Standing my ground

So, when last I spoke with anyone from my old company, the mishegoss was strong with them. The face of the program, SM, wanted me to continue working on it as an “on-call temp”, at “20% of my salary”. Because there’s no one else on the floor who can do what I can. I’d given her my contact details in an email, but didn’t hear anything.

Well, last week, I got an email from JT, the only person on the floor to express appreciation for me, saying that SM had asked for…my contact details, and she wanted to know if it was okay to share them. Well, I said sure—and that I’d given them to her, but prolly got lost. But again, nada.

However, Monday I got an email from SM saying she’d like to chat. I replied suggesting she give me a time yesterday afternoon for a call, and she said, “Great!”

Uh, no—I’m not sticking around between 1200 and 1800 awaiting the ringy-dingy; even Comcast gives you a two-hour window. So I asked her to name a time, and we did have the call.

Well, there was a lot of interesting information, which I will not bore you with. (Although at no point in the conversation did she inquire about me, how I've been in the month since I left, what I've been doing, whether I'm in good health. I'm not at all surprised: a year ago I was out for a week recovering from hand surgery. She never once asked what the surgery was, or how my recovery was going. Likewise, when I took 17 days of vacation in November and December, neither she nor the Clown Car expressed any interest at all in my absence. I do not at all figure in the human tier of their cosmology.)  But the gist of it was she needs me to rework the business plan so the program can show potential corporate donors we have a strategy for sustainability, which of course is generally considered a Good Thing. And I of course can do that.

I let her talk; she was merrily going on about setting up a four-hour meeting with her (interestingly, she made it clear that neither JC nor LW would be involved with this; “we don’t need the operations people for this”*), and reiterating the on-call temp/20% of salary thing. Then I said, “I don’t know how that works, but I get [slightly larger figure than I’m willing to do this for, but still more than she would have imagined] per hour for this work, so we’ll have to figure out how to make it happen.”

*However, when you acknowledge that the program director really doesn’t have any strategic sense, you’re pretty much saying you’re stuffed.

To her credit, she did not drop the phone. And we will have to figure out how to make it happen, because I am not doing it for less than the rate I have in mind. End of.

I was following the advice of a woman on Twitter, who said that, when negotiating salary, you should name the largest figure you can without bursting out laughing.

Because I am #playingtowin.