Was Scope of Agreement or Letter of Intent-Now unemployed.

[sclarke -at- nucleus -dot- com]

A week or so ago I wrote and asked about the difference(s) between a Scope
of Agreement vs a letter of Intent. Quite a few of you responded. Thank
you very much. Andrew Plato also kindly responded and, among other things,
seemed to think I was in CYA mode and that it might be time to move on to
greener pastures. Someone else mentioned it's "hard to get a leopard to
change its spots."

Truer words could never be spoken. I was in *major* CYA mode. My
> manager-profoundly clueless about even the most elementary aspects of
> documentation, publishing standards or documentation development-would only give verbal directives and refused to accept any responsibility for the resulting (usually) negative consequences.  If I did what he told me (most of which was wrong or just plain stupid) I was wrong & got dumped on. If I didn't do what he told me...I was also wrong and got dumped on. Plainly and clearly a no-win situation.

 He regarded me, I felt, as a secretary and why on earth would anyone
listen to or ask a secretary for advice? Only this "secretary" made his
fanny glow  golden (I'm not kidding) in the first ISO audit. The auditors
spent 5  minutes praising the SOP's (on which I'd worked) in the closing
meeting saying how they'd never seen such good ones, how good they were,
how much they liked the pictures in the SOP's & had (literally) never seen
pictures in those kinds of SOP's before etc. etc. etc.

>  I requested a Scope of Services agreement-to which I'm legally entitled as part of my contract- and stipulated that once signed any proposed changes would have to be submitted in writing to me. ( I'd actually asked for it once before-this last August) His response was " How *dare* I go in there making such demands", " that I was in no position to be demanding anything" and that if he signed it...then..." I could merely point to the piece of paper and say...this is *what* you said you wanted me to do." (BINGO...I think he got the message)  He could not and would not guarentee that in the space of 14 days he wouldn't change his mind or change direction (yet again).I really do know that things do change and evolve as a project moves along but in this instance part of the reason this kept happening was because he hadn't the faintest foggiest clue as to what he was doing and b)he wanted and *needed* to be able to blame someone (i.e. me)...if things went awry. And that, is just exactly, what he did.

After berating me in one breath as a 'bad' technical writer and then in
the next breath asking me "if I was going to come back" (no kidding-this
really happened) but without a scope of services agreement-I became
unemployed and am now free...to move on to greener pastures. I have mixed
feelings about it at the moment. Part of me is hugely relieved...part of
me is sad-I really didn't want it to turn out this way...and a whole host
of other things. Live and learn eh?

It actually got worse after that-believe it or not. I (stupidly) offered
to go in-as a professional courtesy-to effect an orderly transfer of files
and show them where everything was because they didn't know. He (my former
boss) showed up as I was taking some personal files off of the computer
and became absolutely obnoxious& demanded to know "what" I was taking and
commented that "they" had done me a favour by "allowing" me to come in. It
just pretty much went downhill from there.  He even started riffling
through my brief case to make sure I wasn't "stealing" any hard copies of
their documents although my contract stipulated that I'm allowed to keep
one copy of each document for archival purposes. It also said I was
supposed to retain them for 7 years. Bozo (my boss) stated he and his boss
didn't "agree" with this interpretation and forbid me to take them.

This has definitely been a case of learning the *hard* way. No doubt about
it.

Sara-Sue
in Canada.


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