Monthly Archives: December 2012

The abyss…

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With 24 days left for POTUS and the collective membership United States Congress to start acting like statesmen instead of maladjusted teenagers, it seems like as good a time as any to ponder what falling off the edge of the fiscal cliff might actually look like. Spending would continue to increase more or less unchecked. Taxes would increase across the board. The national credit rating would plummet. The defense budget would get gutted right along with a host of domestic programs that up until now were considered too important to do without. Those are some of the big ticket, first order effects. I’m not sure I even want to speculate about what the 3rd and 4th order effects would entail. I’m not confident that any economist in the country legitimately knows what the end result of fiscal cliff diving would be. Most seem to agree, though, that it would result in a situation that is less than good.

Thoughtful people can honestly disagree about good policy and the right course of action, but intuitively I can’t believe that higher taxes are the solution. Because I’m OCD about certain things, I have a spreadsheet that keeps track of my income, taxes, and other deductions going back a decade. Without getting into detail, trust me when I tell you that Caesar is getting his fair share from me. The Imperial Governor of Maryland is getting his pound of flesh too, even though he insists that I’m rich and should be happy to pay even more. St. Mary’s County, the City of Memphis, and Shelby County are all still getting a nice healthy check every year. Every time I turn around, it seems some taxing authority is digging their hand just a little deeper into my pocket… and if I don’t smile and thank them for it, I’m labeled a racist, a bad citizen, greedy, or heartless. Occasionally, I’ve been called all of them at once.

Like it or not, believe it or not, it’s going to be people like me (and most of you reading this), who end up paying the bill because our elected leaders want to play chicken with a trillion dollar economy. No matter what they tell you now, it’s our taxes – local, state, and federal –are going to go up. We’re the ones who are going to lose our jobs, some for the second and third time in a decade. We’re the ones who should be most outraged by the personal damage being inflicted on us and the inestimable damage being inflicted on the country… but hey, it’s Christmas time, and we wouldn’t want to let a calamity of historic proportions get in the way of our national shopping spree.

If we get to the 1st of the year and don’t see fewer dollars in our paychecks, if we don’t see massive cuts to important programs, if we don’t see an economy tipped back into the abyss, I’ll happily apologize and publicly eat my words right here in my own house. I’m just a guy sitting here paying attention and I hope beyond hope that I’m reading the tealeaves wrong… but I don’t think I am. And I think the worst is yet to come.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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It’s been a slow week for petty annoyances… and while that’s technically a good thing because it tends to mean my blood pressure isn’t all over the map, it also doesn’t make for a great weekly spot. Despite being a pretty good week overall, there are a few things that I can’t let pass without mentioning.

1. Support services. Theoretically, office trash is supposed to be picked up three times a week. That happens probably 50% of the time. 40% of the time, someone shows up for it twice a week. Last week was one of those 10% moments when no one came by at all. I tote and haul my own trash at home, so I don’t have any philosophical issues with carrying it to the dumpster here at the office – it’s more so a function of a) not knowing where the trash actually goes once it leaves my cubicle, b) not having any of the baby-sized trash bags to replace the one I need to throw out, and c) we’re paying someone good money on a contract that calls for them to, you know, take the bloody trash out three times a week. It’s a small thing, I know, but I have a creeping suspicion that it’s just the surface-level indication that government writ large doesn’t have a clue what kind of quality service it’s getting for our money.

2. Favors. As a rule I try not to ask for favors. That’s mostly because I don’t want to end up then owing someone a favor down the line. If someone asks, though, and it’s not too off-putting, I’m generally open to helping them out. All I really ask is that you be clear about your request. For instance, if you say something like “Hey, can you pick me up a Coke when you go get your lunch” don’t act surprised when what I bring back is a Coke. You see, the thing is, I can’t read your mind. I have no earthly way of knowing that by “Coke” you mean Diet Coke. Honestly, I just don’t pay that kind of attention to people’s daily beverage choices, so I make the blithe assumption that you’re asking for what you actually want. If I asked someone to pick me up a cup of coffee, I’m not sure I’d be offended if they brought back a cup of regular black coffee instead of a vinti-vanilla-latte-extra-hot-with-a-shot. I would have failed to specify what I really wanted… and I damned sure wouldn’t have stood there expecting the person doing me the favor to cover the cost of what I asked them to bring me because they weren’t able to read my bloody effing mind and know what I asked for wasn’t what I wanted. I would have just said “thanks” and gone on about my day. From here on out, the answer is always “no.” Thanks for playing.

As a side note, this is the 53rd regular installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. Hard as it is to believe, you’ve been listening to my weekly list of grips for a year now. I won’t say it’s actually been cathartic, but it sure is fun to take a little time once a week to call out stupid for what it is.

A look behind the curtain…

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As a fresh college graduate back in about 2001, I remember having a series of conversations with a few other newly minted professionals wondering why nothing we learned in college actually prepared us for working in a “real world” professional environment. As I recall, the group consensus was that some kind of handbook for new graduates would have been incredibly helpful in making from the transition from full time student to productive member of society. None of us took up the banner at the time. I think we lumped it into same category of conversations that ended up with us wanting to open a brew pub, build a working trebuchet, and buy a rental cottage on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Of our brilliant ideas, the only one that ever came close to seeing the light of day was building the treb – even though we never did manage to figure out how to attach the sling mechanism to the throwing arm, we managed to put together a respectable first effort at medieval siege weaponry.

Those first random conversations about the idea of a snarky little field guide for new grads has kept popping back into my head from time to time. After going to work for Uncle, there seemed to be a limitless supply of cautionary tales I wish someone would have told me before I showed up for my first day. I don’t know that it’s anything that would have changed my career trajectory, but it’s a stack of information that would have fit well into that “nice to know” category before needing to learn some of those life lessons the hard way. I have a few insights that might be useful for those coming up behind me and I like to think I give it enough misanthropic twist to keep the narrative interesting even if you’re not well on your way to a career as a office drone.

For the last few months, one of the projects I’ve been working on behind the curtain has been a first draft of what I suspect is becoming the handbook we first talked about more than a decade ago. I’ve said it here before, but it’s worth saying again: Serious writing is damned hard work, but it’s some of the most personally rewarding work I’ve ever done. That’s probably because it’s one of the few things I’ve ever written purely for my own purposes. Hard as it is to believe, spitting out well-crafted information papers and memos just doesn’t leave me with the same warm glow of self-satisfaction.

If I had to give it a SWAG, I’d say that at 13,000 words I’m probably halfway to having a very rough first draft. I’m shooting for a 25,000 word first draft with the vague hope of polishing that up to about 30,000 words in its final version. Maybe it’ll be ready by summer, maybe it won’t, but Summer 2013 is where I’m really hoping to land this thing as a well dressed ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I’m feeling pretty good about hitting my “half draft” mark yesterday, so if there’s any interest, maybe I’ll post up a sample chapter so you can see how I’ve been misspending a big chunk of my evenings and weekends.

Exile to Scum Village…

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Setting aside the profound constitutional trouble we’d get into for depriving fellow citizens of several rights without some kind of due process, I think out friends in Holland are on to something. With a few tweaks around the margins I could get on board with Amsterdam’s proposal to round up “nuisance neighbours” and exile them into one location where they wouldn’t trouble neighbors who actually give a damn and where they could be constantly monitored by the police and social services. Admit it, you know you’ve secretly dreamed about having their neighbors hauled off for generally being bad at life as an adult.

Sure, there’s a bit of a problematic history of rounding up undesirables and throwing them in camps far away from polite society, but with a few checks and balances, I’m confident we can figure out a way to keep the system from being too abusive. Add a few claymores, a little concertina wire, and I think we can make folks very comfortable in their new shipping container homes… and if they’re not comfortable, well, at least they’ll be out of earshot so we won’t have to listen to them complaining about it.

Deadbeat…

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Sometimes the best thing about being a blogger is that at those moments you have no idea what you’re going to write about, the universe drops a plum in your lap. I was just sitting down to dinner when one of my neighbors – the one who is more OCD about his lawn than I am and who I actually get along with – knocked on my back door. It seems our mutual neighbor has gotten himself into a bit of a scrape with the fine people of Douglas County, Kansas. And by “scrape,” I mean he got his ass locked up for allegedly robbing a couple of convenience stores… while allegedly using his finger as an imaginary gun. With many, many wonderful pictures of him in the stores, somehow I’m having a hard time imagining a Kansas judge or jury looking kindly on an out-of-towner allegedly doing anything other than just passing through.

The whole story is out there in the local media, but I’m not going to link to it as a modest nod towards neighborhood peace and tranquility. With that said, I hope they’re planning on giving him a nice long stay at one of the fine Kansas State correctional facilities. With those boyish good looks, I’m sure he’ll make an excellent wife for one one their lifers who’s looking for a fresh start with a new special someone.

A year of Sundays…

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If it’s Sunday, you’re obviously stopping by to read whatever goodness popped up from the archive this week. As usual, there are a couple of gems and a couple of throw aways. Sorry about that. No one brings their A-game every time. Still, I think the stories from mid-October 2006 are worth checking out.

Looking at posts I imported from MySpace before imploding that old account, it looks like the rest of the posts cover the period from October 2006 – October 2008. If my memory is to be trusted, I recall that being a pretty interesting couple fo years. I haven’t counted, but assuming 2-3 posts a week for most of that time, I’m guessing there are another 200 or 250 old posts just waiting to get drug kicking and screaming into the new decade… which means I’ve got about a year of Sunday posts covered without putting too much thought into it. Trust me, when you try jotting down something witty five or six times a week, you learn to appreciate one day a week when you can set it on autopilot. I, for one, am very glad to have 87 single spaced pages and 51,000 words just sitting on the shelf waiting for me to do the old copy-and-paste. Sunday is supposed to be a relative day of rest, right?