Monthly Archives: February 2012

Left turn, Clyde…

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To help give a little insight into how I spent most of the day yesterday, I wanted to provide a public service announcement to all the drivers out there. In most vehicles these days there’s a toggle switch on the steering column that controls the left and right turn signals that alert drivers around you to your intended course of action. For instance, when you’re in the turn lane with you blinker flashing, the rest of us assume that you are actually going to go ahead and turn in the direction indicated by your flashing signal. Well over 99% of the time, that’s exactly what happens. It happens with such regularity that it’s one of those things that the driving public just assumes to be true. They assume it to be true right up until the moment when it’s not true and they find themselves pummeled by a face full of airbag. You see, fellow drivers, when you signal one intention and then do something else, bad things tend to happen to everyone involved.

In case anyone is wondering, I’m fine. The dogs are fine. The Tundra, however, is distinctly not fine. We’ll find out just how not fine it is next week when the insurance adjuster and body shop get a look at it. In the meantime, I’ll go ahead and write that check for the deductible so we can get on with getting Big Red back on the road. Nothing like doing $20,000 of damage to two vehicles because the asshat in the turning lane is perplexed by the concept of a turn signal. Meh. It’s safe for everyone to assume I’ve gone from the thankful not to be hurt stage to the throughly annoyed because my truck is torn up stage of the process.

Despite being throughly annoyed, I do have a few shout outs. Special thanks to the Maryland State Police for a professional and rapid response. Of course it helps that we were less than 500 yards from their parking lot. To my dad, thanks for the loaner car. I’ll do my best not to get fooled by anyone else’s signal while I’m driving your ride. Mom, thanks for not freaking out too badly when I called to give you a heads up. She doesn’t think this is a blog/Facebook-appropriate topic, so don’t give her too much crap about me posting about it ok? Thanks. And finally props to my evil stepmother – thanks for driving over and hauling me and the dogs halfway across the state yesterday.

So that’s the short version of my Saturday. It’s safe to say this is not the relaxing and restful three day weekend I was anticipating.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Waiting. Some people, God bless them, are able to sit all day waiting on something to happen. Me? Not so much. Blame it on computerization, the Internet, youth or whatever else you blame such things on, but the bottom line is I’m not a patient person. When something is supposed to happen, I want it to happen right the hell now. Maybe that’s something I should work on, buti don’t think I have the patience for that.

2. Alarm clocks. On any given weekday morning, the alarm built into my phone goes off twice. I don’t remember the last time that work me up. About ten minutes later, my normal alarm clock sounds. That one might wake me half the time. The third and last line of defense is the rediculously loud alarm I picked up from Amazon. That one is still getting me up, but it’s taking longer and longer to get my attention. Another month or two and I’ll probably be immune to that end too. What I’d really like is an alarm that wakes me consistently without needing to set three or four different clocks. Sure, it seems like overkill, but it’s barely getting the job done. Surely there’s a better way.

3. Parking garages. This is America. We drive big vehicles here. Many of us have full sized cars, trucks, and SUV’s that are not only tall, but also wide. While I completely respect your efforts to cram as many parking spaces as possible into that fancy seven story garage you built, what I’m going to need you to do is widen up those spaces a bit so I don’t have to use two of them, every time I come visit or leave a big chunk of my vehicle hanging precipitously far into the travel lane. This is really something that I shouldn’t need to mention in the country that decided the Hummer would be a good ride for in and around town.

4. Bad coffee. If you’re going to charge almost $3 for a 20 ounce cup of regular, no frills drip coffee, there’s no reason you can’t make it from legitimately good grounds. Whatever you lose in the margin will be more than made up for by people who don’t go seek out your competition for the next cup.

Not quite…

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There’s a difference between feeling sick and feeling too sick to show up at the office. Sometimes that difference can be measured by the width of a razor blade. One thing that’s been pretty consistent in my career, though, has been my willingness to use sick days when I’ve needed them. Those tend to be days when getting out of bed or off the couch is just more effort than I can muster. Just below those days on my severity scale are days when I feel like a big steamy pile of poo, but show up in the office anyway. The problem with days like that is even before your computer boots up you know the day isn’t going to be productive. You’re going to end up pissing away most of your time alternately halfway reading articles online, coughing up a lung, and staring longingly at the clock wishing it were already time to go home. The only thing that’s really different between these type of “sick” days is the geographic location where you waste the day.

The only possible upside of being sick and in the office all at the same time is that your colleagues are likely to beat a hasty retreat when they catch a good look at the vast array of cold medicine, tissues, and homeopathic remedies piled up on your desk. If nothing else, it might buy you a little time away from them without needing to dip into your sick time stockpile. Then again, the ones who are oblivious to everything else are just as oblivious to your dripping nose and itching eyes. Personally I always try to make it a point to cough and sneeze in their general direction. At best, they’ll end up getting whatever you’re down with and at worst, I feel like I’m exacting at least some minor retribution for their failure to pay attention.

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.

Down the shore…

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We’re getting into the time of the year when where I really want to be is sitting under a palm tree sucking down rum drinks from little coconut shaped cups. With a house in Tennessee that’s not quite paying for itself and finally getting the costs of a cross country move into the just about paid off range, I’m grudgingly coming to accept that flying somewhere warm and tropical probably isn’t in the cards this year. And that makes me die just a little bit on the inside. I think I’m just having a hard time justifying that kind of vacation while paying someone else for the privilege of living in their house. Maybe my attitude on that will change if I still have a house in Memphis two or three years from now and on indefinitely into the future. I suppose that’s a first world problem and all, but still, I’ll miss my regularly scheduled rum punch marathon.

Since last year’s major vacation involved packing, moving, and unpacking an inordinate number of boxes I’m still determined to manage at least some time sitting on a beach somewhere. Maybe I’ll just pack it up for a long weekend and head to Atlantic City. If I’ve learned nothing else from MTV, it’s that New Jersey is full of tasty adult beverages and people in serious need of mocking. It might just be the best vacation ever.

Easy does it…

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After a few days away, I usually like to ease back into the office routine by spending some time checking email, responding to voice messages, and catching up on whatever paperwork happened to pile up while I was otherwise engaged. Today was not one of those smooth transitional days. Instead it was the kind of day where Stupid showed up not long after I turned on the lights and decided to stick around for the full day. Now I don’t mind putting in a day’s work, but it’s nice when the day doesn’t demand rowing against the tide from start to finish, because honestly, after a week of less than optimal sleep and carrying around what I’m sure is four or five liters of snot in my head I don’t think a nice easy day to get back into the groove would have been too much of a request. I was, apparently, wrong about that. Let’s just hope this isn’t the start of a trend for the week.

To whom much is given…

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Because of talent in some particular field, some people are set above all others. It happens in all walks of life: politics, sports, academics, and yes, especially in the entertainment industry. Maybe it’s crass to say this, but I have a hard time finding sympathy for those who achieve these heights and then actively try to undo their success through bad behavior, drug abuse, and general hard living. While I can be empathetic to family and friends who have lost someone, I can’t get on board with efforts to lionize that person by choosing to ignore the decisions that lead them inexorably towards untimely death. Ultimately, we all live and die by the decisions we make. I’m less sympathetic when a so-called celebrity falls to their own bad decisions than I am for the tweekers on any street in West Baltimore. They, at least, didn’t have much of a choice to begin with.

So yeah, while the news channels are screaming that this is a big deal, all I’ve managed to see is a someone who was given the world and decided to throw it all away. Maybe it is a situation worthy of our collective sympathy, but I’m just not feeling it.

Embargo…

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I make a point of being just as honest and open here as is realistically possible. There are, however, some topics that I don’t feel perfectly free to touch on in a public forum. As life-long writer it’s frustrating because getting thoughts down on “paper” is the way I tend to think through things. On the other hand, that instinct is balanced by there just being things that don’t need to be put in print for general consumption. The social contract here on the internet is that we all tend to expose far more of outselves to the public sphere that was common even ten years ago. It’s become so ingrained that most of us don’t even think about it as a matter of course. Be honest, how many of you have actually taken the time to figure out how to use the privacy settings on Facebook to really control how much different people or groups can see about you? I’m betting that there aren’t too many hands raised out there. I’m not making a judgement call on that by the way. When your name is your web address, you pretty much give up the right to criticize how anyone else manages their online privacy.

The last thing I’ll say is that you shouldn’t read too much into this little post. It’s mostly been a quick thought exercise while I try to get my head wrapped around a few things, so with that I now return you to your regularly scheduled weekend.

A matter of motivation…

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In 1885, President Grant was dying of throat cancer but somehow found the motivation to write his two volume memoirs. By way of contrast, in 2012 I’ve got a head cold and can’t seem to find the motivation to write more than a half dozen lines at a time. Maybe it’s a generational difference in work ethic or possibly I’d have a lot more to say if my body were trying to destroy me from the inside. Either way, I don’t have nothin’ to say about nothin’ tonight. Sometimes that’s for the best.

The bad touch…

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In the last 40 hours of work, slightly more than four of those hours have been dedicated to reeducating us on constitutes appropriate versus inappropriate comments, innuendo, and/or touching. That’s more than one tenth of the last work week focused on this stuff. In my years working for this Big Government Agency, I haven’t yet run across anyone who actually thinks sexual harassment is a good idea, so I’m forced to wonder if this latest round of training is maybe a little off the mark. I mean did anyone wake up this morning thinking that they were going to come to the office and start talking about the rack size of dime piece piece sitting next to them? Even if they’re thinking it, most people have a sufficient instinct for self preservation to know that they shouldn’t say it out loud… or at least within earshot.

Look, I’m not naïve enough to think that it doesn’t happen, but I don’t think the key to solving the problem lies in more training. The response to every leadership issue for the last decade has been “obviously that happened because we’re not doing enough training.” But seriously, how much training do we need to make the point that rape, pillage, and plunder are not acceptable workplace activities? The thing is, plenty of people get the training and just don’t care. Telling people that X, Y, and Z are bad doesn’t change the way they feel even if it manages to change the way they act when they think people are watching.

From my ant’s eye view of the bureaucracy, a spike in harassment complaints isn’t a failure of training. It’s a failure of management and dare I say leadership. When management doesn’t respond to a validated complaint with swift and furious action, it establishes a climate of permissiveness and that climate says far more about how the organization feels about “inappropriate” actions than a ream of policy memos and endless hours of training. If leadership were serious about it being an issue, heads would roll every time they find out something happened, but it’s obvious to even a working schmo like me that if they keep doing what they’re doing, they’ll keep getting what they got.

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.

Me and my big mouth…

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You know, not more than three days ago I was talking to someone about the rediculously long-lasting sickness that everyone seems to be passing around this winter. I distinctly remember the conversation because I mentioned it took me a full month before the scratchy throat finally went away. Sadly, my proclamation of health may have been a bit premature as I started hacking and wheezing all over again at approximately 7:00 this morning. I know the time because that corresponds almost exactly on the time I pull into the parking lot at the office. Not that I’m alleging that it’s a case of post hoc ergo proptor hoc. Work tends to make me sick to my stomach, not so much the ear, nose, and throat region, but I digress. Still, somehow I feel that a month of feeling less than optimal followed by less than a week of feeling “normal” and then going right back into the old hack-and-wheeze doesn’t sound particularly fair. Perhaps if I just redefine having a nagging cough and mild sinus drainage as the new “normal,” all will be well. Bugger me.