Sometimes the shoe fits
Feb. 12th, 2021 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormThis was a good but challenging two weeks at work. One of the real learning curves of this career change was managing contractors; not folks-helping-for-a-day-or-two but: setting up contracts, selecting contractors or using contractors mandated by the company or by a previous bid process, doing QA on work in areas I may rarely or never get to see across multiple types of deliverable, capturing and sending along the correct information from my organization in a useful format, and ending relationships with contractors.
A lot of this work is done either by email or phone.
Forestry contractors are a very mixed bag. As with landscaping you often have a-guy-with-a-truck who did this for someone else for a couple years and wanted to go out on his own schedule. Then there are mid-to-large companies with actual employees and sometimes even internal structure. In nearly all cases folks go into forestry because they want to be Out There, especially contractors who do most of the on-the-ground work (paying enough employees year-round to do fieldwork is seldom something the big orgs do). Again in many cases, folks go into forestry because they're just not that into people, though in larger contractor companies often the folks who are better with people rise into communications positions.
All this is a long way of saying, contractors are a very mixed bag of interactions. Sometimes there's conflict, which is always hard for me in a new context until I learn what boundaries I'm allowed to set-- can I fire a contractor for yelling at me? For calling me an idiot?
And sometimes the contractor is incredibly professional and does good work, like this last one. When that happens I tend to want to reward them with more work and with good feedback. I'm not always able to award contracts for good work though.
Normally I choose an informal register for talking to contractors. Learning tradespeak when I was landscaping was revelatory for me: code-switching into it has really helped me be accepted as a competent rather than just a woman.
This time, though, I have a supervisor who manages to both quote a lot of legal documents and sound very warm and personable while she does it and a contractor I like a lot who writes very professionally. I've been working hard to come absorb those skills through this contract negotiation. That's meant lots of looking up legalese, carefully drafting emails, consulting with my supervisor, and finally sending.
It's been really good. The contractor is great to work with and I am pretty sure we both successfully conveyed lots of goodwill through these very formal documents. Plus-
I haven't really been able to write since the accident in 2015. I got through the rest of school by using speech-to-text because the part of my brain that writes was gone but the part that could speak coherently still existed. I could do a sentence but could not put it into a paragraph for love or money. A lot of short-term memory was gone too so I couldn't formulate a paragraph in my head and then write it down, and even my trick of working bullet point outlines up into sentences just... didn't work.
This week I've felt like I could write again, a little. That is, I could think of a couple points I wanted a text to address, structure that text, and then put it down in a document. I could go back and edit it some and think about how the parts influenced the whole. These were only single-page documents but it felt like being home again.
Any week that has an interpersonal and a skill challenge that both end up successfully addressed is a good one. Any week that offers hope I may regain my writing ability?
The world changes and I change with it. I accept that. Some of that change is a shearing-away of who I was. Some of that change is an accretion, a hardening or intensifying of the remaining self. Sometimes, though, I get to regain something and that is a gift.
A lot of this work is done either by email or phone.
Forestry contractors are a very mixed bag. As with landscaping you often have a-guy-with-a-truck who did this for someone else for a couple years and wanted to go out on his own schedule. Then there are mid-to-large companies with actual employees and sometimes even internal structure. In nearly all cases folks go into forestry because they want to be Out There, especially contractors who do most of the on-the-ground work (paying enough employees year-round to do fieldwork is seldom something the big orgs do). Again in many cases, folks go into forestry because they're just not that into people, though in larger contractor companies often the folks who are better with people rise into communications positions.
All this is a long way of saying, contractors are a very mixed bag of interactions. Sometimes there's conflict, which is always hard for me in a new context until I learn what boundaries I'm allowed to set-- can I fire a contractor for yelling at me? For calling me an idiot?
And sometimes the contractor is incredibly professional and does good work, like this last one. When that happens I tend to want to reward them with more work and with good feedback. I'm not always able to award contracts for good work though.
Normally I choose an informal register for talking to contractors. Learning tradespeak when I was landscaping was revelatory for me: code-switching into it has really helped me be accepted as a competent rather than just a woman.
This time, though, I have a supervisor who manages to both quote a lot of legal documents and sound very warm and personable while she does it and a contractor I like a lot who writes very professionally. I've been working hard to come absorb those skills through this contract negotiation. That's meant lots of looking up legalese, carefully drafting emails, consulting with my supervisor, and finally sending.
It's been really good. The contractor is great to work with and I am pretty sure we both successfully conveyed lots of goodwill through these very formal documents. Plus-
I haven't really been able to write since the accident in 2015. I got through the rest of school by using speech-to-text because the part of my brain that writes was gone but the part that could speak coherently still existed. I could do a sentence but could not put it into a paragraph for love or money. A lot of short-term memory was gone too so I couldn't formulate a paragraph in my head and then write it down, and even my trick of working bullet point outlines up into sentences just... didn't work.
This week I've felt like I could write again, a little. That is, I could think of a couple points I wanted a text to address, structure that text, and then put it down in a document. I could go back and edit it some and think about how the parts influenced the whole. These were only single-page documents but it felt like being home again.
Any week that has an interpersonal and a skill challenge that both end up successfully addressed is a good one. Any week that offers hope I may regain my writing ability?
The world changes and I change with it. I accept that. Some of that change is a shearing-away of who I was. Some of that change is an accretion, a hardening or intensifying of the remaining self. Sometimes, though, I get to regain something and that is a gift.
