Re: not neccessarily very good at brown-nosing...
When the company I was working for was being "re-organised" into several smaller companies, I was invited by my then Boss to take over the Technical Manuals department, as the incumbent had decided to take early retirement. The position, Chief Engineer, was Grade six on the company's pay structure, but involved being on call 24/7, and having no overtime allowance. I asked if he would downgrade it to Grade five, Principal Engineer, at the same salary, which would mean that I could leave at 5PM and go home, plus I could come in Saturday mornings and earn some overtime.
As soon as I took over the department, with one other Technical Writer and two Shorthand Typists, we relocated the Xerox DTP system into a different building, and proceeded to produce Technical manuals for the new range of products, plus maintaining those for such previous products as the new company was still producing. Of course, I had no clue as to how much we should charge for the new Contract Specific manuals, so I looked back over the previous five years' records, plotted the Manual Cost against Contract Price, and produced a formula to calculate ongoing prices, which I ran past my Boss and then sent to all of the Sales Team, including the Head of Sales.
Some ten months later, I received a snotty email from the Head of Sales, asking why it was that when he plotted Manual Cost against Contract Price, he got a straight line (log/lin plot). I resent him the original email informing him, and the rest of his crew, of the formula, and explained that the straight line was a direct result of applying that formula.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
