Monthly Archives: August 2012

Limited (dis)agreement…

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So let me get this straight. You want me to sign a “limited telework agreement” that basically says management can tell me to work from home any time it’s convenient for them (i.e. whenever the office is closed due to some outside condition like snow, hurricane, or wildfire). In return, they may possibly consider allowing me to work from home a few days a year on days when I would usually take some kind of leave (i.e. dthe cable guy coming to fix the TV). I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump at the opportunity to sign on for something that’s a whole lot of upside for management, but that gives me pretty much nothing in return.

Oh, and just in case you were considering signing up for the program, you’re signed agreement will give your employer the right to come into your home to inspect for “safety”. Sure that will probably never happen, but even knowing it’s possible is more than a little creepy; a creep factor that I’d be willing to deal with if it were for a regularly scheduled day where I’d get to read memos and build PowerPoint decks while wearing my fuzzy slippers and sitting at my kitchen table. It’s not a creep factor I’m willing to get onboard with just to have the privilege of working the next time we get snow deep enough to make the roads too hazardous to get to the office. Honestly, if it’s so bad that I consider coming to work a hazard to life or limb, I’ll go ahead and exercise the unscheduled leave option if the powers that be are too hardheaded to close up shop for the day.

For me, it’s a simple fact of living in the 21st century: Telework is either a good program or it’s not. It’s something worth doing right or it’s not. For an organization that does business in 100+ countries to say that individual productivity depends on sitting in a cube so people have physical access to them is farcical… or it would be farcical if they weren’t so serious when they said it. I’ve been at it long enough to know that you don’t gain a damned thing from swimming against the tide. I’m not going to wage war for the sanctity of telework and I’m certainly not going to fall on my sword for it, but the chance of my signing a “limited” agreement are somewhere between slim and none.

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.

Banker’s hours…

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I thought that one of the perks of not being a supervisor would be qualifying for some kind of alternative work schedule… you know, the deal where you work nine hour days and get every other Friday off kind of thing. Years ago at the start of my career I worked at a site that ran ten hour days Monday through Thursday. Every week was a three day weekend. I have to admit that there’s something to be said for that schedule. Yesterday, though, I took a pass on the chance to get on board with the every other Friday off schedule. I always figured I’d jump on the opportunity for “free” days off, but I didn’t and here’s my rational:

1. I’ve become a morning person by default. I’m more productive between the hours of 8-11 AM than I am the rest of the day. My least productive time of the day tends to be between 2-4 PM. Tacking on another hour after that doesn’t seem to be a value proposition for anyone. Now if they’d let me start the day around 6AM, we might be on to something, but that doesn’t seem likely.

2. If I leave on time, even in the depths of winter, I get 30-45 minutes of daylight in the evenings. It doesn’t sound like much, but for my money there’s little worse than driving to work in the dark and arriving home in the dark. In December, those few minutes of light every day are worth more to me than extra days off (seriously).

3. The only “alternative” I’m really interested in is telework. I had a good run with telework back in the day and found working from the kitchen table, five feet from the coffee pot to be probably my most productive day of each week. That probably has something to do with being out of sight and out of mind. It’s a great way to sit down once a week and focus on something without that cacophonous roar of people yelling over the top of cubicles at each other.

4. Being a single father, there’s only so many hours I can stay away before something bad happens… like the kids staging a jail break, eating the couch, and turning the floor into an open sewer. Since they’re pretty well trained at keeping themselves entertained for 10 hours, trying to change up a system that works seems like a bad idea. That’s just a layer of additional stress that I don’t need to inject into the environment.

So yeah, I’m going to take a pass on the alternative work schedule for the time being and just be happy keeping banker’s hours.

Curiosity…

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They say in America you can grow up to be anything. We all know that’s not exactly true, but believing that is something that is as much a part of our national narrative as apple pie. I, for instance, could never have grown up to be an engineer. My math skills just aren’t that strong and my level of interest in slogging through massive equations hovers just slightly above 0.00%. I just don’t have any business operating in a world that demands tolerances with hundredths and thousandths of an centimeter. It’s important to know your personal limitations.

Of course there’s a price to pay for basically ignoring math and science education. While I’ve been keeping myself busy with endless PowerPoint and unlimited supply of memoranda, the guys at the Jet Propulsion Lab were guzzling Red Bull, piling up over time and night differential, and landing a Volkswagen on Mars. You’ve got to admit, that’s a pretty damned cool resume line. It’s fair to say that a history degree and an MBA aren’t likely to get me assigned to one of those projects. Maybe if I’d have just paid a little more attention in Cosmic Concepts back in 1996 things would have been different…

Royal Warrant…

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For the last couple of centuries companies that provide goods and services to the royal households of Europe were permitted to advertise themselves as Royal Warrant holders. Basically that means they get to slap a royal coat of arms on their letterhead and let everyone and their brother know that they are the official purveyor of some product to the sovereign. That probably ment more three centuries ago than it does today. As usual, though, that’s not really the point.

When I moved in here at Rental Casa de Jeff I inherited a US flag that had been flying from a bracket on the deck for God knows how long. It was faded, but serviceable and survived a hurricane and whatever other weather northeastern Maryland threw at it. After the most recent round of storms, though, the frayed ends graduated to full fledged tears and it was time to retire the old girl. This finally brings us to the point of the day’s post.

The Flag Shop in North East, Maryland occupies probably 100 square feet in the corner of a building at the southern end of Main Street. As far as I can tell they’re open mostly at random times and the only employee is the old guy who owns the place. After trying to sell me on the virtue of the 15-star, 15-stripe “War of 1812” flag, I picked up a more conventional 50-star variety. Let’s just say that the prices aren’t exactly competitive with Amazon. Still, there’s just something about the place that I like. It might have been that he reminded me that the VFW down the street would take my old, worn flag for proper disposal or that he knocked a buck off the price because I paid cash. I’m going to go ahead and proclaim The Flag Shop my official purveyor of flag and flag-related accessories, if for no other reason than I like having the option of walking into a place that’s not Walmart and buying a flag that wasn’t made in China.

Emissions Inspection…

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One of the things that apparently changed here in the great state of Maryland while I was gone is a requirement for a regular vehicle emissions test. Since I’ve never seen a smoggy day here in Cecil County, I’ll assume that little gem and its $14 fee is one of the governor’s non-tax taxes. I’m not even going to go into the general ridiculousness of needing to get an emissions test on a vehicle that passed the invasive state vehicle inspection less than a year ago and that’s only 2 years old with less than 40,000 miles on it to begin with. I’d honestly feel better about it if the MVA would just send me a letter saying send us $14 or we’re going to suspend your license. Admitting that the state wants money for nothing would at least be honest, but that’s probably too much to expect when it’s so easy to just give the illusion of doing something productive. According to the print out, I’m good now through August of 2014, or until they decide they need to look at some other pointless thing and bill me $20 for the privilege.

What Annoys Jeff this Week: Household Addition

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1. Wood floors. I use to think wood floors were the bee’s knees. If I did’t have dogs, I probably still would. No matter how many times, I sweep, vacuum, and mop there’s always enough hair coming up to build my own pug. God help me, when the sun slants through the windows just right it looks like the floor has never even seen a broom. Until I lived with wood floors, I had no idea how much filth wall-to-wall carpet hid. Ignorance is bliss. I miss that.

2. Window air conditioners. Window air conditioners are loud, dirty, and don’t work particularly well. I have two of them, which means I have two rooms that are sort of cool-ish and the rest of the house which is basically uninhabitable most of the time. Don’t get me started on the bigs, dist, and occasional black mold the damned things seem to breed. Central air is officially a must have in my next place. Failing that, I’m moving to Northern Maine where the subject of air conditioning is purely academic.

3. Green algae. Two sides of the fabulous Rental Casa de Jeff never get direct sunlight and as a result the siding on those sides seems to have sprung fourth with a remarkably aggressive colony of green algae. It looks God awful, but since you can’t see it from the road, it’s mostly my own private shame. It feels like something I should attack with gallons of bleach and a pressure washer. At present, though, it’s not quite annoying enough to make dragging a pressure washer up a ladder seem like a good idea.

In style…

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As I reach back into the dark corners of my mind, I vaguely remember something from one of my “How to Be a Teacher in Two Semesters or Less” classes about there being different learning styles and preferences. Some people are audio learners, some visual, others are hands on, and some do best in groups while others are better working alone. Personally, I did reasonably well following the standard college learning model – let’s call it 15 hours of weekly lecture followed by independent study and reading time. In my worst semester, on my worst day, I never had more than four hours of lectures scheduled on any 24 hour period. Even those four hour days were punctuated with breaks, lunch, and assorted other gaps. I would have gouged out my eyes with a #2 pencil if I had needed to sit through 4 hours of uninterrupted talking.

Of all the dry, dull, and occasionally pointless classes you take as part of a major in the humanities, I never recall sitting in any classroom for eight hours at a stretch going blind on hundreds of PowerPoint slides. The reason for that is most likely because it’s a really shitty methodology for almost everyone involved, up to and including the instructor(s). No matter how engaging the material, there’s a very real limit to how much the average human brain is going to absorb in any one sitting. Everything else is runoff, or more diplomatically it’s simply “exposure” rather than actual learning. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with exposure, of course, as long as you admit that’s what you’re doing up front and don’t expect to much return on investment in the end.