It's been almost exactly a year since Zuza's last recognition for her work on the HM/SA staff, a period that neatly overlaps with her service as my Praetor. Although I discussed much of her work in her recent promotion, now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to quantify that in terms of XP.

Part of Zuza's job over the last year has been, as I put it in the promo rec, "Deputy Arch." She had to prepare to take on the HM role in case I was unavailable for any reason. Sometimes she got something to show for it, like the 36 exams she graded during this period or credit for running the Q4 Decathlon competitions. But usually it meant that she had to give up time that could have been spent gaming, writing, or doing anything at all that would've been more fun so that she could deal with continuity training. I have no idea how long she spent on this. I know simple tasks, like when I walked her through grading SA exams, were pretty quick: that was a 13 minute call in January. Other times it was more involved: when I gave her a full overview of staging SA courses, which includes preparing and uploading assets, creating the course on the site, creating the exam, and repeatedly previewing and tweaking everything, I know she sat patiently on the call for a little over an hour. But I don't know how long she spent looking through the style guide and building the template for the upcoming societies courses, or learning how to make course updates through the admin panel (which only she and Zen have done among current staffers), or handling the off-site issues tracker and bug report system (which only she's done), or learning how to update the Ruby script that governs degree progress.

Zuza also provided skills that I don't have. I knew the gifs for Comms 101 were outdated and needed to be replaced but I don't know how. So Zuza did it, and then she taught me how she did it. My only experience with video editing is a school project in 2005, so it fell to Zuza to create the video for Writing Dialogue. I made her track time on that one, so I know it was about two hours of harvesting clips, editing, and re-editing.

Since this summer, Zuza has officially been the point person for a lot of what is now Emissary work. Specifically, stalking our new joins and doing individual, private outreach to them. It was a natural evolution of the ad hoc new member engagement she'd been doing and the informal taskings I'd been giving her to poll newer members about the Essentials courses and other SA projects. She was the only person in the club working this as a primary duty before the Emissary position opened; now she's still doing it but she's at least part of a team.

I guess I should step back and acknowledge that a lot of people don't think that "chat" is work. Well, if it's not work, why is it so damn hard to get people to do it? At every level of this club, purposeful communication is critical for getting results. But it's a struggle to get people to go out and promote their competitions. It's a struggle to get supervisors to give their subordinates actual instructions or feedback. The CONs sit in their chat complaining that the DC doesn't talk to them while we sit in our chat complaining that the CONs don't talk to us. For years, it's been an uphill battle to get people to talk about the work their peers and subordinates are doing so they can get timely medals and promotions. I used to tell my junior summit to "do one thing and talk about it" and it was like pulling teeth. It's impossible to quantify the energy expenditure or impact of this, but the units where people do it are active and growing and the units where people are not doing it are not. So it's tempting to write off "Zuza talks to new people" as a charming personality quirk, but that's ripping her off. It was direct tasking from her boss that she faithfully executed for half a year. Recruiters, sales reps, pollsters, and others make a living doing the same thing. When Zuza was starting conversations with twenty-something Discord-authenticated new joins, getting into voice and video chat and gaming sessions with them, that was an intentional time investment in the future of this club and a mission so important it just got the first new DC position in six years.

Zuza, thank you for all your work over the past year. I look forward to seeing what you and Qormus can accomplish in the new office.

Alethia Archenksova
Headmistress

Headmistress Alethia Archenksova, 2023-12-20 19:23:39 UTC