Friday, Monday arrived.
The company owner has flitted in, and out again, a couple times since I asked about dropping to a four-day week instead of taking a promised pay raise, but I hadn't been able to catch him to ask what he'd thought about it. Friday, he was in and spent much of the hour before lunch talking to one of the other programmers. And talking. And showing little sign of the conversation breaking up by the time lunch arrived. I went to lunch hoping that he'd be around a while, but the secretary mentioned that the owner had a 1 pm meeting and we were getting right up to that time. So when I saw him come downstairs I abandoned my lunch (a peppers-and-eggs hoagie) and ran for him.
It turned out that he had not, in fact, thought very much about my proposal, but he thought it seemed like it could be done, maybe. Although there was the very real chance that the company would be securing a nice new client arrangement in which, actually, my first project (completed) and my second project (waiting endlessly to get really started) would both be done, and that might require my coming in five days a week to get the schedule on time. This turned into an odd little fifteen-minute ramble about the contract proposals and the politics of the proposals, all of which amounted to his conclusion that probably I could although it's possible I might not be able to.
However, the important thing was: he agreed to letting me drop my hours down, at my current pay rate, and while he couldn't tell the office manager (who was out), he did tell the secretary who's in charge of payroll and scheduling. And so, from ... I guess ... this coming week I only have to act like eighty percent of a grownup. It's going to make for some happy weekends.
Trivia: The 1917 legislation intended to clarify the relationship between New Jersey and Rutgers College, which had been the land-grant college for the state since the Civil War, declared that the ``State University of New Jersey'' would be the ``Rutgers Scientific School, being the State Agricultural College, the State College for the benefit of agriculture and mechanical arts'', as maintained by the Trustees of Rutgers College. This ``State University'' was a division of Rutgers College, although it was not clear just which parts of the college were in the Scientific School, and appropriations in following years referred still to the State Agricultural College. Source: Rutgers: A Bicentennial History, Richard P McCormick.
Currently Reading: 1587: A Year Of No Significance: the Ming Dynasty In Decline, Ray Huang.