control

there's this intern. (yes, i'm about to talk about work, for those who know me and where i work.) she's great. she really is. smart, willing, and down with our cause in a super big way. the perfect person we want volunteering for us. she even has a grad degree.

but there's this project. it's bigger (oops, i almost wrote the n-word) than we originally thought and could lead to some stupendous conclusions; me and the intern made a preliminary presentation on thursday to the project manager. she was duly impressed but it was clear that we had some holes to fill. so we extended this sub-project to fill these gaps. then the PM suggested that we might want to each write a report on our project and draw some conclusions and present it to her (and my boss) because the stuff was turning out to be fascinating.

no biggie. this all makes sense to me. the timeline is sorta tight, but i'm thinking about how we can do this in three easy stages: stage 1 - gap/fit; stage 2 - populate the map; stage 3 - look at the map and report what it's saying to us.

the problem: the Intern is a grad student and likes to make brilliant-sounding pronouncements that ultimately get us off task and she gets caught up in all the details. the map is one such detail. we're putting all these little markers on it, coding them for different things, and the map isn't the best. it's a population/demographic map so it has only the most general outlines of communities. if it was a map with census tracts AND demographic (racial/ethnic) info it would be different. so the Intern, now confronted with how this project is about to get a mite bigger, starts worrying about how far apart the dots are on the map.

this is not the problem i'm identifying, which is how we're going to gather the data for the fracking map complete in just 5 days, with a few more days to do the mapping and then write the report. who fucking cares about what color sharpie to use to dilineate pilsen from logan square??

i said, 'i don't think we should be worrying about this. we need to establish a process for how we're going to cull through the information from all these other sources. we to decide how we're going to divide this job.'
she said, 'but the map isn't accurate.'
'uh-huh - it's accurate enough. we don't need satellite-level accuracy. we need general areas. the dots can come off. the tabs can come off. i can reprint another fricking map. we have to trawl through potentially 400 more agency sources.'
'do you think a silver sharpie would show up?'

aaack! suddenly, i could see her getting bogged down and we'd miss the deadline and who'd be to blame? me - not some volunteer, but ME. no way, dude. not on my watch!

so, on friday, i made a decision that kept me at the office for 5 extra hours: i completed the first half of stage 1, then i sent her what i'd finished and told her what part was hers and when she needed to be finished (wednesday).

we are not going to co-write this report sitting side by side like snow white and rose red, dickering over each word/idea. she's going to write hers and i'm going to write mine; then we're going to see whose report the PM likes best.

clickety-clak! clickety-clak!