It’s a fine line I walk, trying to get out of doing as much work as possible. When the Boss asks me to read the fine print of legal boilerplate, I reluctantly (and I let him just how reluctantly) agree, but I remind him that I’m a “numbers person.” When he asks for financial reports, I remind him that I’m not an accountant, just a guy who knows a little arithmetic and has taken a couple of bookkeeping classes.

Here’s the problem. Both long pages of text and long columns of numbers make my eyes glaze over. I can handle both, but doing so sucks all the remaining joy out of my existence, to the point that I end up banging my head (or at least my fist) on the desk. If the Boss is willing to accept my ill-informed opinion on the legal language, or a half-assed stab at an accounting report, I’m willing to give it to him. Once he sees the result, it’s usually a long time before he asks again.

Whatever I’m doing must be working, because this morning the Boss sent me a list of clauses from a contract we’re working on for the federal government (yes, they are still spending money on construction projects). These clauses are available only on the government’s web site, and he doesn’t have a computer (and wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did). He didn’t ask me to read this gobbledygook. He asked me to print it and fax it to him so that he could read it. I felt as if I’d won a prize.