Sacrificial Minion

I have a minion. At work, that is. A few months ago (just before the Great Blog Hiatus of early '08), my manager called me and said, "So we'd like to get somebody else trained to do some of the stuff you do. Namely, the boring things, so you can focus on more interesting stuff." Which is obviously a fantastic development, as the Alpha and Omega of my Boring List is the newsletter, and here I was being given carte blanche to pawn that off on someone else. Hell yeah.

Why did the give me a minion? I'd like to think it's because they realized how brilliant I am, and that they were wasting my genius by forcing me to spend all day fiddling with fonts and table layouts. That's certainly how they pitched it to me (my bosses are somewhat paranoid that I'll leave and have been awfully friendly lately; more on that in a future post). But what I suspect happened is that the managers realized there was nobody listed as my backup on the official organizational chart, and that if I were ever struck by a bus THEY might have to be the ones fiddling with the fonts, and thus they gave me a minion.

Let me start by saying my minion is a wonderful person. She's sweet and friendly and genuine, with a good sense of humor. She dotes on her kids (one in college, the other in high school); she's sent me pictures of them and tells me about their baseball games, which I enjoy. I don't have kids so I tell her about my dog, and she listens and laughs at my jokes. She's eager to learn new things, and willing to put up with my sometimes stilted, meandering explanations.

She's also driving me insane.

I've recently started explaining my job to non-geeks by saying, "I do technical things for non-technical people." I set up ftp sites for salespeople to download presentations. I figure out the video editing software, then write tutorials with lots of pictures so sellers can record their pitches. I create websites to store and track information. I write Excel macros to make peoples' lives easier. And I format newsletters and mass email so that it looks professional and is easy to read. I'm a former software engineer, an occupation where misplacing one semicolon can cause the proverbial plane to crash into the mountain. As a result, I'm detail-oriented to a spectacular degree; things like "two different sizes of text in the body of an email" almost cause me physical discomfort.

The minion does not share this mindset.

I can't blame her. I realize I'm in the (vanishingly small) minority. But today she was ready to send an email to 5,000 people that contained a large graphic about the benefits of "Vizualization." Yesterday she tried to update a web page and subsequently broke every link because she pasted an extra "http://" in front of each URL. Wednesday she sent out a mass email to the right group of people with the right heading, but forgot to include half the email text.

Some of this is just her adjusting to a new role and learning new things. Some of it is my fault; I'm definitely not cut out to be a teacher, and since she lives in another state we have to do all the training over the phone. But the main problem is that she's just not detail-oriented, and I don't think she ever will be. So when the boss suggests I delegate some moderately complicated web work to the minion, I have to tell her that noise she heard from my end of the line was a sneeze and not me shooting soda out of my nose in horror.

I can't rat her out or request a different minion, because that'd break her heart and I'd feel like crap. So I correct her HTML before she sends it in for approval. I swallow the bile when mass email goes out formatted in such a way that it doesn't fit horizontally on the screen. I tell myself that, in the end, it's all worth it.

And it is. Because now she's the poor sap who has to fiddle with fonts in the newsletter.