Monthly Archives: September 2019

It’s not the Illuminati (probably)…

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You’d have to be living deep in the wilderness not to at least catch some of the reporting on the ongoing drama in Washington. I tune it in and out, mostly interested in keeping informed of the broad strokes of who’s up and who’s down. Even if you’re not paying attention, the coverage is hard to miss – no matter how hard you’re best to stay out of the day-to-day details.

Given the nature of of our representative republican form of government, the simple fact is the biggest chance I have to influence national-level policy direction and political questions happens every two years. Getting myself twisted around each news story doesn’t accomplish much other than raising my blood pressure. I have no interest in spending my days picking fights on social media or plotting to storm the damned barricades. We’re watching a political process unfold between the two political branches of our national government. Standing around waving a sign is about as influential as standing on the front porch waiving my fist. I’ll take a pass, thanks.

The one thing I know for sure is that the ongoing battle between the executive and legislative branch is sucking just about all the available oxygen out of the room. It makes the more cynical and jaded part of my brain wonder what’s not being reported. It makes the paranoid part wonder what slight of hand is being carried out while we’re all collectively busy following the drama that surrounds talk of impeachment.

I don’t think this is some grand Illuminati plot or anything, but stealing the lawn tractor out of the backyard shed is a hell of a lot easier when everyone is busy trying to figure out why there’s smoke coming out of the house. It would be a good time for all of us to remain vigilant.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Three things at once. At several points during the day I found myself trying to do three things at once – something on the right screen, something, on the left screen, and something on a paper copy between the two. Technically it might have even been four things if you count attempting to vaguely pay attention to the conversations swirling around the room or to the occasional person asking me a direct question. I won’t testify to the quality of any of the things I did, but I’m quite certain none of them were getting the kind of attention they probably should have received. My powers of multi-tasking are just fine as long as no one is expecting any level of attention to detail.

2. Roadwork at rush hour. Seriously, there’s nothing you can do to that goddamned overhead sign at 4pm on a Thursday that couldn’t have been done at a time when people were less apt to need to use the road. One might be forgiven for speculating that the State Highway Administration didn’t put a lick of academic rigor into their planning process. 

3a. Information. Ok, look. My general hatred of the 21st century is public knowledge, but it does have a single redeeming quality – the availaity it original source information which one could use form imreasonably informed opinions. So please, before you fake news this or impeach that can you please take a few minutes and read the source documents. They might just be more informative that the interpretation you’re getting processed through your favored news outlet.

3b. Impeachment. It’s not a synonym for removal from office no matter how many news sites use it that way. Read the Constitution. It’s the damned owners manual. When it comes down to a fist fight between the political branches of the government, knowing what the words mean would serve us all well.

On morale, org days, and one size not fitting all…

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As you may well know by now, I’m not well known as a joiner of activities. I don’t seek out social events or organizations. I don’t join clubs or rush out to sign up for team events. A million years ago as a student, group projects were an absolute agony… and I like them even less now as an adult. To say I do my best to avoid those situations is an understatement at the least. Anything that reeks with the stench of “group project” is to be avoided at nearly any cost.

The officially sanctioned Large Bureaucratic Organization “org day” is exactly the kind of thing I was built to avoid. The endless rounds of small talk with virtual strangers, the repeated need to refuse requests to sign up for various “team building activities,” and spending hours standing around looking vaguely uncomfortable are rarely the hallmarks of a good time. They’re not, in short, the kind of things I would enjoy doing under any circumstances, let alone when it’s laid on under the auspices of a benevolent employer.

Maybe it’s the kind of thing that’s good for someone’s morale, but I’m not that someone. The sort of things that improve my feeling of well being aren’t generally the ones that lend themselves to being a team event. Give me a comfy chair, a good book, a decent beverage, and a furry critter whose ears need scratching and my morale goes up dramatically. Recruiting me to join in a tug-o-war, not so much.

In this case, the best possible outcome I can hope for is managing to spend a couple of hours showing the flag and being seen by the right people before quietly disappearing to do something that will legitimately make me feel better about the world. I know there is no way to account for every individual preference when dealing in large numbers, but it would be nice, occasionally, if someone recognized that one size does not fit all.

A day of general fuckery…

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Some days fly by not so much because you’re busy and gainfully engaged in doing important and productive work, but because you’ve got an endless rain of ridiculous questions, halfassed ideas, and general fuckery waiting on you around every turn.

I’d dearly like to say that such days are a rarity, but a cardinal rule of this blog is that we don’t lie, exagerate, or make misleading claims. Maybe days like this aren’t arriving often enough to be the rule, but they aren’t rare enough to be the exception, either. It’s more like a certain level of fuckery has been normalized. It’s just what you come to expect on any given day.

After all these years, you’d think that I’d have dialed in my level of expectation accordingly, but every now and then it really does jump up and catch me by surprise. No matter how jaded or cynical I manage to be, a day always comes along that leaves my eyes wide and head shaking in wonder at the business of “business as usual.”

Sigh. Sometimes the only good thing you can say about a day is “it’s over.”

Four months later…

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Jorah will be rolling over the 11 month mark this week (with his official birthday designated as October 26th). It feels like a good time to assess where we are now that he’s had four months of learning how to fit into the household.

I’d like to say that the whole process has been seamless, but anyone who follows along with the day to day saga on Facebook would immediately know that’s a bald faced lie. Since Jorah was about six months old when he picked us out, he’d had plenty of time to learn a lot of bad habits at the shelter. It also meant I missed out on the early training window when most dogs learn how to act in civilized society. I’d never say that an older dog can’t learn new tricks, but getting those new ways of doing things through their fuzzy little heads is just going to take longer and require a lot more effort. Jorah’s a smart little dog, but he’s no exception to this. Teaching him any new behavior has felt like it’s taking far, far longer than it should. My overall experience has been that young pups are far more receptive to basic training. Winston and Maggie had their share of training issues, but didn’t go through months where I was legitimately concerned that they were never going to “get it.”

So four months on, where are we? Jorah is a dog who happily goes to his crate – as long as there’s a treat involved. He’s gone weeks now without randomly peeing on the kitchen floor or sneaking off to the laundry room to go. He’s started to have some self-awareness and there are fairly noticeable signs that he’s ready to go outside – noticeable at least when you’re paying a degree of attention. He still doesn’t love road trips, but he’s learning to tolerate them – even willingly walking out to the garage instead of having to be carried the whole way. He’s caught on (mostly) to what should and shouldn’t be chewed to oblivion.

Since his overall bladder control has shown marked improvement, he’s now even getting to spend time in the living room. Mostly it’s limited to an hour or two in the evenings and he’s still a long, long way from being a trusted agent able to enjoy the space unaccompanied, but it’s progress. After spending ten weeks confined to my own kitchen any progress on this front is cause fo great joy and celebration. You don’t realize how much you miss regular access to the big television and comfy seating until you don’t have it.

Progress has been slow, but hasn’t been equal across all fronts. Jorah is still peeing in his crate at night once or twice a week. We’ve mostly ruled out medical causes, which leaves me casting around to sort it out as another problematic behavior issue. For now, it’s restricting water in the evenings and pushing back my own bed time to try giving him less time overnight to have a problem. It’s not ideal, but the alternative of scheduling a 2AM bathroom break is even less appealing.

Realistically, I know he’s come a long way from the scared-of-his-own-shadow little dog that came home with me over Memorial Day weekend. I don’t know if I can realistically say that the worst is over just yet, but at this pace, Jorah might just be a tolerably well integrated member of the family by the time Christmas rolls around.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Counting. Look, I’m about as math challenged as any adult human being can be. I avoid dealing with numbers whenever possible, but there are some moments when it just can’t be avoided. Taking a quick look around and finding out how many people should be in a room, how many are in that room, and then figuring out where the balance of the people actually are shouldn’t not create the most difficult task known to man. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes. And it definitely shouldn’t take six hours to arrive at an “inconclusive” answer. Being able to find your people in the event bad shit happens is kind of a hallmark of supervision – or it least it was back a million years ago when I had that particular rose pinned on me. Being forced to admit in public that you can’t count up your people should be a source of great shame to you and your family.

2. Layers. You know what would make an already pretty top heavy organization even more frustrating to deal with? Yeah, adding another layer of management on top of the five already in place between the working level and decision makers. For all of the vaunted effort put in to “right sizing” and “workforce shaping” it’s like no one can get past doing it the same way we’ve been doing it since George Washington was a private… because additional layers of management are exactly the cure for anything that ails a big, bureaucratic organization.

3. Patience. Some greybeard long ago said that patience is a virtue. I can only assume that this individual didn’t actually have anything he was looking forward to. So polite society says we’re supposed to be demure and pretend that the waiting around doesn’t bother us. It’s not something we’re supposed to admit, but in my humble estimation, the very notion that we should be happily patient reeks of utter bullshit.

Three thousand…

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Managing the public archive has gotten significantly easier since I went through a mad tear of consolidating several different blog platforms into this one WordPress account. I can tell from the handy dashboard that shows me everything from daily views to most searched phrases and what keywords are likely to be bringing people here that the number of posts here has now swelled to 3,000.

It’s a nice round number. It’s the kind of milestone or way-marker I enjoy hitting. It shows me that regardless of that somewhat ephemeral nature of the internet, there’s a transaction record of sorts showing that I have, in fact, done a thing – even if that thing isn’t exactly the great American novel.

Sometimes I think I’d like to spend some time going back to the early days and do a bit of reading – sort of a look back at where it all started. I’ve got a bit of real curiosity about what may have changed over the last thirteen years. Or maybe I’m more likely to find that I’ve refined and expounded my ideas a bit since then, but many of them are still found firmly rooted in the soil from which they sprung originally.

From time to time someone asks why I do this. I’m not monetizing the site. In fact I pay a noiminal fee every year to prevent adds from appearing here at all. Like I wrote up there in the “About Me” section many, may years ago, anything written and posted here isn’t necessarily done with an eye towards an audience. It’s done almost exclusively to vent my own frustrations and petty annoyances. Knowing that, the fact that so many of you hang around for the ride is downright humbling.

Here I stand…

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September 17th. It’s Constitution Day. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last half decade pondering the Constitution. That doesn’t make me a scholar or imbue me with expert status on the topic by a long stretch. I still like to think between reading and thinking and trying to digest just what the founding generation were up to, it gives me a better than average perspective on the fundamental taproot of our government and laws.

In my estimation, the men who wrote, argued over, and eventually signed the Constitution were a mountain taller than even the best politician serving in office today. The fact that the system they designed is able to even creak along under the guidance of the hacks we’ve collectively elected to office in Washington speaks to their ability to design a system that could be operated even by this bunch of strutting and preening empty suits.

Not so very long ago I was accused of “worshiping at the altar” of the Constitution, with the implication being that doing so was somehow “un-Christian.” I’m sure it was meant to imply something negative in my character, but in my mind the truth is precisely the opposite. I don’t propose to be governed any more by Christian theology any more than I’d accept being ruled by extremist Islam. You can bugger right off with that nonsense. A moral compass is a fine thing to have, but I’ve never found that you need to be overtly religious to have one of those in your kit bag.

I was raised and protected and have grown and prospered under the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. As an adult I swore an oath to support and defend those rights and liberties against all enemies… and there’s not a force on earth or in heaven that could compel me to go back on that long held promise. I will walk this world cloaked in the protections and liberty afforded me as an American citizen and defined by the Constitution and its amendments.

Here I stand. Come and move me.

Somewhere in the middle hump…

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When you get use to easing into the week by spending most Monday’s working from home, a Monday thrown directly into the daily asshatery of the office is like wrapping yourself in a cold blanket of angst. Going from a nice quiet Sunday surrounded by books and dogs to a cubicle surrounded by 30 other chattering bureaucrats is just hard on the system. It’s not insurmountable pain and agony, of course. Maybe it’s more akin spending eight hours with your swim trunks full of sand. It’s just unpleasant.

There are two sides of every coin, though. In this case, the obverse is that it’s one more day ticked off the calendar – meaning the work week is 1/5 the way done and there’s still a nice day of answering phone calls and emails from the comfortable precincts of Fortress Jeff still left to come. Don’t tell me I can’t see the brite side of things.

All told, it’s probably just another Monday – somewhere in the middle hump of the bell curve; not great and not awful. If there’s one thing I can count on my inner pessimist to deliver, it’s a constant stream of reminders to not worry, because things can always get worse. I’m quite sure that’s one of those sayings that’s supposed make you appreciate what you’ve got, but for me it’s always been more of a warning that even in the midst of what seems stupid, there’s plenty of room to drive the train even further off the rails… and into the ditch… knocking over a bridge… and crushing a bus full of nuns and children on their way to adopt all the puppies.

So if you’ve ever wanted to know what thoughts lurk in my head on a typical Monday in the office, there you have it.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Politics in 2019. Someone told me this week that I should be “open minded” and read up on the ten or so leading Democratic primary candidates, suggesting that I might even like what I found there. Hey, I’m all for open mindedness and considering a wide variety of information in my decision making process, but the simple fact remains that as long as whoever is ultimately the Democratic candidate for president is once the primaries shake out is standing on a platform that supports massive tax increases to support “free” stuff for everyone, unchecked creeping socialism, abrogation of the Second Amendment, unchecked illegal immigration, and hollowing out the national defense establishment, there’s just not much in a candidate left for me to get behind. I’m not about to give up one four decades of slightly right of center positions because “orange man bad” is the best argument you’ve presented.

2. Failure to sleep deeply. Over the last few months I’ve gotten attuned to waking up at the first sound of a dog peeing in a crate a few steps away from my bed. It hasn’t been a regular occurrence, but has happened often enough that my brain has apparently gotten attuned to it. Under normal circumstances, I can sleep through a small war taking place in the next room. I have a feeling that this new skill of mine, along with what I can only presume is a much lighter sleep, is directly responsible for my increasing level of what can probably best be described as “hostile lethargy.”

Other than linear thought. I admit it, I’m a linear thinker. I think and express myself best in neatly ordered, structured parts and pieces. It’s the systematic way of doing things. The problems arise when I bang directly up against systems that were not designed – or at least don’t behave in – a linear manner… let us just say for instance, a web-based tracking tool that arbitrarily changed the numbers it assigns to each task it’s tracking, which makes using the basic search function of the site nothing more than a roll of the dice. I’m sure it was a good idea to someone somewhere, but it’s the kind of tinkering that takes an already pretty inelegent system and makes it downright unpleasant.