Ring around the rosy...

Do you ever feel like you’re playing a game of ring around the rosie at work? Or someone says something sooo ridiculous that you stare at them and think, You’ve got to be joking? Well that was my Wednesday back. I barely had a chance to hit ctrl-alt-delete on my keyboard before I was bombarded – “You’re not going to believe what happened?!” - these are the words you never want to hear from an assistant.

There are two kinds of assistants – the good kind and the bad kind. Thankfully I have one of each. The good kind this time was the one telling me that the bad kind had sent an email blast without blind copying our entire invitation list for a launch party I’m producing. This in theory should be a little boo boo and annoying duh don’t do it again…but for us it’s a big boo boo and a how can you be so stupid when the executives from every major network are now hounding our door because we didn’t invite Susie big shot but we invited Larry the nose picker who actually does all of her work and places our spots. This lovely gift bestowed on me to fix was the first three hours of my day. By the time 11 am rolled around, I was well on my way to kicking myself for not jumping in front of the cab that almost rolled over my toes that morning.

Needless to say a two day break to get over a bad cough means very little even when you’re in CT where you get no cell phone reception (email is the annoying cousin who won’t move out of your house). To my lady boss’s credit the morning meeting proved to be quite helpful to catch up on the two days I was gone and as a bonus I also discovered that a new coordinator accepted an offer – woohoo, she has no idea what she’s getting into!!! While hump days don’t always prove to be the most productive, I was pleasantly surprised with the lightening afternoon of meetings where quite a bit was signed off on. Trust me, it’s not easy getting someone to write a check for $70,000 worth of Sushi and chocolate. This was very much appreciated with the launch party only a week and a half away.

Now to the hard stuff, crunching numbers. Events (for my company) are all about the budget vs. placements – how many press placements you get vs. how much money you spend. When you have to cut a budget in less than half and pull off the same event, it gets a little tricky. That’s the problem I’m facing with one event I’m producing for first quarter ’07 and boss lady is all about big picture – no details. I need to get a new budget in front of the boss lady for the exact same event minus a few hundred thousand dollars – ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall…

So here’s a tip for a female boss who is all big picture – don’t bog her down with details. Information is power and if she doesn’t want it, don’t give it. Keep the pretty pictures in the power point presentation and cut the corners in a different way (no one is going to notice if we don’t serve lobster sushi, they’ll only notice if we don’t serve sushi, and a one color embroidery on the hand towels in the rest rooms are perfectly acceptable if the two color costs twice as much). As luck would have it, my cold managed to get passed around the office so the new boss lady is out today – though you couldn’t tell from my inbox. This gives me one more day to fiddle with then numbers for this project.