An achievement leads to ...

.....sometimes I wonder!!!! The joys of management....gotta love it.

I pay my team their bonus for each quarter of the year. In Friday's paycheck, it's the Q2 bonus. I had lots of feedback when I arrived that they never received a written breakdown of their bonus before - and i could back this up with the number of questions I got in Q1. So I decided that I would give everyone their breakdown - the idea being that I'd avoid 95% of all questions. I had sooooooo many of them last quarter I figured this would be a great idea.

Of course, with 60 people in my team I wanted to avoid writing 60 emails with the breakdown. I decided that I would use the mailmerge function in MS Word. Now, I used to use it years ago so I understood the principles of mailmerge. It just took a little while to get it working. By a little while, I mean at least 6 hours at the weekend and about 3 last night. I had issues with stupid stuff....like in Excel it'd show a % and in word it would translate to 1.15. Not a huge deal, but not perfect! By 10pm last night I had it all figured out. You have to create a text-only Excel sheet, make sure ALL the data is correct and then save it. You can then do the mailmerge in Word brilliantly.

Worked great, I got all but one out the door - and have received brilliant feedback. So, I know it was worth the effort.

So here's the peculiar piece. A guy in my team joins on May 8th - that means he's due 8 weeks worth of bonus out of the quarter's 13 weeks. Make sense? It did to me. So, I was on the floor laughing my ass off when he wanted to know why he didn't get a full quarter's bonus. Is it me, or is he plain stupid? I think the latter.

Luckily, I have a sense of humor!