Oct
06

Surprise!

On Wednesday I was walking to the cafeteria when I ran into my boss.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I—well…Lunch?”
“I need to talk to you. Come to my office at noon.”

So, I went off to eat, not at all dampened by grim mental images of firing, public excoriation, and the walk of shame past security with my belongings in a cardboard box.
By noon I was mentally updating my resume, and when my boss walked me from his office to the office of The Director, well, it took all of my willpower not to make a break for it.

It couldn’t be good news. Possibly it was a dressing-down about my many sick days. Certainly it was not a promotion, as I had just been promoted a few months ago, and the next level would require me to have held that position at least another year.
Had they found my website? Perhaps management disapproves of employees using the word “vagina” on the Internet. Perhaps management disagrees with my strong opinions regarding gauchos. Perhaps management feels the way my third-grade teacher did about smart-alecks.
Oh god. Oh god. I was going to be Dooced.

Only I wasn’t.
Instead, I was named Lead Editor of a large jurisdiction.
LEAD. EDITOR.
I will try to communicate to you the enormity of this change, but it will involve much tedious legal publishing talk, so bear with me:

As you will remember, we are organized into teams by jurisdiction. Currently, I am a Senior Editor, and back-up to the Lead for a very small New England state. This jurisdiction just finished publishing its 33-volume pocket part. We have about a dozen other publications, and we publish three recomps (a recomp is a revised, updated version of one of the heavy bound volumes in our annotated statute set) per year.

My new jurisdiction is a large, high-profile state with a multi-million dollar product revenue stream. I will be the Lead Editor, which means I am responsible for several other editors and all of the publications for this jurisdiction, including SEVENTEEN recomps and the ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY VOLUME pocket part that is currently in production. There have been some systems issues lately, with the result that my transition meeting today can be summed up like this:

–There are at least eight weeks worth of work left on the pocket part and the five concurrently shipping publications.
–The deadline is in three weeks.
–Say goodbye to your weekends…
–…and welcome to the team!

I start next Wednesday.
NEXT WEDNESDAY.
I do not get my lead-editor-related raise until next year, as I just got a raise in July—but I do get a smaller office! (Yes, really.)

I am weirdly excited by all this. I was chosen in spite of my flagrant lack of seniority, presumably because I am good at what I do. Which is true, if unexpected. I started working for this company after my last miscarriage, and at the time, I worried that I wouldn’t be here long enough to qualify for their excellent maternity leave—because surely I would be pregnant any second, and would go back to freelancing so that I could stay home with the baby.
But almost two years later, I’m still here, and except for the days when I am exhausted and burnt out and swear I am going to quit working altogether and move to a yurt somewhere, I love my job.

Now I have somehow become a Lead Editor, and my reaction to my newfound authority has gone like this:
GLEE—>PANIC—>GLEE–>CONFUSION—>PANIC—>GLEE.
Work myself into a lather—rinse, repeat.
I have three days to finish my projects for my old jurisdiction, transition those duties to someone else, learn my new position, pack up my old office, and move into my new one.

So much for my quiet October.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |