Monthly Archives: May 2011

Things to do…

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So we’ve officially gone directly from stressing about getting a job to stressing about getting through all the wickets to actually get there on time. It probably says something disturbing about me that I’ve sat down and started keeping track of those wickets using a color coded matrix. Of course this isn’t an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems like as good a way as any to keep track of the things I need to get done between now and June 4th. I’d anticipate in the next week or so this list is going to be alot longer than it is now. That’s fine. I’ve never shied away from hard work for a good cause… and my escape from Memphis is currently the best cause of which I am aware.

Today was a planned day off long before I got the word that I would be leaving, but I’ve tried to use it to good effect. Aside from the original planned trip to the vet, I’ve managed to set up appointments with two movers for quotes, changed some mailing addresses, started the process of changing my insurance coverage, talked to my sawbones about forwarding medical records, and even packed a few more odds and ends – before running out of boxes (again). That’s a reasonably productive day. I’m gaining confidence every moment that I’ll be able to clear out without too many issues.

Reception on the other end remains to be determined. It would be nice to have a house lined up and waiting when I show up, but the chances of that happening are slim to none. I don’t exactly have alot of time built in to the schedule to go poke around myself so I’m relying on the kindness of friends, family, and a slightly standoffish relator (at the moment) to point me in the right direction. Disturbingly, the most important features I’m looking for aren’t even something for me. I need a rental house that’s pet friendly and has a fence… because lets face it, trying to cram me, two eighty pound dogs, and a house worth of furniture into a two bedroom apartment isn’t going to happen.Neither is me running them in and out to a designated “community pet area” multiple times a night. So yeah, a house and a fence. Pretty much everything else is a point for negotiation.

There’s a metric crapload of things that still need done… and the clock is definitely ticking.

Dan Rather…

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Everyone has their quirks, but the one that probably annoys me most (at the moment) is one individual who has taken to providing regular accounts of the morning’s news to me before I even sit down at my desk in the morning. I’m not exaggerating. He’s standing at my right elbow before I’ve even set my bag down each morning and starts in with whatever “emergencies” are happening around the country. If there are no fires or earthquakes, he’s on to the local news and weather… and I’m still trying to get my computer booted. This drones on for 20-30 minutes every morning despite my best efforts to politely redirect his attention and sometimes my blatantly impolite efforts of staring at the now-booted monitor and responding to his review of the highlight reel with the occasional grunt. Uh huh.

I’m deeply interested in the events of the world. Before I get to the office, I’ve usually at least scanned the headlines of the local paper, the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post. If it’s a light news day, I’ve probably already looked over Drudge and the AP wire as well. But at half past six in the morning, I don’t want to have a philosophical conversation about what’s going on anywhere. What I want to do is spend the first 30 minutes of the day focusing on email that came in over night and otherwise preparing for the day before the rest of the staff wanders in. But no, instead of doing that, it’s like I’ve got my own dim witted Dan Rather giving me a daily morning news brief.

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

Just like that…

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I’ve had nine months to think about what this post would look like, but surprisingly it’s not one that I started working on in advance. Now that the day of jubilee has arrived, I find myself at something of a loss for words. How do I sum up the experience that has been finding my eject handle? Is it defined by the statistics? 273 days on the hunt. 91 days of frozen time. 385 resumes submitted. Sometimes I felt like I could count off the hours of each one of those days. Almost a year of complete confidence tempered by false starts and rejections. And then moments of unadulterated joy. Whatever the moment is, it’s not defined by the statistics.

I’m feeling very conscious of those who made the jump before I have. Of how much I miss them and how much I’ll miss a few of those I’ll leave behind. I’m conscious now more than ever of home, of family, and of friends from whom I’ve been too long separated. They say you can’t go home again. I’ve been away long enough to know that everything has changed – and that nothing that matters has really changed. I’m coming home and I’ll take it as I find it, changes and all.

There is plenty of time to go into specifics later. For now, let it suffice to know that tonight I will sleep the sleep of the vindicated. My great experiment in Memphis is drawing to an end. I’ve survived my ride on the crazy train. And I’m coming home.

When I sat down to write, I thought this post would be a valedictory. It seems my nerves are still too raw for that kind of triumphalism. Give me a day or two for the reality to sink in, though, and it’s a fair bet that you’ll be reading posts with some serious swagger.

Boxing day…

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No, it’s not December 26th, but it’s officially the day I’ve decided to go all in with the assumption that my time in Memphis is drawing to an end and that it is going to do so with great rapidity in the next couple of weeks. The fact is the more I can do now, before the crush of having an officially designated D-day, the better I’ll feel. There will be enough to do to keep two or three people gainfully employed once the actual paperwork hits my desk. As it stands now, the kitchen is the only room on the house that doesn’t have boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling. The obvious question is where all this stuff came from, as I certainly didn’t bring it all here with me (I ran out of those boxes very early in the process). Regardless, it’s all finding its way into temporary quarters safely tucked away surrounded by newsprint and bubble wrap. It helps that I’ve been slowly sneaking things into boxes since January, but now it’s getting real because we’re getting into the items that I’m actually missing now that they’re gone. The electronics are still all up and running. The kitchen is still fully functional. But in almost every other respect, this place is 75-80% ready for check out time.

When the word comes down from on high, who’s going to be ready? That’s right. This guy.  it won’t take long to pack out the clothes and few key odds and ends that I’ll be carrying myself. I moved here with a Mustang packed to the roof and I suppose I’ll leave in a pickup truck looking a bit like the Clampetts, but the important thing is I’ll be leaving… assuming (as always) that the paperwork gets done. I don’t know that I’ll ever get use to knowing, but not knowing. It’s damnably frustrating to spend so much time working from hints and allegations, but in the absence of clear guidance, I’ve elected to create my own based on my read of the situation and reports from well placed sources.

Boy will I be pissed if this thing falls apart now.

That’s progress…

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I had a vague hope for most of the day that the powers that be would intercede and pass the word before close of business. It would have been nice to spend the weekend in something other than a state of definite maybe. That might over-state the situation a bit, but the clock is running and almost everything involved in this process is time sensitive. The longer it takes to square things away here, the more of a headache it’s going to be to start getting things lined up on the other end. Until they officially put a mark on the wall, I’ll remain stuck somewhere between reality and happy illusion – and there’ll be a hard limit on how far I can and can’t prepare. Can I pack every stick of stuff in the house? Sure. But I don’t know if that means I’m going to spend the next two days or two months surrounded by boxes and making dinner every night in the one saucepan that I didn’t pack. I can’t make any definitive plans to get a house full of boxes from here to there. Maybe more difficult is that I can’t start making any decisions about where I’ll be unpacking all those boxes once they get to wherever they’re going. I’m getting visions of way too many nights hanging out in a not quite mid-grade extended stay hotel. It won’t take me long to close out on this end. That’s the beauty of planning your exit for the better part of the year. The issues that are bedeviling me tonight are all about what happens after the Mayflower truck pulls away from Memphis. I know I can torch that bridge when I get to it, but for someone who lives his life by a plan, it’s the kind of uncertainty that can keep a guy up at night. If there’s any up side, it’s that I seem to have gone from being paranoid about the job itself to only being paranoid about what it’s going to take to get from here to there. That’s progress.

Meetings…

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It’s not an official duty day without attending at least one meeting. It is, therefore, imperative that we have an effective and efficient means of coordinating who should attend and when they should arrive. If only there was a widely available and heavily used computer program that would make that possible. Oh, yeah… Outlook does that. In theory. What setting up meetings in outlook really does for us, though, is generate mass confusion surrounding any meeting that we might ever attempt to schedule. In fairness, I suppose it’s not so much an Outlook error as it is operator incompetence.

Scheduling a major meeting at our “organization” (i.e. any aggregation of more than four people) involves a process that looks something like this:

Step 1: Set up a meeting request in Outlook

Step 2: Change the time and/or date of this meeting at least three times

Step 3: Receive one or more cancelation notices

Step 4: Get three follow-up meeting requests either the same or slightly
different than the first

Step 5: Receive a reminder email from the meeting organizer two days before the meeting

Step 6: Receive a reminder phone call from the meeting organizer one dat before the meeting

Step 7: 15 minutes before the meeting receive 1-3 automatic reminders from Outlook depending on how many of the original meeting requests the organizer remembered to cancel.

Step 8: Arrive at the appointed conference room to find it empty and the lights off

Step 9: Consider the misguided series of steps that led you to your current career.

If you’re lucky, the no one else will figure out when or where the meeting is actually supposed to take place either and you’ll at least have a nice quiet conference room to hide in for a while. Quiet weeping is optional at your discretion.

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

We’ve got a heartbeat…

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I hear it in the hushed conversation over cubicle walls. I see the grins and sly thumbs up offered by our own HR staffers. Somewhere just beyond my field of view, the wheels of the great green machine are in motion. We’ve got a heartbeat. It’s faint, but there. After the torturous road this process has taken just to get to the “tentative” stage, I don’t dare to think of it as a done deal. The probability of success is definitely increasing, but that’s a long way from a signed set of orders and a new desk. Nevertheless, I’m raising the confidence meter from cautiously optimistic to hopeful.

Experience has taught me and millions of others that the Army is a serious player in the game of hurry up and wait. I’ve got the waiting bit down to a science. It seems that we’re about to get a lesson in extreme hurry up. I’m confident that in this case, hurry up is far preferable.

Calendar…

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When Pope Gregory “invented” the calendar, he was working under the belief that having a single universal standard that today was really “today” and not some time in the middle of February would be a good idea for the Christian kingdom’s of Europe. At the very least, it would allow everyone to hold their major celebrations and feast days at the same time. Good stuff if you were a Pope in the 16th century. Most people today keep a calendar for the same basic reason. It’s a hellofa good way to keep major events organized and make sure everyone shows up to them at the same time.

The rub comes, of course, when no one can agree what is supposed to be on a “major event” calendar. Senior staff meetings make the cut, but not inter-staff meetings. The Uberboss’ days off are on there, but not the senior staff. Multi-jurisdictional exercises show up, but sometimes not local exercises impacting people in the building. Some events are listed three times because whoever put them on there can’t figure out how to change the date and/or time of the original reservation. And keeping track of the hot mess that is our calendar falls to junior staff who a) Don’t know what the schedule is supposed to look like; b) Aren’t told when things change; c) Have never been given clear direction about what events “make the cut”; and d) Have no authority to demand information from other senior staff offices. Sure, that’s a guarantee of getting a good product.

The way I learned it back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the earth was that if you are given responsibility to do a thing, you should also be given the corresponding authority to make that thing happen. Having one without the other, well, is about as productive as trying to put a high gloss of a pile of feces. This little endeavor isn’t something that should be hard to do… but the players involved almost guarantee that it will be an exercise in futility… But the again, that’s never stopped us from wasting inordinate amounts of time before.

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

A sign of life…

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After another week of ponderous waiting, I was given another gentle reminder that this thing up north might actually work out. I got to spend a few minutes talking to a to individual who will act as my “sponsor” during the transition and in-processing period. It wasn’t exactly the call from HR that I have been waiting for, but it’s a sign of life. At this point on the long, torturous process I seem to be overly given to looking for signs and reading tea leaves. Absent the magic moment when they throw the switch from tentative to official, that is probably as good as it’s going to get. After nine months, you’d think that I would be use to waiting for things to happen.

The ability of the system to make the simple things hard is never far from my thoughts these days. Since this whole exercise involves filling out some paperwork and moving my electrons from one database to another, it’s still hard to understand how it could possibly take as long as it does. The irony is that once they pull the trigger, they’ll probably want to give me a short reporting date and wonder why I can’t get out of here with a whole two weeks notice. I’ve been around this Army long enough to know better than spend a dime making preparations without a set of orders in hand. So, I hurry up and wait.

Hitting pause…

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I’ve been on a bit of a tear lately with posting. Numbers are up. Click throughs are up. Week after week, I’m setting new “bests” in most of the categories I’m interested in tracking. As much as I’d like to keep that upward streak alive, I’ve got a blinding headache tonight and I don’t think any more time staring at the screen trying to force the words out are going to help the situation. Forgive the brief pause while I wander around looking for the Tylenol.