Rage against the machines
I got in trouble last year. We launched a product right around now.
As ever, I didn’t know shit about the product. Am only in charge of the products.
I was not wildly nice about preparing all the product materials. Hard to write the how-to guides, FAQs, onboarding letters, debut “gala” issues, etc. when you have zero fucking idea what’s going on or who the editor is even going to be.
Said product is, a year out, a failure by all accounts. We still don’t know who the fuck is supposed to write it but we get it written.
Anyway I got in trouble for losing my patience over the whole thing.
I ate that spoonful of shit and apologized to everyone.
Then mom died a couple of weeks later and that criticism of my attitude faded. Oh, she had real problems and had to spend all her time on hijinx. We get it.
Well here we are again with a new launch (and relaunching last year’s product with the same questions we had last time) and all sorts of other big launches.
And I went to Disney World.
Today is Saturday and I’m writing the how-to guides and FAQs.
Monday was my first glimpse at the product. Friday was my first day at my desk.
And I had a pile of other shit to do that didn’t require pulling an entire book out of my ample ass.
Well i just pulled said book out of my ass. And I still have to write FAQs, which got some “meh” feedback because it didn’t contain the components of the product I had never heard about.
I did manage to BS my way through the manual about some of those. But now that I see the product live, I am just laughing about all the feedback coming my way about stuff I didn’t include.
I am being very careful not to have an attitude, as I must have last year.
I really do like what I do. And truly, if I had all the information I needed to make decisions, I wouldn’t believe it anyway.
I just hope they realize that I am pretty pleasant, not to mention pretty useful at guessing and hitting deadlines more or less around the time I need to hit them.
One of my staffers, god bless her, used Chat GPT to draft all the materials.
On my way out the door to Disney, I said you know what, submit them. I don’t have anything to add.
Boy did people not like those materials.
So, I love that I am the only person who can pull 30 pages out of my ample ass in 12 hours that people might actually want to read.
Not to knock my staffer. She also knows blank pages terrify me and that I will destroy anything handed to me.
All I gotta say is ChatGPT will never replace us. Jesus. Talk about rage-editing.
I knew GenXers were going to rage against machines. I just didn’t know they’d be software, not robots.
Anyway, the website looks nice. And I am not mad about launching something on a Saturday. I’m not drowning in invoices and meetings and PIPs and breathless “what FOTUS did now” updates.
But no rest for the wicked. I still have some things to do for this launch, probably including rewriting the damn book. And thanking all the people who hopped online today to wait for the link to that stupid book.
When am I going to write my own book, though, instead of doing this twice a year about the stock market?