Trop rants

Ugh. I'm running on about six hours sleep since Tuesday. When I'm sleep deprived I get crabby.

And right now I'm crabby about a client.

As a rule, we require a three week turn-around to build the models I build. There are other models we do that are less time intensive; I can bang one of those out in an afternoon.

But my models (I'm the only one in the firm that does them), are an entirely different beast.

It doesn't actually take three weeks of labor to build one, but it does take a few days to a week typically. A lot of work is involved: data manipulation, model fitting, diagnostics. Then there is the actual deliverable, which is a vast web of formulas in a big Excel workbook of detailed tables and charts.

Millions of dollars are a stake with each one. It has to be right. Sometimes getting it right takes time and painstaking effort.

I have a track record of getting it right. I know what I'm doing.

I'm crabby and sleep deprived because I was given data on Tuesday and had to turn it into a deliverable by 8:00 this morning.

I knew this was coming and that there would be a crunch this week. We go out of our way to accommodate clients, though reducing a three week turn-around to 48-hours is a bit much, especially for a slacker like me. But for the good of the company, I did it. And wouldn't you know it, this one was one of the more difficult models I've had to fit. It just kept coming up wrong. I finally got it working at about midnight last night.

And what did I get for my trouble?

A hijacked meeting.

Every now and then I encounter a wise ass who thinks they know more about what I do than I know. If you run in academic circles or attend conferences where papers are presented you've seen this person. They come for a presentation and then hijack it by challenging every esoteric detail they can retrieve from their graduate school glory days [eye-roll]. It's not that such details aren't legitimate and important, but for purposes of the presentation, they don't much matter.

One of our clients has a wise ass on his staff. Whenever she's in the meeting she hijacks it with really technical questions of the kind I didn't even get at my dissertation defense. She did it again today. There was no point to her questions except to show off. I really have no patience for people like her.

She was so annoying that I seriously considered faking a dropped call just so I could scream.

Grrrrrr!