A few days after my boss passed away, a wise woman warned me that I would get an unofficial promotion. “So you’ve already been tasked with taking over one of his projects?” she asked. I nodded. “Congratulations, you’ve been promoted,” she said. “Twice the responsibility and half the pay.”
That wise woman happened to be my hairdresser, but she is a hairdresser in Boston’s Financial District, so she’s subjected to countless hours of work-related drama, including the effect of untimely deaths on corporate organization charts.
“Of course they’re not going to hire anyone right away,” she said, brushing my roots with the magical blonding solution. “That’d be like if his widow ran right out and got married. Sort of disrespectful. Besides, it sounds like you’re already giving them free milk, so why buy another cow?”
My problem is not that I’m giving them free milk, especially since my milk is significantly more watery than my boss’s milk. I mean, I don’t have a MBA, I haven’t spent 20 years in the domain, and I don’t walk into a conference room and assert my managerial will like a bayonet. So I’m not sure exactly why they would want my milk, especially when they are using it to create a very expensive, very business-critical cake.
No, as my self-belittling prose may make clear, my problem is that there’s no chance that I can succeed. Writing a product requirement specification is a punishing task that will draw the ire and contempt of most everyone involved, and my former boss only achieved semi-success even for much simpler projects with much less at stake. I’m one week into this beast of a project, and I’m beginning to think he took the easier way out.
