Today was primary day in my state. Normally, I vote in the morning before going to work, but I didn't make it out of the house early enough to do that, so I had to leave the office right after a meeting ended at 5:15 to catch a 6:00 train and make it to the polls by 7:00 pm. We have a lot of retirees in my neighborhood who can vote any time they feel like it during the day, so there are almost never lines, except when I have a school budget vote for which the high school is the only polling place in town. This was for senator, my congressional rep, county freeholders, and a few local township positions.

Nine people wanted my vote for freeholder. I got to select three. Most of them never bothered to send out any literature, and a few didn't even bother to leave a pre-recorded message on my answering machine. If you want my vote, you can darn well at least introduce yourself and state your positions on a few issues on a large postcard. Failing that, my introduction to you shouldn't be a call from your wife "reminding" me to vote for you.

Six-six-six. The sign of the beast. Today is my five year anniversary. The date is technically off a day, but I started the Tuesday after Memorial Week, so the day is correct. Funny. It was also one of our sales rep's anniversaries--one year for her. My five years seems like 25 to me, but her one year seems like six months. I've only once before stayed with an employer for longer than five years. In advertising and related businesses, it's not unusual to move around every few years until you hit senior management.

Stayed at Bozell for eight years, and in retrospect, that was two or three years too long, considering that when I left there eight years ago, I wasn't making a heck of a lot more than entry level kids get now . . . it required moving a few times to get my salary back up to par with my colleagues with similar experience, and regain a little sanity with nine hour work days instead of 12 hour ones. Nine-to-six isn't bad, but with a round trip commute of anywhere between 3.5 and 4 hours, nine-to-nine is awful, especially when you know you're being severely underpaid vs. colleagues your age who are on all the same industry committees.

Had our little department meeting with our CEO today during lunch hour, even though he had already stopped by my office beforehand to chat in private. We ran through our project list item by item, going through who was going to cover what aspect of it in the absence of 40% of my staff come another few weeks. The scary part is that he and a woman in sales will take over some of the sales proposal aspects and client support aspects of it. Okay, but they better darn well consult me when it comes to proposals that include loading proprietary databases, because we don't want to get stuck with the client not paying for an electronic codebook--it becomes extremely cumbersome for us to deal without one, if we have to analyze the data for them as consultants, and next to impossible for them to use it themselves.

I'm all for letting sales & support take over client support aspects. It's hard enough getting any real work done, when I have to hand hold the client for weeks on end, whenever we get them a new data load. Guess what? We have a department that is getting paid to fulfill that role, and it's not mine. I can't stop a client who's gotten comfortable calling me directly from doing so, but I can fob it off on someone else to handle, if it's not too technical. Obviously, some clients are far more demanding than others, but I think I finally have one ultra-relieved client willing to do much of the numbers/spreadsheet legwork for us that will help expedite their project (which in turn costs them less, given the time savings at my end).

Time will tell what direction my department will take, but at least I have a couple of people outside my department willing to take on the paperwork and phone call end of it.