And the Winner Is...

Anyone who works with clients, be they external or internal, is bound to have moments of frustration, when you think, "Did you really just say that?" Or, "Which meeting are you in? Because it's clearly not this one."

Over the past few years, I've had to learn new ways to express (read: not express) frustration, as well as mind my mouth. (You can take the girl out of Tower...) I can only walk around the building so many times, and have yet to figure out how to do so during a meeting or a webex, so indulging my innate snarkiness, is once again the chosen path. I give you the current list of the top five annoying things my clients do:

5. Schedule meetings to talk about upcoming meetings. Seriously. This happens far more often than you'd think possible.

4. Invite me to meetings I know nothing about for projects I'm not involved with out of the blue. The usual culprit in this case is someone forgetting to inform me that I have a new project.

3. Ask for constant status updates but consistently fail to get me approvals or information on time. Um...you know how this works. Right?

2. Ask me to move meetings to times they aren't available. The old "find time on my calendar" trick—psyche!

And the number one annoying client behavior is...contacting multiple people in my department in an attempt to get the answer they want. If Mom says, "no," go ask Dad. Yeah, this happens.

I do realize the above is pretty mild compared to what many people deal with on a weekly basis, and humans are humans. Hang around each other long enough and we'll likely get on each other's nerves at some point. I'm very grateful to be employed, and that I had the good fortune to land at a great agency led by a team that truly cares about the workforce. For the most part, my clients are very easy to deal with, and we do good work together. It might be more fun to be  snarky, but I'm smart enough to realize how lucky I was to land this job. And that's winning no matter how I look at it.

It’s Just a Matter of Time

When I started my current job, I showed up with a few pre-conceived notions. As I set about learning the language of workers' comp insurance and state-speak, and trying to acclimate to an entirely new workplace vibe, I felt like a retail bum who was likely in over my head. Retail jobs were the sum total of my work experience, and I was suddenly working with people who’d been in government their entire careers.

Then I began to notice some stark differences in those vastly different worlds, the most surprising of which is how fluid deadlines seem to be. Coming from a world of seasonal campaigns, newspaper and radio ads, and you know, holiday promotions, I thought "deadline" was a pretty universal concept. As in the due date of a given project is agreed upon at the beginning, and that's that. (Fun fact, the historical meaning of the word is "a line drawn around a prison beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot.")

On more than one occasion, I've found myself nearing the end of a project only to be informed of a major shift in direction. When I calmly point out that if we do that, the project timeline will need complete revamping, and the agreed-upon deadline will be impossible to meet, I'm told, "okay." Um...What?? And there I sit, searching for a reasonable response and biting my lip so as not to blurt out, "Oh, let me just move Christmas because you people changed your minds!"

It's taken a while, but I've come to realize that my humble retail beginnings actually did plenty to prepare me for the real world, including teaching me how to stay calm when someone is ranting about things that are completely out of my control, how to multi-task, and how to get. Things. Done. I suppose that really shouldn't surprise me, given how hard my former colleagues and I worked, especially to set up and execute holiday campaigns. And it's not news that government timing is...different...

I've often thought a mandatory two years in retail would do wonders for this society, especially when I see customers going off on minimum wage clerks. Maybe we'd all be kinder and more understanding, but maybe not. In any case, I can be proud of my retail roots and thankful for the collective experience that brought me this far. Will I ever get used to deadlines as mere suggestions? Time will tell...