminder emails" and then set the slider and it will create a weekly timesheet with the task and amt of time you spent on it?

my supe would love that but it would be a huge nightmare

I don't know what you mean by sliders, but we use timesheet software that has a list of pre-approved tasks that you just select and then type in the number of hours.

i don't know what i mean either -- we don't have any fancy software for anything where i work, so i am kind of living in medieval times

we don't even have a complete set of walls in my office

Hello! I finally re-registered. I opted for neither clever nor my old name (had to use a new email anyway). So I went with my dog's nickname which is much longer than his actual name.

wait, who else has a dog?

Kelsey!

It is a relief to have ilx back, in whatever form.

But bookmarks don't work in the sandbox afaict? Quelle horreur!

Dog's actual name is Mosley.

i'm on here. this blows. i'm saving up my good posts until real ilx comes back.

And now I'm ready to hear your DC rant.

DC rant.

DC Talk cover band iirc.

I reject any mass migration, but esp to the place where you are taxed without being allowed to choose your own representation in our "representative government"

but i do support fugazi

also bookmarks are working ok for me?

Yeah, my image of DC is basically diplomats and policy wonks rocking out to Fugazi at Ethiopian restaurants.