Confrontation

We had a meeting about part 12(c) of the minor project near the end of October. Verdict: we got to do the table our way. Victory. The meeting was more than a bit aggravating, though. The senior tech writer (sort of my manager but sort of not, the most experienced writer who is kept in the loop on all this stuff but he doesn't actually manage anyone) came along but left me to do most of the talking. Optimistically, maybe he would have jumped in if he thought I was screwing it up, but he doesn't seem much like the type. He's a very bad speaker. Bad in a public speaking sense, although he manages to ramble and trail off in one-on-one conversations too. It's just as well I kept things under control there.

In the end, I think I did OK. My arguments may have shifted a bit over the course of the meeting, going from "You can't use these previous rulemakings as a guideline because this one is different" to "Well, you can use these previous rulemakings as a guideline, because they actually mean something completely different than you thought." Underneath it all, of course, my real reason for it was "Do it our way because this is our choice, and our way is this way because my boss says so". My boss's way was probably the best way, but I could have made a good argument for my way if we weren't already behind schedule, and it wouldn't be too hard to come up with an endless variety of tweaks to the formatting of a table. The differences between them would have been almost trivial.

It was downright weird, maybe the most decisive I've had to be so far in this job. It's a pity it was over this. There are lots of problems that actually matter in this job, but the only significance to this problem was the internal turf thing.