Monthly Archives: September 2011

Delicate sensibilities…

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As alleged professionals, we all have basic responsibilities beyond those things described in our job descriptions. If your job description provides a laundry list of explicit tasks, our status as professionals imparts a second list of implied tasks that we need to carry out in order to accomplish our primary role. One of those implied tasks, at least in my mind, is reading and understanding the information put in front of us.

Part of my job, from time to time, is preparing electronic correspondence for senior leaders to inform them about upcoming meetings, key decisions made at high echelons, or to provide general information about the health of their organization. I generally write those messages as if our leaders aren’t mouth-breathing oxygen thieves. According to the self-anointed gatekeeper of such correspondence, my assumption is incorrect.

Apparently, selecting “forward” on the email task bar and referring them to the appropriate section of the message will lead to catastrophic confusion in the executive suite. These are important people and expecting them to use the little track wheel on their Blackberry to scroll down is too presumptuous. I’m told that our leaders can’t be troubled to read more than two or three sentences in an email, so it’s critical that all salient facts be presented in the viewable space when they first open a message. Thanks to my colleague, I now know that our leaders are too busy to read or contemplate any message involving the slightest hint of complexity.

Call me difficult, but when the topic has been perfectly well summarized by someone already, I don’t see any value to taking 30 minutes to reword it based on the argument that the big words might confuse our leaders or that having a message forwarded might offend their delicate sensibilities. Despite my occasional arguments to the contrary, I don’t really think our leaders are that dumb and I certainly don’t think they are that delicate.

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.

Registered…

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Since moving back to Maryland, I re-registered with the Republican Party. In Tennessee it was the Bible-thumping social conservatives that chased me out of the party. In Maryland, it’s the tax-it-till-it’s-dead liberals that chased me back in. For pretty much as long as I can remember, presidential politics has been an exercise in holding my nose and voting for the one who smelled least worst. Up until now, I’ve been avoiding the coverage as much as possible, but as the Republican candidates gather to debate tonight, I think it’s time to tune in and see if there’s anyone I can stomach supporting. This is America, the greatest democracy in history… Please let 2012 be the year we have something other than a socialist, a religious zealot, a village idiot, and protectionist to choose between.

Adding it up…

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Heavy rain + dogs = wet dogs + wood floor + shaking dry = skating rink + wet dogs banging into everything + dripping dry = entire house smelling like wet dog = not cool.

I always thought I’d like having wood floors, but I think I’ve been disabused of that notion. Carpet has its limitations, but in the end I can douse it with powder or Fabreze, run the Dyson over it and it’s good as new. Oddly, the wood floor only seems to encourage the wet dogs getting excited and sliding headlong into everything in the house. Letting the carpet suck up that wet dog funk and then covering it up seems much more practical, because let’s be honest, the chances of my mopping the entire house on a Tuesday night are slim to none. At least with carpet you can’t really see how bad things are. Ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

How you know it’s been a good meeting…

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Bureaucrats, as a group, are big fans of meetings. When we’re not sitting in them, we’re preparing for them, discussing how they went, or pondering what other topics are important enough to warrant having their own meetings. If you plan your day just so, you can step from meeting to meeting and never once have to risk accomplishing anything that might accidentally be considered a productive use of time. Pretty much the only guaranteed think to come out of a meeting is that there will be more work on your desk once it’s over than there was before it started.

If you step back and honestly asses your own experience, when was the last time you walked out of a meeting feeling good about how much you’d accomplished? Alternatively, how often do you walk out of a meeting feeling like you had just spent two hours of your life that you were never going to get back? Personally I can’t remember the last meeting I was in where the salient points couldn’t have been dropped into an email and circulated to those with a need to keep track of such things. More often, the whole thing could have been avoided if two people passing in the hallway could have had an “oh, by the way” moment and restricted the exchange only to the people who actually care about a specific topic or issue rather than subjecting the entire office to an afternoon of torment.

If you’re a proponent of meetings, do you know when you’ve just had a good one? I do. It’s when the senior person in the room stands up at the end and asks if anyone has a clue why we just sat through that and then walks off shaking his head.

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.

Thanks old dude…

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I spent most of Saturday morning outside laying siege to the trees, bushes, and random foliage that kept smacking me in the face while I was cutting the grass. Sure, I could just duck, but that’s nowhere near as fulfilling as chopping off branches and making nature look you want it to look. While I was standing hip deep in the ditch obliterating a tree that had no business growing there in the first place, I heard a car pull up behind me and a door open. It’s my experience that random people stopping by for anything usually doesn’t end well and I expected a pitch about why I should come to their church or at the very least who I needed to make a donation to some cause or another.

What I ended up with was an introduction to the old dude and his wife who live diagonally across the street from me – nice people who just wanted to stop and say thanks for making the outside of the place not look like crap. Not surprisingly, he brought up the previous tenants who apparently were every bit as worthless as I imagined them to be. Not like that’s a surprise, but it’s always nice to have confirmation. Other than keeping things mowed at a reasonable length and laying down plenty of weed killer, I haven’t actually done much. I should probably be grateful to the last guy for setting the bar so low.

The old dude would be less impressed if he saw the inside of the place with its god awful drywall patches, cut-ins done but walls not painted, doorknobs missing latches, and general lack of even the most basic maintenance. I’m fixing the things I can with the tools and supplies I have on hand, but lord knows I’m not sinking a dime of my own money into this place. I just need to nurse it through the next year or two and then it will be someone else’s problem. There’s very little I can do to remedy a cheapskate landlord or lazy property management, so the least I can do while I’m here is try to prevent this place from being that house that drags down everyone else’s property values by having that nice abandoned look about it. But seriously, thanks for noticing.

Most Powerful…

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There was a time when I thought being president would have to be the coolest job in the world. You live in a big, fancy house surrounded by armed guards to keep out the riffraff. You have your own jumbo jet and helicopter. You’re followed around by a guy whose only missing in life is to be ready to help you destroy the world at a moment’s notice. You’re President of the United States, dude. Come on, the only way you could be more impressive is to have a nice fancy uniform (I’m told the chicks dig that). As POTUS, it’s got to feel like you’re in the catbird’s seat and riding high with the last job you’re ever going to worry about having.

At some point, though, you’re going to realize being Commander-in-Chief doesn’t bring quite as much power and authority as you were promised as a kid. As president, you’d think it would be easy enough to hop on live TV and give the country a little pep talk. Except that your sworn enemies have already scheduled the night you really want. And your second choice date has been co-opted by the National Football League for the season’s opening game. Let’s face it, no matter how awesome your title, you don’t want to be the guy who makes the networks cut away from football, right?

So there you have it. You’re the most powerful man in the world and you just got played by the television schedule. That’s got to be a special kind of frustrating, I’d think.

What annoys Jeff this week?

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Since none of these things are big enough to stand alone, here’s an amalgamation of the things that are annoying me this week. Somehow it feels like this could become a weekly feature. Trust me, this is nowhere close to an exhaustive list.

1. How the hell is it September already? I feel like I just finished unpacking my boxes a few days ago and now expect to look outside and see three feet of snow on the ground at any moment. This does not qualify as having fun and therefore time has no business going so fast.

2. Enough with the hurricane talk. The wave that became Hurricane Katia was all of what, 200 yards off the African coast before the news channels picked it up as a major weather story? Hey, I’m all for preparedness but since I still have the canned goods and bottled water I bought for Irene, I think we can give Katia a pass until she gets within a thousand miles, ok?

3. Stubbing your toe first thing in the morning always sucks. It sucks more when the toe in question has an ingrown nail. At least I think it’s ingrown based on the completely unqualified research I’ve conducting using the world’s leading search engine. All I know it is hurts like a mother when anything touches it, which is pretty much all the time since my employer insists that we must wear shoes.

4. Moammar Gadhafi. Seriously. This douchebag needs to just be dead already.