Monthly Archives: September 2011

Don’t ask, don’t tell… Don’t care…

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After seeing the media has gone it’s usual level of overboard spinning up the talking heads on today’s repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, I just can’t resist the temptation to wade into the issue just this once. One of the reasons I’ve so often parted company with my Republican brethren is that as a rule I tend to be just a hair to the right of hopelessly liberal on most social issues (at least the ones that don’t involve throwing good money after bad). Some people will tell you repealing don’t ask, don’t tell is a matter of social justice. Maybe it is, but since I’m not a social justice theorist, that argument is pretty much academic to me… fun to argue, but mostly an abstraction.

As a conservative (and I mean old school, personal liberty loving conservatism here), I believe in the maximum amount of individual freedom consistant with maintaining public order. The government that can tell a lesbian she can’t fly a helicopter is just as capable of telling me that I can’t do my job for no other reason than I happen to like women too. I’ve always felt common cause with the lesbian community that way. As I’ve admitted before, government does a few things really well, but it’s got a piss poor track record at legislating it’s own particular version of morality. If I don’t want Uncle to make decisions for me about who I can like, love, or fornicate with, that means I’ve got a duty to keep him from making those decisions for anyone else. That’s just the way the social contract works, gang. An assault on freedom anywhere is an assault on freedom everywhere.

Personally, I think this is all a good sign that we’re getting over our collective puritanical hangups about sex. It’s only taken 400 years. Don’t ask, don’t tell is history… But I wonder why anyone cared in the first place.

Good intentions…

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I always sit down to write with the best of intentions… like taking time to edit whatever it was I just dumped on the page or hitting some topic that’s caught my attention with a painful level of detail. More often than not what actually happens is I hit “publish” as soon as I’m done typing and then fix errors as I find them… sometimes days or weeks later. And detail? Yeah, let’s face it, most of the time I’m lucky to stop rambling long enough to draw out a salient point or two. I’ve noticed that it’s mostly a battle between putting together quality or putting together volume. For the last six months or so, I’ve come down pretty squarely into the volume camp and tried to post five days a week. The part of me that’s curious about such things wonders if I’d write better if I only posted half as often.

One of the aspects of Get Off My Lawn that I’ve always enjoyed is that is has a “as it happens” feel because the posts a function of whatever happens to be going on at that moment. Setting a schedule of posting on say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at least to me, seems to take away some of that flexibility. I don’t want to turn this into a set piece affair, writing on some formulaic “topic of the day,” but at the same time I’d like to bring a little more editorial and quality control to improve how things read and look when they come hot off the press.

I read a lot of blogs and know there are many out there who seem to effortlessly produce large volumes of quality posts. It’s not a contest, but I’m definitely interested in how much time they spend composing their posts and where they get their ideas. I like to think I’m a better writer now that I was when I started blogging. I know I’m certainly more introspective now. I might even be more technically accurate, but better? I’m not so sure. Sometimes it feels too mechanical, like I’m posting just to post.

Penny wise…

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I’m usually a fan of doing things online whenever possible. The internet frees us from the bounds of 9-5 and lets people engage when and as their schedule permits. With that said, how you “do” something online needs to be considered before the powers that be decide to make the leap from real world to electrons. It’s been my experience that unless an online class is really very well designed and engaging, it quickly becomes an exercise in clicking the “next” button until the machine rewards you with a certificate of completion. In many things this is good enough in that at least people will know where to go get information even if they don’t know exactly what information they need. That’s well and good most of the time.

When it comes to training the next generation of supervisors, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that a week-long class on the dos and don’ts of labor law, equal employment opportunity, and dealing with unions can be quite so nicely condensed. Training the people who are supposed to enforce the standards by letting them click through a set of slides on their own is a terrible idea. There are enough piss poor supervisors already and we really, really need to get this one right. Expecting the new guy to “learn on the fly” is pretty much your standard recipe for disaster. Look, I know funds are tight, but this is a pay me now or pay me later situation. By doing it right from the beginning, how much cost avoidance will you realize by preventing the inevitable increase in EEO, prohibited personnel practice, and fair labor standards settlements?

Can we please, just this once, look more than 15 feet down the road when deciding how to save budget dollars?

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

The searchers…

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Running a blog is a mixture of art and science. The art comes in the form of the actual words on the page. The science tells you who’s searching for what, why people are visiting, and where their coming from. It’s probably not a discussion to have with your friends who are worried that the government or big corporations are tracking your every move. The analytic tools that are available to me, a poor simple blogger, would be profoundly disturbing for them. Disturbing images of big brother aside, I’m always curious about what brings people here. And since it’s bad form to blatantly ask, I’m using some analytic tools to let me know what web searches lead people to me. So yes, I’m tracking you, but only a little bit. I’m sure there are ways to put names with hits, but that’s not something I’m interested in so your secret identities are safe. All I know is that you’ve been here. Sort of like knowing that people lived in your house before you did by finding a box of their crap pushed all the way to the back of the crawl space.

If you’re wondering what brings people here, there are some obvious answers. The top draw was apparently the DOD/Army hiring freeze. That one’s still bringing in hits although I haven’t written about it in three or four months. Electronic cigarettes is another big winner. Apparently there’s alot of interest out there. Of course my old favorite is still well into the top five: Teamwork Sucks. That’s been bringing in consistant visitors since I opened the doors here. None of those is surprising, really, once you remember the the town square of the modern world.

The ones that are really interesting are the one offs that land just one lone individual here on the site. Some of my personal favorite searches from the last year are:

– memphis storm drain backup
– how can i protect my grass from people driving over it?
– narcotics jeff tharp
– how to piss off apartment manager
– ocd mowing the lawn
– jeff tharp star wars oregon
– tactical retrograde
– glen beck institutionalized

Some of them I can understand. I did spend some time ranting about Glen and an inordinate amount of time worrying with my lawn. If any of you are updating my mother, though, can you please assure her that I have no idea where the narcotics part came from. Thanks for the solid.

What annoys Jeff this week?

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And without further adiu, here’s what’s annoying Jeff this week.

1. Waking up on time and then hitting the snooze bar five times, making yourself 45 minutes late. Clearly there has to be a better way to execute a morning routine.

2. Thursday night laundry. Yes, it saves me from eating up an entire weekend afternoon doing laundry, but it still annoys me. Meh.

3. The 24-hour day. You suck. Seriously. A 30-hour day would be much more conducive to balancing the amount of things that need done with the time available to do them.

4. The neighbor who lets his kids run along the fence taunting the dog. At some point she’ll have enough and bite you in the face. I’ll be smiling on the inside.

Long-term storage…

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The risk in throwing things away is that you’ll wake up one morning and realize you just tossed out something you now need. In the vast majority of cases, this moment never happens and we go on with our lives with a little less crap laying around junking the place up. Some people have a harder time than others letting things go… or even just accepting that even though it’s something they very clearly remember doing that was important once upon a time, no one is ever going to need it again.

I can’t stress with enough conviction that we will never, under any conceivable circumstance, need to retrieve the office document archive from 1985. After 26 years, it’s probably safe to assume that those days when you were the young buck are well astern and you should probably just let them go instead of insisting that we hold them in our very small storage room “indefinitely.” Those boxes are more likely to fall over on some poor unsuspecting intern and kill them than they are to contain anything that anyone in the office might actually find useful.

I hate to have to be the one to bring this up, but you’re already the person in the office who keeps too many plants and too much trade show swag in your area. I’d consider it a massive personal favor if we could try to avoid you ending up on the pilot episode of Hoarders: Cubicle Farm Edition. So please, dear colleague, let it go.

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

Write like the wind…

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I’ve found an interesting thing about writing. The more I do it, the more I want to do it. I’m pretty sure there some chemical reaction in the brain governing this sort of thing, but it feels damned good to see the written word fill up a piece of paper that doesn’t have anything to do with a quarterly report, status update, or policy memo. Since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, I’m finding that the problem is that there always seems like there’s more to say than there is time to say it. Let’s just say that this is leading to some good stuff, but also some bleary eyed mornings.

Someone asked me not long ago what I do for fun. This is apparently it. Some people spend their free time building models or playing kickball, baking, or candlestick making. It seems that for now, this is going to be my most time consuming hobby. It keeps me off the streets and I can do it without needing to go out and deal with large groups of people, so maybe this is exactly what I’ve been looking for after all. Some of you extroverts will scoff and say it’s not a real hobby, but remember to be nice or I’ll blog about you. And no one wants that.

Interestingly, the more I write, the more I read; which strikes me as a strange circumstance since both are inherently time consuming activities in their own right. It’s possible that this is a passing interest, but five years of active blogging, and a new found interest in e-publishing would point to something different. Maybe I will lose interest at some point, but for now I’ll write like the wind because you never know when you’ll get hit broadside by an insufferable case of writer’s block.

Time management…

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I’m a good employee. I’m conscientious, pugnacious, and attentive to detail. I get things done on time and do my best to at least project the illusion of confidence. For the most part, things are reasonably busy and productive (as long as you count meetings as “productive” time). Even on those busy days, once I get back from lunch the days just drag. The 120 minutes between 2 and 4 seem to pass at the same relative speed of the six hours between 7 and 11. I’m sure some big-brained psychologist out there has a good and rational explanation for why that is, but a cursory Google of the issue hasn’t returned any really satisfactory answers.

And don’t get me started on the weekends. They go by so fast that they’re practically non-existent. Seriously, damnit. I no more than wake up on Saturday morning and suddenly it’s Monday again and I’m schlepping down Route 40 with a thermos full of coffee and a bleary-eyed slightly dazed look on my face. Sure, time flies when you’re having fun and all, but should it really fly when all you’re doing is cutting the grass, cooking a few meals, and picking up a bag of dog food? When you’ve figured out the secret to this time management dilemma, let me know.

Sitting here on a Monday night, all I know is that I want my weekend back. Or I want to start my next career as a PowerBall winner. Either way’s good.

Keys to the kingdom…

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Day after day, we sit at the same terminal behind the same guarded doors, inside a secure compound. Aside from the usual path to the coffee bar or to tend to nature’s call, our professional world is mostly made up of what’s happening in one or two rooms and whatever happens to make it across our computer screens. Other than what’s immediately in front of us, we’re remarkably insulated even though we’re “trusted agents.” Personally, I’m fine with that. The less I know in detail, the less I may have to testify about at some point in the future. I’m happy to leave the firewalls right where they are.

It occurs to me, though, that the people who have the best eyes and ears for what’s going on probably aren’t the ones manning the computer terminals. They’re the ones emptying our garbage. Every day they make their rounds through the building. Into and out of every office on every floor and able to hear whatever conversations are taking place and what everyone has on their monitor. 250-odd days a year. I wonder if they pay attention or if it all become background noise at some point. Since there’s no solitaire, I wonder how many times a day they see Facebook and USAjobs. The voyeuristic part of me would love to walk the rounds just once out of sheer curiosity at seeing how the rest of the cubicle dwellers spend their time.

The way I’ve got it figured, the janitorial staff holds the keys to the kingdom somewhere in their trash cart. Just think on that the next time they wander by to gather up your recycling or run the vacuum.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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It’s Thursday night… and that means it’s time again for your regular installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. In no particular order, here we go…

1. Ron Paul. As much as he’d like to roll back the clock, it’s not 1789. The Constitution and the laws have to be expansive enough to deal with the real world, not the loony tunes world you’ve created in your own head. It’s not ideal, but I’d rather have TSA running security at the check in line than turn that mission over to Blackwater. Guaranteeing free and secure movement around the country is a compelling national interest and belongs in the purview of the federal government, you cranky old coot.

2. Rain. Enough already. Between pansy hurricanes and tropical storm remnants, it’s been raining more or less for two weeks with occasional pauses to regroup, reinforce, and start raining again. It’s really time to knock it off for a while. Since the dogs still won’t go out unless I go with them, this is becoming a priority as getting soaked to the bone two or three times a night is no longer a sustainable solution.

3. People who over-share personal information. I don’t need a running narrative about whatever you happen to be doing over there. I don’t care that you think oysters are disgusting. And I absolutely, positively don’t need or want to know the fascinating medical history of your family and the trials and tribulations of elder care. We happen to share office space, I promise you that doesn’t mean we need to share our deepest, darkest secrets… mkay? Thanks now.

4. Apple. Yeah, I said it. Apple. Release the damned iPhone 5 already. I’ve got money and I want to give it to you.