Monthly Archives: March 2016

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Selling online. There are a few pieces of lawn equipment and other odds and ends I don’t have use of anymore. For ease of listing and in hopes of not dealing with too many crackpots, I opted to post them on the local neighborhood website instead of Craigslist. In retrospect I would have been far better off just loading everything in the truck and hauling it over to the dump. I know I’ve spent at least $150 worth of time answering questions about a $25 item. Lesson learned. From here on out I’ll just throw stuff away. It’s not worth the aggravation for so little return on investment.

2. Walking and talking. If you’re on your phone and wander into the street without paying the least bit of attention I should be within my rights to hit you with the truck. I’m not talking about flattening anyone, but it feels like giving these dipshits a glancing blow with the side mirror should be accepted if not encouraged.

3. Connectivity. Having access to email and the Internet are pretty much my only real job enablers. I’m sure I could do at least some of the work without those tools, but everything would take days longer than it should. Some of it I can get done by phone but the “must have a signature” stuff not so much. If you’re a knowledge worker access to a function network isn’t a convenience or a perk, it’s a necessity. If you the employer can’t provide that then you’d best not look at me cross eyed when I start telling you there are things I can’t do. Like it or not, without connectivity there’s no path between Point A and Point B that doesn’t involve hand written letters and a book of stamps.

Dreams and wishes…

Posted on by

With all respect to Dr. Freud who argued that dreams are and exercise in wish fulfillment, I’m afraid I have to go out on a limb and beg to differ. I woke up in a cold sweat this morning near enough to 3AM in the aftermath of a dream in which I (for some unknown reason) was sitting on the back porch watching the back yard wash out all the way down to the bottom of the foundation. I can assure the good doctor that I in no way have any wish to do that kind of excavation work. Ever.

Maybe the most entertaining part is that Dream Jeff was completely uninterested by the every growing chasm that was appearing where his dream yard was supposed to be. I can only assume that the entire thing was just a bad reaction to too-late-in-the-evening meatloaf sandwiches and spending too much time obsessing about a dry basement.

I’d like to think the couple of hours I allocate to sleep are supposed to be a restful time. Fortunately last night is largely an exception to that rule. Even so, it’s yet another of the many reminders that sometimes inside my own head is a very strange place to pass the time.

​Pushing paper…

Posted on by

I’ll admit that pushing paper doesn’t have the same gritty-sounding edge as breaking bad, but that doesn’t make it any less of an exercise in futility. On this particular Monday, I had the good fortune to review and/or revise an After Action Report, a “fragmentary order”, an “operations order”, two separate requests for information, and several requests for echelons higher than me to pass information upwards through the chain of command. The only thing that really unifies all those efforts is that it’s helpful to be good with words and to know just where in the bowels of the organization something might need to go in order to have a prayer of being answered.

It’s an unfortunate skill that I seem to possess, at least in some limited quantity. If that’s the superpower I got, well, let’s just say I got the short end of whatever stick they were handing out that day. Oh, it pays the bills and keeps a roof over your head, sure enough. Still, it’s not exactly what anyone might call a passion project unless they’re into a deeply warped kind of S&M.

So we trudge on at this petty pace from day to day, fueled almost exclusively by over strong coffee and too little sleep. Until we grind down all the world’s forests to cover the globe with reams of paper carefully checked at the margins and printed in 12 point Arial. Even then, on that long coming day when the last report has been printed, the last order cut, and the last briefing printed… somehow there will still be paper left to push. Worse than a nightmare, this is real life.

A year later…

Posted on by

As most of the rest of the Western world is busy celebrating Easter, I’ve mostly spent this Sunday morning trying to wrap my head around the idea that one year ago almost to the hour I was sitting down and signing my name on 37,361 pieces of paper that allowed me to borrow a horrifying sum of cash and move into a far better house than I imagined possible. I won’t say that the year has been all sunshine and roses – it feels like there’s been some part of the place under construction for most of that time; not to mention an ever-lengthening list of projects yet to come.

Now with that being said, and despite the general pain in the ass of being a homeowner, this place ranks among the better decisions I’ve ever made. Good bones, good neighborhood – and neighbors I can’t even see for three seasons of the year – it’s a hard place not to like. The longer I’m here, the more I change to suit me versus suiting the last guy to live here, the more I like it.

I’m already struggling to imagine that a year ago I was standing in the middle of a totally empty house wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Getting a new project. I don’t mind taking on different work, but there are few things more professionally frustrating that being on the receiving end of a data dump of information about a project you haven’t in any way been part off. Generally I tend to prefer the quick hit projects that run for a couple of months, have their big finish, and then are put to sleep. It’s the never ending, ill defined efforts that are always a constant source of aggravation and annoyance. I suspect that’s mostly because of not having the background of how and why certain decisions were made. Basically all you end up with is an enormous steaming pile of email ​without history or context. The best you can hope for is that the guy running the project before you didn’t leave things an unmitigated cluster fuck and that you’ll be able to sift through the mass quantity of electronic paper to find the few gems that you really need to know.

2. If you say you value your people as your highest organizational asset, but then hold them two or three hours after the end of their normal duty day because you want to have a meeting and can’t be bothered to be in the office more than one day during the week, well, you can pretty much forget about ever recovering your credibility. Time is arguably the most rare commodity we have and when you think your people don’t have anything better to do with their (alleged) personal time than wait around to play the fawning audience, you’ve stopped being a leader and started being just some guy with a really good parking spot. I’ll respect the office because it’s the right thing to do, but respecting the office leaves me plenty of room to consider you a pretty crummy human being.

3. People. A dear friend of mine pitched the idea of going to DC to wander amongst the cherry blossoms this weekend. It sounds like a fine idea in practice. It’s a rare enough thing for both the blossoms and the weather and a weekend to cooperate all at the same time. The fact is, as good as it sounded, all I could really think about was the vast sea of humanity who would be there doing the same thing. I like the idea of festivals, concerts, and events in general… but the people. Sigh. Thats another matter entirely. I’ve heard that we all have some kind of neurosis and this one seems to be mine. I’ve never mastered the fine art of being around large groups of people and hiding my disgust at how many of them are oblivious to everything and everyone outside whatever personal bubble their occupying. I can do it when I have to or with sufficient preparation, but a whole day spent elbow to elbow with the masses sounds more than slightly hellish. The mental energy it would take not to completely lose my shit would leave my exhausted for the better part of the next week. I’m told I can be quite engaging with individuals or even a group of people I know reasonably well, but I’d be well and truly hopeless schlepping around a Tidal Basin full of perfect strangers.

A vestigial remnant, or Eight hours in the aggregate…

Posted on by

Like any good bureaucrat I have a system when it comes to accumulating and pushing along information. Every morning the first hour or so of my day is dedicated to sending out various data calls, requests for information, and making sundry other attempts to gather the information I’m going to need for the day. The rest of the day (aside from whatever unfortunate percentage is going to inevitably wasted in meetings), I then spend amalgamating the information I received into a semi-coherent narrative or providing information to others.

I sent out a lot of requests for information on Monday, knowing that a few of them were somewhat involved – and also knowing that I was going to be off Tuesday so I wasn’t in a real rush to get anything back. I assumed, and here you can see where the problem starts, that two days would be a sufficient amount of time to respond to a few straightforward questions. My assumption, as those prove to be so often, was wrong. That, of course, is why two days later my inbox is bereft of information I need in order to start closing the loop on a couple major pieces of work that currently reside on the corner of my desk.

I won’t say that today was a wasted day, but it could have been a hell of a lot more productive if people bothered to respond to email and voice messages in something approximating a timely manner. I’m sure we’re all very busy working on very important projects, but yeah, that only goes so far towards salving the painful realization that I could have left for the day by about lunch time and gotten just as much done… which all lead back to my long-festering belief that the 8-hour work day is a vestigial remnant of when we all worked in factories and production was measured by the piece. When production is measured in something less tangible – in ideas, correspondence, and concepts – it seems that the days should be “as long as they need to be” with some shorter and some longer but most likely approaching an average of 8 hours in the aggregate.

I suppose this is just one of the many reasons no one ever asks me to expound on my philosophy of organizational management.

Under construction (again)…

Posted on by

It’s springtime here at the homestead and that means the year’s big improvement projects are about to kick off. Fortunately this year’s points of main effort don’t involve the evisceration of the back yard as I’ve opted for two smaller and slightly less invasive projects this year.

Phase 1, getting underway at or around 8AM calls for removing and disposing of three relatively large white pines that are encroaching a bit too far towards the house and front yard. Bringing these guys down should improve some soggy yard issues on that corner of the house, but mostly getting rid of them was an esthetic decision. Opening up that side of the yard will dramatically improve the house’s “presence” as seen from the street. More importantly, perhaps, it will give the front two bedrooms an unobstructed view out to the stand of oaks currently hidden behind the pines. It’s nice to see that not every project on my list has to involve major feats of engineering.

In Phase 2, we move inside to brick over the basement window that has been the source of constant consternation and aggravation since I moved in. A little excavation, a little block cutting, half a dozen new cinder blocks, and a whole lot of exterior waterproofing and backfill should at least get me to the point where there isn’t a readymade pit for the water to build up in. In theory, removing the pooling water should go a long way towards remedying the problem. There are a lot of other ways we could have gone after it, but doing away with a below grade window that served absolutely no purpose felt like a no brainer. Once the basement is closed off and the window well filled in, whatever water falls should follow the new path of least resistance which is out towards the back yard instead of down towards the place where a window use to be. Not being a hydraulic engineer, that’s my operating theory anyway. Once we get the first good rain, we’ll see how well that theory pans out under real world conditions.

So that’s it. I’ll have contractors crawling all over the place tomorrow and then have two of the three big projects for the year finished. After almost a year in residence, it’s starting to feel like I’m putting my own stamp on the place.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Gas pump parking. I was pulling in to the gas pump at one of the 8,743 local convenience stores when an alleged person pulled in to the next pump over. The driver, his wife (or girlfriend, baby momma – who the hell knows), and a gaggle of kids pile out of the car; all in their pajamas and head into the grab-n-go. Figuring at least one of them was going to go put a $20 down to pay for gas, I didn’t think anything of it, until they came schlepping back out with their fists full of candy, big gulps, and chips, loaded back into their car and drove off. I missed the memo where parking at the pump to go grab a snack for you and your brood while people are lined up waiting for fuel on a busy Saturday morning is now a thing. If you’re really too lazy to walk the extra twenty feet from the actual parking spots at the side of the store, maybe you should just go ahead and stay home as to not tax your system unnecessarily. Fuckwit.

2. Bikers. The Thomas J. Hatem Bridge is a 4-lane span that carries 7,624 feet of east and westbound US Route 40 over the mighty Susquehanna River. Its lanes are 12 feet wide with a 1 foot shoulder. During peak traffic times, the bridge is a major bottle neck in traffic traveling to or from Cecil County and points east. On July 1st the powers that be in this great state of Maryland have decided that it’s a good idea to add bicycles to the mix by permitting them to use the bridge in the same lanes as motorized traffic. Now you can spout to me all day long about cyclist’s right to use public roads and that motorists have to be aware of their surroundings and give way, but the whole idea sounds ill advised to me. Putting a bicyclist on the same narrow span as tractor trailers and tens of thousands of rush hour passenger vehicles sounds more like a recipe for needing to hose some intrepid former bicyclist off the bridge than anything else. I’m sure lots of very nice people ride bicycles for fun and profit and I’ll feel vaguely sorry when one of them gets turned to goo on the bridge, but mostly what I’ll be is annoyed that their mangled corpse caused me to get home two hours later than usual.

3. Cecil County Government. The Cecil County Executive announced this week that the local animal shelter, currently operated under contract to a third party as a no-kill facility will be reincorporated as an arm of county government that will have a “no kill philosophy,” but not operate as a no-kill shelter. The translation here is that instead focusing efforts on working with local non-profits, other shelters, and concerned citizens, the shelter will hold animals for the minimum legal time and then begin euthanizing them when they “time out” if there is no extra capacity at the shelter. Here’s the thing, most shelters nationwide will tell you one story: there’s never extra space, but somehow many no kill facilities make it work. The government of Cecil County is in the midst of failing their citizens and their animals. Bringing back the “high kill” mentality to local animal control is the wrong answer. It’s fortuitous, at least, that this douchebaggery was announced during election season because it will certainly influence who has my support at the ballot box.

Good things…

Posted on by

If you stick around long enough occasionally good things happen to good people. Most of the time that’s not the case, but just occasionally the universe gets one right. It’s nice to see someone finally get compensated for the level of responsibility they’ve already had. It’s a damned rare thing and I’m happy to see it.

The flip side of such recognition, however, is that when these good people move up and out you inevitably end up with a pile of their old job on your desk because someone still has to do it when they’re gone. Anyone who’s been in the game any length of time at all has been on both sides of the “workload balancing” equation. So it goes.

My advice at times like this is to remember that the day is only eight hours long no matter who’s trying to cram 12 hours of work into it. Wash, rinse, and repeat as needed until the weekend arrives. A decade ago, this kind of thing would have made me nervous and jerky. Now I mostly just shrug and accept there are some things that will never rise to the top of the list of things to do – and even if that’s not technically ok, it’s just the way it is.

The lucky ones or, The difference between climate and weather…

Posted on by

I’m about to say something controversial, or at least controversial among some of my more right leaning friends. Here it is: the Global climate is changing.

It’s shocking I know, but there are a whole sea of scientists who tell me it’s happening and in cases of science, I’m generally inclined to go along with the majority rather than hang in with the outliers. For purposes of this post, I’m just going to stipulate that climate change is a real thing. In fact that’s all I’m going to stipulate to, because I don’t know (and it really doesn’t matter) whether that change is being caused by humans or whether it’s the result of natural phenomena. The cause, at this moment, isn’t actually the important thing.

If we accept that the earth’s climate is changing and that this change will result in a number of negative consequences, the only question that really matters is what are we going to do about it? We can do nothing, let the temperature creep up, let the oceans rise, and get use to the idea that the breadbasket of the world will end up in central Canada instead of the American Midwest. We can adjust to record rainfalls and droughts, to stronger and more frequent hurricanes, and to the coming unprecedented migrations out of areas that will no longer be suitable for human habitation. Those things are coming regardless of whether we cause the earth to warm or if it’s just part of a natural cycle. It’s going to happen.

Why am I saying this? Well, you see I’m one of the lucky ones. Most people my age have had a few kids and might be interested in leaving the world a better place for their offspring. I’m not tied down with that kind of long range baggage. What I’ve got on my side is the fact that global changes come on fairly slowly and that I’ve already exceeded half of my average life expectancy. Playing the numbers, I’ll most likely be able to ride out the last of the good times and then promptly drop dead before things really go to hell in a handbag, so even if we collectively decide to do nothing, it’s mostly wine and roses for this old boy. You bunch out there with kids or grandkids, on the other hand, wow. The world is going to be a different place for them.

The world is getting warmer and that means life is going to get harder, more violent, and generally less pleasant. We can piss and moan about what caused which, or we can throw in and come up with some solutions to get after the worst of the consequences. The only thing that the pop science I have access to seems certain about is that we can change now or change later, but either way a change is going to come. I’d say it’s better now while we have a chance to think it through instead of just reacting to external stimuli. Then again, what do I know, I’m just a guy sitting here who’s smart enough to know there’s a whole world of things he doesn’t know. As a rule, though, when big groups of smarter people than me say there’s a problem I tend to listen to them rather than dismiss them as hokum and witchcraft.

Now I’ll just sit here quietly while someone from the RNC comes to collect my Republican Party ID card and decoder ring because I think it’s ok to know the difference between climate and weather.