Monthly Archives: March 2011

Still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Posted on by

If you would have told me back in August when I decided it was time to pull the plug on my Memphis experience, that I’d still be firing off resumes on the first day of spring in the following year, I simply would never have believed you. The irony of coming here in the first place was that I’d alwayherdsrd that getting back to the DC area was easy because no one from outside the area had any interest in going there. That may or may not be the case, but I’ve found that in most cases for jobs inside the beltway the typical number of resumes submitted for consideration is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 with some running north of 500. I’ve got a healthy level of professional self confidence, but the odds get pretty long when you start talking about numbers like that.

There are still a couple of “maybies” out there that I haven’t written off yet, but it’s definitely slot slower going than I remember the last job search being. The department’s hiring freeze extending over the last two months, of course, hasn’t helped. The personnel office points only to the most recent memo that calls for the freeze to be reevaluated by April 1st to decide if it will be extended or to announce how hiring might be handled moving forward. It’s not reassuring that the hiring system will get back to something approaching situation normal any time soon, even if it starts up again in April. With a two month backlog and a notoriously slow process to begin with, things could be ugly for the forseeable future.

There doesn’t seem to be much to do now other than to continue piling my name onto as many heaps as possible and hope it turns up at the top of one of them. The federal government’s a big place and something will come along eventually, but this exercise in patience is wearing very thin. In hindsight, I’m sure this experience will be character building or something, but in the moment it’s enough to drive a man around the bend.

Perspective…

Posted on by

There’s nothing like a retirement party to put a career in perspective. We all like to think of our working lives as being productive and valuable and perhaps that maybe after 30 years of work, we’ve left our mark. Most of us, of course, would be wrong in thinking that. Sure, there are exceptions – Hyman Rickover is the father of the nuclear submarine force; Henry Bessemer made steel economical; Watson and Crick identified the double helix structure of DNA – but for the average schmo sitting in a cubicle there aren’t going to be entries in even the most obscure history book – unless you create your own entry in Wikipedia.

I attended a retirement luncheon – a function that no one ever really wants to go to, but that guarantees a long lunch without anyone getting on your case – and had the dismaying realization that even the people working next to you don’t really have a clue what you do on a day to day basis. The highlight of the “ceremonial” portion of the event was the soon-to-be-departed employee’s supervisor saying a few kind words. One would hope to hear how they made the workplace better, or contributed to the war effort, or saved homeless kittens in their spare time.

What this particular career boiled down to was this: A supervisory musing about how he’d “always remember the great report you wrote about the problems in Peoria.”

Wow. That’s perspective.

For most of us, that’s how a career is going to end. Think on that next time you’re working late on an “important” project or skipping vacation days to make sure a project is finished on time. In 20 or 30 years when your middle of the road colleagues are sitting around a table at a middle of the road restaurant bidding you farewell it’s likely all you’ve done is written a great report about Peoria.

Live your life accordingly.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Hard copy…

Posted on by

With very few exceptions, all of our documents live on one of several network drives available to every employee in the building. I theory that means if ask where something is, I should be able to say “it’s on the Q-drive in the folder titled Big Expensive Project.” Thus armed, a reasonable person could be expected to go forth and find the file they need. Of course our people aren’t necessarily reasonable… and the concept of a networked drive Dot Matrix.jpgmight as well be a blueprint for a time machine.

I’ve been using a tablet to tote all of my paperwork for the better part of the last year. It’s great. I make changes in a meeting, at my desk, or sitting on the can and whatever I’m working on propagates through the network to my laptop, my desktop, and even my phone. With the exception of a very few things that require, for some inexplicable reason, a manual signature, I don’t need paper. And I don’t want it. Paper is going to get lost. My electronic files are going to get backed up once an hour and then stored off site at the end of the day.

You can, perhaps, understand my level of frustration when an employee, let’s call him Mr. Turtle, comes to me with a hand illustrated packet that explains one of the new concepts we want to put in place. Seriously. He had hand drawn graphs and had cut sections out of other documents with scissors and taped them into his “presentation.” Literally. Cut. And. Paste. I’m a pretty smart guy, but I have no idea where to even start dealing with that level of ineptitude from a long-serving “professional” member of the staff.

It’s possible that I’m going to have to pummel the next person who comes to me wanting hard copy of something with a ream of 11×17 paper to drive home the point that this isn’t 1870. Everybody doesn’t need a dead tree edition of everything. Actually, almost no one needs a hard copy of anything any more. Of course that would mean that they’d have to figure out how to use the glowing box on their desk for more than a place to stick Post-It notes.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

24601…

Posted on by

I’ve hidden it reasonably well from all except those who have known me the longest, but I can’t deny that at heart I’m the same band geek I have alwas been. I was flipping stations a bit ago and not paying attention, I landed on the local public television station. Not long after, I was surprised to find myself singing along with #24601 in his escape from Javert. I’d actually forgotten that I even knew the words. But there I was in the kitchen washing dishes, singing like a stark raving lunatic. Lots of memories from what feels like a different lifetime. It’s amazing what a few bars of music can bring back to you. But thank the gods that it does.

All news, all the time…

Posted on by

So I’ll ask you a question. If a newsletter is published and only the Uberboss reads it, is it actually a publication? That question is, sadly, not rhetorical. Every quarter, our staff spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 man-hours planning, organizing, editing, and publishing the “official” organizational newsletter. Actually, we spend more time than that because we usually end up writing most of the articles ourselves because our “call for contributions” generally goes unanswered… and when someone does answer the call, we generally spend even more time rewriting their bit because it seems possible that English is their third language. Or possibly their fourth. That, however, is a separate rant.

Our usual circulation is about 20 print copies plus an electronic version posted on the organization’s intranet site. Last quarter, the electronic copy was accessed something like 37 times. We have several hundred employees. You can do the math on how well this product is being received. Since the majority of our employees work away from the home office, it doesn’t even have the virtue of being used as birdcage liner for most of them.

The workflow for this product is something like this:

• Complete final draft
• Perform editorial review
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Rewrite or change layout at request of Uberboss
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Have “editorial board” meeting with Uberboss
• Rewrite or change layout
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Wait until Uberboss is out of office
• Publish
• Ignore for 2 months
• Repeat

Given the hours required and the pay rate of those involved, the cost to publish breaks down to something like $12,000 per quarter… or $210.52 per view.
Putting up numbers like that, it’s hard to believe that Uncle Sam is ever short on funds.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Cletus…

Posted on by

God love her, the representative of the management company hired as a caretaker for the homeowner’s association must have the patience of a saint. There was one couple at the meeting last night who I’m pretty sure were enjoying their first “big city” experience after coming fresh off the farm. Neither the budget, or the attached explanation of expenses, nor the further explanation of the manager, or the helpful comments made by the other owners seemed to sink in past the first or second layer of brain cells.

The only reason they were there is to figure out where their $120 a year HOA fee went and why the management company was hassling them about the length of their lawn. The nice lady went to incredible lengths to explain that she was only able to enforce the rules put in place by the previous builder and written into the HOA covenants and restrictions and once a new board was elected, they would be responsible for modifying and enforcing the rules.

The concept of maintenance of common areas seemed to present a real analytical challenge for this bunch. Apparently somewhere in the world $170 a month to cut, trim, and treat grass, salt side streets and alleys, and do general upkeep is considered excessive. If $10 a month in fees is going to get your goat, try living somewhere where the condo fees are north of $500 a month. Then we’ll tiptoe into a conversation of unreasonable fees.

My point is this: I don’t want to do it. You don’t want to do it. The guy down the street doesn’t want to do it either. So let’s just agree to put a board in place, let them make the executive decisions, and continue to pay the nice lady a few hundred bucks a month to handle the detail stuff like sicking the lawyer on people whose paint is peeling or who park derelict truck on the street. Otherwise slack-jawed yokels like you and the missus will run this place into the ground.

Sigh.

Homeowners Confederation…

Posted on by

It seems that there are now enough lots in the subdivision sold to warrant the handover of the homeowner’s association from the builder to the actual homeowners. Actually, it’s not the builder… Two of them went bankrupt trying to build the place out, so we’re actually dealing with the a holding company who probably can’t get the place handed over fast enough.

Usually I wouldn’t bother with these meetings, but in the interests of trying to hold the usual extremists at bay, I figure showing up is the least I can do. Given the level of neighborly involvement here, I fully expect this to be a homeowner’s confederation rather than an actual rule-making or enforcement body. Once I’ve assured myself that the couple of activists aren’t going to run away with things, I plan on going back to ignoring 99% of what goes on here.

Well trained…

Posted on by

As a matter of policy, we want a well trained and highly educated workforce to carry out the agency’s business. One of the great military-as-management-philosophy aphorisms is that an organization should “train as it fights.” That is to say, it should build its training program based on situations and circumstances it will encounter in the real world. Of course that’s not the standard we train against.

Our training is driven by a “points” system. Each of several hundred real world and online courses are valued as a specific number of training points. Once you reach the prescribed number of points for the year, you are, by definition, “well trained.” This is great if your objective is to be well trained in as short a time as possible; not so much if you actually want to learn something. Then again, learning something isn’t actually part of the training requirement so if it happens, that’s mostly just a bonus.

On a recent morning I had a few hours of unplanned free time, I racked up more than half of my required yearly points after about three hours of clicking through various PowerPoint slides and Flash presentations… while also having discussions with other staffers, answering the phone, sending email, and monitoring breaking news on Charlie Sheen. I don’t think that was necessarily the kind of quality learning the training office hoped to achieve, but that’s what happens when you base the requirement on earning a fixed number of points rather than on actual knowledge gained or skills needed to stay current in your career field. This is doubly true when you write off professional pride as a motivating factor.

Fortunately, I’m now officially “well trained” for 2011… so I can put this sad, sad experience out of my mind for another 11 months.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Busiest. Day. Ever.

Posted on by

Just taking a few moments this morning to thank all of you who read Get Off My Lawn for making yesterday, the most active day ever on the site – You almost doubled its previous best day (which was last years launch day for the iPhone 4 – so, yes, I’m seeing the pattern here).

I started blogging as a way to vent off the ideas rattling around in my head that were too impolite to say out loud. Over time, it’s become my personal soap box to opine about any topic that’s caught my interest. Surprisingly, you’ve stuck with me even without any overarching rhyme or reason for what topics are taken up around here. All I can say to each of you, is thank you for being interested. I’d blog even if nobody was reading, but you guys make it much, much more interesting.

We know you have choices in reading curmudgeonly rants and Get Off My Lawn appreciates your business.

Taking a test drive…

Posted on by

I promised an unboxing, but was a little too quick getting things unwrapped to keep much of a record. For the moment you’ll have to be satisfied with riding along as I take the new toy out for a test drive. The first thing you notice out of the box is just how good it feels in the hand. The tapered edges are much more comfortable than the vertical edges on version one. It’s definitely a slimmer form factor. I didn’t expect it to be as noticeable as it is, but it makes quite a difference.

After the mandatory registration with iTunes and really getting a chance to put iPad 2 through it’s paces, I’ve got to say that it handles remarkably well. Web browsing is very, very quick and switching apps doesn’t lag at all. I haven’t thrown too much stress at it yet, but I’m expecting great things based on first impressions.

For an afternoon launch, the line wasn’t bad – assuming you got there early enough. I ended up waiting just over three hours from getting in line to walking out of the store… Which brings up the only negative experience of the day. Stockage of the 18 different versions was a bit of an issue. By the time I made it into the store, the AT&T 16 and 32 GB models in black and white were sold out, leaving the only AT&T option as the 64GB version. Since the card I got while in line guaranteed only an AT&T enabled version, it was either hand over an extra $200 and take delivery of four times more storage than I planned on or walk out empty handed. Since I had an AT&T card, I couldn’t just switch off to one of the Verizon versions that were still in stock. This is an issue Apple could have prevented if they would have taken online reservations as they have for previous product launches. Of course it’s not necessarily in Apple’s interest to do that. I forked over an extra $200. I wonder how many others did too. I can’t image many who sat in line for hours were going to be thwarted by another two bills. Now if I were one of the people who was still several hundred people deep in the line when I left, I might be feeling a little different about how things turned out.

All things being equal, I’m well pleased. There are still plenty of things I need to put through their paces, but I’m pretty sure our friends from Cupertino hit another home run.