Forgive me the pixelated photo link. I suppose it adds to the surrealness of yesterday, though. Yesterday, I was so dog tired that I took a nap around dinner time, and went to take out the garbage when I awoke. On my way back to the house from the garbage shed, I heard the phone ringing through a window I had cracked open a few inches in my den. Fine--let the answering machine get it.

Crap. It was my CEO. The client for whom three of us had busted ass on Friday had a complaint about the work I had sent him. The client knew how to contact me, yet chose to call my CEO instead. My CEO called my boss who was "on vacation" but really he was just moving from one house to another, and me. Back and forth. My boss, then me, then my boss, then me. I ended up speaking with my CEO a handful of times. The bottom line was that the only thing wrong with the flowcharts was some cosmetic stuff, which I was able to fix from home in about 40 minutes and toss into a .zip archive and email off to the client.

We were using a cost for their in-store radio network that the client had given us about a year ago, because the client never sent us any new costs on Thursday or Friday, as promised. The costs we used for regular network radio and network tv came from Ed Papazian's book "TV Dimensions 2006." But I almost got into a shouting match with my CEO about it, and the fact that the costs we used were irrelevant to the reach/frequency analysis, inasmuch as we used population to convert between cost-per-thousand and cost-per-point, and while the difference between using a :60 vs. :30 vs. :15 second commercial could affect the frequency distribution for the dollars it could buy, it would not affect the reach numbers, because in most cases, the advertisers were near saturation in terms of audience levels they could possibly achieve. The bar graphs on the backup work clearly show that.

Unless you work in advertising or media, most of this will zip right over your head like an ICBM, but trust me, I know what I'm doing in this arena. I've been in this business for almost 25 years.

The CEO even questioned the method by which I connected to the office computer network from home. "I thought you had VPN." I replied "No, George, I don't use VPN, unless I'm traveling with an ultra-slow laptop computer. It's more efficient to use Secure LogMeIn when going from a really fast tower box at home to a really fast tower box in the office. It works like a charm, but scrolling can be a bit slow and clunky. I'll fix those files, and send them off--the client will have them by 9pm, latest." He gave up arguing that issue, because he knew it wasn't going to be productive. I emailed the revised files in a .zip archive at 8:37 pm.

After 8:30 pm last night, the phone went strangely silent. My guess would be that my own boss told the guy to lay off me. My boss won't be in the office at all next week, because of his house move. My CEO lives in suburban Chicago.

What will happen Monday morning when I arrive for work is completely up in the air. If I get fired, fantastic. It means I can collect unemployment. The only big bill I have to pay is quarterly property tax. With no earned income, what I owe Uncle Sam, NJ, and NY plummets to the level of mowed grass vs. a tree. I can live off my unearned income just fine. I'm a tightwad by nature. Both my parents were Great Depression babies, so their spending mantra rubbed off on me pretty well.