Monthly Archives: January 2013

Throwback Sundays…

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If there’s anything you can count on in this world, it’s that when Sunday morning rolls around, I’m going to welcome everyone into my way back machine and tell you stories about what it was like back in the olden days of blogging. In keeping with that tradition, I offer up a five selections from January 2007. I have to say that the January 14th post, Middle Class in Crisis, holds up remarkably well and, to me at least, is as on point now in 2012 as is was five years ago.

The world has changed… but clearly not that much.

Hello, George…

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We all know I like animals way more than I like most people. If money were no object, there’s a pretty good chance that I’d be living on 500 acres surrounded by a herd so varied as to make Noah himself blush with shame. As it is, I’ve decided to add a 3rd mouth to my brood.

photo (8) George is a Russian Tortoise and from what I’ve been able to gather from research, his shell size indicates he’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5 years old. Conveniently, he’s an herbivore who favors the same dark greens that I like in my own salads (translation: feeding means picking up an extra bag of spring mix and mustard greens when I go grocery shopping. He doesn’t do ant tricks, or really do much of anything other than hang out under his heat lamp and look like a tortoise. That’s about as low maintenance as you can get in an animal.

Before you decided to leave any smartassed comments, remember there’s every likelihood that George will outlive me, so one of you suckers might just end up with him camped out at your house one day. Talk about things you never worry about when picking out a puppy.

The view from my fighting position…

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I’ve been blogging here at jeffreytharp.com for almost three years now. For all my other ranting and raving, the single most searched for and commented on posts were consistently focused on the 2011 Army hiring freeze. Some version of “hiring freeze” has been in the top spot for searches that bring people to the blog. Now, I love web traffic as much as any blogger, but honestly, I hoped that was a topical area that I’d be able to leave dead and buried. The hiring freeze that trapped me two years ago is long gone, but it’s been replaced by a newer, broader, and seemingly more permanent version. That doesn’t bode well for the average person working the line in an organization that has always sung the praises of personal mobility as a means to progress to reaching bigger and better opportunities.

In a world where a one-half-of-one-percent raise is a political football, the future does not look like a particularly bright, shiny place. Throw in what looks like a cross between budgetary indecision and panic at the most senior levels of leadership, the knowledge that the worse of the cuts aren’t yet here, and that there’s now open talk of across-the-board furloughs and reductions in force for the first time in a generation, and well, you’ve got yourself a workforce that shows up every day wondering when the other shoe is going to hurtle out of the sky like a dying communications satellite.

Even if the budget situation is resolved without what feels like almost inevitable bloodletting, it’s already taken its toll. Not backfilling empty positions, piling more work on those who remain, holding salaries flat as the price of everything else increases, and repeatedly telling everyone that the worst is yet to come isn’t a recipe for getting the most out of a workforce. In this one case, my hat’s off to management for trying their best to moderate the worst of the outside forces that impact all of us… but when your fates all hang on the ability of politicians to get things done in a smart and timely manner, well, you can understand my not being particularly optimistic about what the future holds.

That’s my view from my fighting position, anyway. So let’s all cross out fingers and hope that someone proves me wrong.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The phrase “Assault Weapon.” The variants of the AR-15 and AK-47 that are commonly available on the civilian market are not “assault” rifles, regardless of what people call them. Real assault rifles (read the type of rifle generally used by the military), are capable of fully automatic fire, meaning that when the trigger is held down, the gun fires until the magazine is empty or the receiver jams. A semi-automatic in the AR- style (or any other style for that matter) requires a trigger squeeze for each round to fire. An alarming number of people seem to be under the misguided impression that just because a gun is based on a military design, it’s a military gun. I’d almost have more respect for the ban supporters if they’d come right out and say that they want to ban military-looking semi-auto rifles“ because even though they don’t know a carbine from a catamaran, those AR’s are just scary looking… As if the gun knows the difference between a walnut stock and a “scary” looking black carbon body. Oh, and one more thing. Please, for the love of God, please stop calling them “machine guns”. It’s embarrassing for everyone.

2. Anyone who has ever argued a variant of “the Second Amendment only covers muskets.” Assuming for a moment that the Constitution and Bill of Rights only apply to items in existence at the time of adoption in 1789, by extension we’d also have to argue that the First Amendment only protects speech in the form of newspapers and standing in the town square spouting off about whatever is on your mind – forget about the internet, television, radio, and telephone. And forget about a right to privacy, the Framers didn’t even bother mentioning that in the text at all. You either have to accept that the Constitution is a living document and means what the courts say it means, or that the Constitution means what it says in plain text applicable only to the world as it was in 1789. You can’t have it both ways based on whatever select bit or piece fits your particular world view.

3. Grounds. Taking a big gulp of coffee only to end up with a mouth full of grounds ranks right up there with root canal on my list of bad things. Since it’s happened on two separate days this week, it might be time to break down and reevaluate my dependence on my long serving Mr. Coffee brewing station. Clearly this is a situation that can’t be endured much longer.

One bad mother (shut your mouth)…

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I generally make a point to avoid using this as a venue to talk about work. For one thing, it’s just bad form to grouse too much about the people who sign your check. For another, work is hard enough without everyone looking around wondering what embarrassing story you’re going to tell next. Finally, work is usually the last thing I want to talk about when I’m not, you know, at work, so most of those stories never get written, let alone see the light of day.

This post isn’t going to break that mold in any meaningful way, but I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say that other the last week and a half has been a real mother. It’s been seriously busy. And I mean busier in the last ten days than any other tend day stretch in the last 17 months. It’s not that the work is any harder, just that there seems to be more of it… and between flu, random sickness, planned time off, meetings, uncertainty about the budget, impending sequestration, no raise for 3 years, and a host of other things, I think it’s safe to say the whole place is just in a mood.

I don’t know what the remedy is, but for the time being the best course of action is probably just keeping my head down and doing my best not to draw unnecessary fire. I’m not wishing my life away, but 4:00 Friday afternoon can’t get here fast enough.

Fruit fly…

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I pride myself on a whole host of things, but one of the most important has been being able to keep a precision focus on whatever task happened to be at hand despite multitasking to keep up with emails, text messages, and the six dozen other things that crop up to distract us in the course of the day. Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but being able to hold multiple irons in the fire is a point of personal pride. Or it has been until the last couple of days.

I don’t know where that part of my brain that usually handles multiple relatively complex tasks at once, but it’s well and truly out of service at the moment. Focusing in on just one thing at a time has been more of a challenge than I really want to admit. Thank God it’s winter. If the weather was better every bird or squirrel passing the window would be cause to send me off on a wild tangent. Just keeping my focus with the myriad of conversations going on around me has proved to be something close to a full time effort. Quite frankly, work is traumatic enough without also dealing with the attention span of the average fruit fly.

It’s one of those inconveniences that I’m sure will sort itself out in a few days or a week, but in the meantime, I’m driving myself bloody crazy over here. The number of Post It notes now decorating my desk at work and the kitchen table is bordering on ridiculous. Getting back to an even keel where I can remember to pick up dog food or make a phone call without a reminder would be most appreciated. Until then, if I’ve told you I’m going to do something, feel free to remind me often, because there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to forget about it completely before it actually gets done. I really hadn’t planned on hitting the “always forgetting stuff” part of my life until much later, so hopefully this is just a temporary sneak preview of the impending joys of much later middle age.

ID(on’t)…

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At any given time, I’m carrying around three or four separate pieces of plastic that confirm that I’m really me – The card that gets me inside the fence, the card that gets me inside the building, an ID from three jobs ago that for some reason is still stuck in the back of my card holder, and my venerable old school driver’s license. It seems to me that it should be possible to take the information on all of those cards, link it into one master database, and then figure out how to issue me one card to rule them all.

Better yet, just let me keep all my pertinent information on my phone. Lord knows I’m not going to leave the house without that. It just seems that there should be better technology available than a metal chip sandwiched between two layers of plastic. Maybe the answer is biometrics – a thumb print and a retina scan to prove we are who we say we are and that we’re where we’re supposed to be. It just seems that in the last 100 years we should have made more progress than simply transferring information from a laminated paper card to a laminated plastic one.

Oh, and managing to make it something I’m not chronically prone to leave laying on the kitchen table when I’m on my way out the door well before the break of dawn would be pretty damned helpful too. Feel free to just jam a chip in the back of my head and get it over with. Sure it’s intrusive and has all sorts of negative privacy implications, but it would prevent needing to drive all the way back home to pick up my ID and that’s really the only thing I’m looking for at this point.

10 years on…

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10-year-anniversaryAround this time a decade ago me and about 30 of my brand new friends were herded into an auditorium that would be our home for the next six months. We were handed about 371 pieces of paper needing our signatures, took our oath of office as government employees, and, as I recall, spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what the hell we had gotten ourselves into after accepting a rather vague sounding job from an obscure sounding Army office.

I’m not going to lie, this career hasn’t been what I expected. It hasn’t been all good, but it hasn’t been all bad either. All things considered, Uncle Sam carved out some amazing opportunities for a guy with a history degree whose only real ambition in the winter of 2003 was to get as far away from teaching as possible. Ultimately, work is work. I’ve had some good days and there have been some spectacular flops too. On balance, it feels like there has been more good than bad, though.

Ten years feels like a pretty impressive milestone for a guy who up until that point had never stayed with an employer for more than three years… of course the pessimist in me can resist pointing out that all a ten year anniversary means is that I’ve got twice that amount of time before I can even think about hanging it up. That sounds like an awfully long time until I remember just how fast the last ten years have seemed to go. I have a disturbing feeling that I’m going to wake up one morning a month from now and see the 20 or 30 year mark coming over the horizon.

Apparently time doesn’t just fly when you’re having fun. Time just flies.

Misfire one and two…

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Like most of the things I do when driven by good intentions, I should fes up to two misfires in the last 24 hours. The first, a blog post that went live on a Friday night around 8:30 based on the assumption that everyone would be paying attention to other things, proved to be my single most viewed post since March 2011. The next time I try sliding something past you people, I’ll show up at 3:30 on a Wednesday morning.

The second misfire came this morning, with my plan to drop in on the first big local gun show of the year. I’ve got a list of items I’m looking to pick up… some functional, some esoteric, and others, as the saying goes, just because I can (at least for the time being). That was my thinking anyway. Since my experience with gun shows has been almost exclusively in states that once rebelled against the Union, I was decidedly unprepared for the strict scrutiny, litany of nausea inducing rules, and sheer tonnage of regulations that the state of Maryland applies to it’s subjects who wish to exercise their rights enshrined in the Second Amendment.

The bottom line is that I opted out of the circus that I’m sure descended on the state fairgrounds this morning. For the time being there remain more efficient and still legal ways of doing business. I have no interest in becoming a felon, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to subject myself to the whims of the state legislature and of our most mighty and exalted lord governor unless I absolutely can’t avoid it.

1994…

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Because it’s a Friday night and that generally means that blog posts pass by with a minimum level of attention paid, I’m going to go ahead and let this one slip out despite my better judgment. Now before anyone comments, I want to say for the record that this photo was taken in, as close as I can figure, late Scanned Image - Version 2April 1994. I know this because that was one of only two time in my high school career that we sprung for charter busses to take the band from Point A to Point B. The other time was in November 1992, and I’m just making an assumption that I would have been wearing something heavier than a hot pink pullover windbreaker to take on the frozen astroturf of Lackawanna County Stadium.

To my best recollection, this photo is the only surviving image of my having attended a long ago Azalea Festival parade in Richmond, Virginia. See, when you’re a band geek, even you spring trips are geeky. Even so, those times, and those people are some of my best memories. Thanks, Mike, for this little jewel and the opportunity to stroll down memory lane.