Monthly Archives: January 2020

It’s not exactly a new thing I learned…

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This space is usually reserved for a retelling of something ridiculous I learned this week. I wouldn’t have much trouble filling the space. Though maybe a second edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week would be more appropriate.

Instead of that, though, I’ll just say I put my 59 minute early departure from work to good use. I stopped on the way home for groceries, got home and turned out the dogs, got them fed, loaded out the bird feeders, and then bolted the house on the couple of errands I almost always relegate to Saturday mornings.

I say that to say this… I’m kicking off a three day weekend and I wouldn’t have to leave the house until Tuesday if I didn’t want to. If you don’t think it’s a real possibility, do you even know me?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Missing the obvious. I dropped my glasses on the sidewalk sometime back in about September. They weren’t damaged beyond repair, but there is a small gouge in one of the lenses directly in my eye-line. It’s obnoxious, but as long as the lenses are super clean it was something I could deal with until I was due for a new pair. A couple days ago, while they were particularly grimy, I mentioned how annoying it was to my mother. She, being ever practical, just sighed and said “You know they’re probably under warranty.” Yeah. I hadn’t even considered that. My new lenses will be here in 7-10 business days.

2. Sign stealing. I don’t know baseball. I admit it. But color me perplexed at the current “scandal.” I have no idea why you’d assume, in a venue in full view of 50,000 people, that someone wasn’t going to figure out what you were doing with your hands and translate that to what was happening on the field. I have a hard time buying that’s a situation where you have any legitimate expectation of privacy at all. But like I said, I don’t know baseball.

3. Professional decorum. Professional decorum, as far as I can tell, exists only to make it socially unacceptable for people to tell unpleasant truths to those higher along the wire diagram. If it weren’t for professional decorum, for instances, it would be totally acceptable for someone to kick in every door in the building, shake his or her fist, and scream I TOLD YOU SO! while a shitstorm unfurls. Instead this person ends up saying some ridiculous bullshit like “That’s an interesting idea and we should consider it.” Utter bollox.

On my relationship with sleep…

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Further wrecking any hope I’ll ever have of having a normal relationship with sleep, I’ve pushed my daily wake up call up to 4:30. The extra 30 minutes means time to actually fix a reasonable breakfast, give the dogs a bit of attention, and to sit down and take a breath before charging out the door. I didn’t fully appreciate just how harried my typical mornings were, nor how much I was trying to cram into 35 or 40 minutes… and doing it badly.

I like the new, reasonable relaxed morning procedures. I suppose if that means I’m eternally damned to wake up well before 5am, it’s a price I don’t really mind paying. It’s not as if the dogs mind keeping vaguely unusual hours.

Leaving the house in a relatively calm and well prepared manner, specifically on a day I know is going to be a shitshow from start to finish at least starts me on the best foot. Since there’s no hope of finishing that way, best to control what I can, when I can.

Not to reason why…

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Even if you’re not steeped in the history of the Crimean War, it feels likely you’ve heard about the charge of the Light Brigade, or at least know of the phrase, “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.” Few lines of English poetry are, in my mind, more evocative.

The (very) short version is that the British light cavalry, owing to confused orders and the fog of battle, was sent charging down into the valley against well placed and defended Russian artillery positions instead of towards the far more suitable target intended. The Light Brigade, brave sons of England, faultlessly loyal to Queen and country, was savaged by the Russian guns.

Mercifully, I haven’t been put on orders to seize anyone’s guns. In the better part of two decades in service I’ve made my bones by delivering projects on time and to standard regardless of impediments or restrictions. I’ve worked projects I’ve hated with the white hot fury of a thousands suns and a few that I’d have almost paid to be a part of. My personal feelings never figured into the effort if there was a job that needed doing.

I’m not the kind of guy who gets frozen with self doubt. It’s not my nature. I want to get the job done smartly and move on, always. But here, now, we have the first time a job’s been put in front of me where I don’t see any good or reasonable path forward. Every avenue of approach bristles with pitfalls and obstacles… and the clock is running.

I’m in the deeply unfamiliar and unhappy position of legitimately not knowing if I can get there from here – in some large part simply because I don’t know what I don’t know. If you think what you don’t know can’t hurt you, well, you’re a damned fool.

Let’s just say that my usual sense that if I drop my shoulder and shove hard enough, I can move the world seems to have abandoned me at the moment. After seventeen years, it’s possible I’ve found the job that I just can’t deliver. If you think I’m not well and properly shook, you don’t know me at all.

Theirs is not to reason why, indeed.

Eyes on the prize…

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We’ve been back to work for a week now. It’s situation normal, but unavoidable if your life goals include not living under a bridge or in a van down by the river. Add in not going to prison and you’ve basically covered my Tier 1 Life Goals. Anything beyond those few things is really just the gravy.

Still, if I sit here and try hard to channel my inner Mr. Brightside, there is a federal holiday coming up. That’s something. The glimmer of a promise of hope in the darkness. It really feels like I’ll spend the next decade and a half casting my eyes from holiday to holiday looking for the dim gleamings of days not tethered to the cubicle.

So eyes on the prize or whatever

What I learned this week…

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I was pulled over this morning. The thing is, as soon as I saw the blues and reds coming up in the rear view, I basically knew what it was about. I’ve never entirely cured myself of the lead foot that’s afflicted me since dad first put me behind the wheel of a mid-1980s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera when I was about twelve. I had a lot of horsepower and a wide open road and, well, one thing led to another.

My point is, I didn’t get pulled over because this particular trooper felt like being a jerk this morning. The guy was doing his job and just happened to be sitting somewhere where he got a good look at me being stupid.

Once we pulled off to the side of the road, I waited patiently, kept my hands visible on the steering wheel, didn’t fidget or reach around for things, and waited for him to come up alongside. I produced my registration, insurance, and driver’s license – while narrating what I was doing and where I was reaching; left rear pocket for wallet, glovebox for everything else.

Directly behind my driver’s license in my wallet is the license that the state of Maryland requires me to hold to purchase handguns. He obviously saw it. The trooper asked if I had any guns in the vehicle. No, sir. Hands back to a very visible place on the wheel. OK.

I sat quietly for about five minutes, waiting for someone, somewhere to report back that I have no current points, no history of violations, and I’m not sitting on a stack of warrants.

Once we confirmed all that, I was handed back my documentation, issued a warning, and told to be safely on my way.

Every word that passed between me and this particular trooper was civil and professional. I didn’t feel any compulsion to give the guy a hard time or make an already dangerous job more difficult. I didn’t want to make a point or try to capture the whole thing with my phone.

We were sitting there on the side of a two lane country road because I gave him a reason to put me there.

So what did I learn this week? Nothing new, just a good solid reminder that if you act like you’ve got half a brain in your damned head, accept that you too can be in the wrong, and don’t antagonize the officer who’s just trying to get through his day, an engagement with the police doesn’t need to result with rolling around in the ditch getting your dumb ass shot.

When the help isn’t…

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It’s the third day back from vacation. The restive and restorative effects of having a long and happy break have long since worn off. Frankly they didn’t make it past Tuesday morning.

I’ve spent most of this week trying desperately to uncluster a Special High Interest (SHIt) event that, not unexpectedly, spent the last two weeks teetering dangerously on the verge of flying off the rails. It’s the kind of thing that happens when too many people who don’t know all the background information try to give things a little extra help.

I’m sure it was all well intentioned, but I could have done without the added mess in need of fixing this week. Easing back into the routine and building up a slow head of steam for the haul through the next four months doesn’t feel like it should have been too big an ask… and yet here we are, with me looking for the nearest load bearing structure to repeatedly bang my head against.

People will tell you that it’s good to feel needed. All things considered, I think I’d probably enjoy sitting in the corner being ignored far more than I do being the guy who gets tapped when the next SHIt event is in dire need of fixing.

Sigh. Some boys have all the luck. It’s me. I’m some boys. And all the luck is bad.

Postcards from the past…

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Two weeks ago I passed a few days in the house where I did most of my growing up. For all my travels, I’ve always managed to find my way home at least at Christmas time.

I get up early. That doesn’t change just because I happened to have a few days off. One of the perks of waking up before the sun is that you get to see it rise over the Appalachians. In a lot of ways, those clear mornings were a throwback.

On a dead calm Boxing Day morning, the wood smoke hung thick in the George’s Creek valley. A hundred years ago it would have been coal, but for a distant observer it didn’t make enough difference to notice.

For a couple of minutes, it was like watching a living picture postcard from another age – a sight that realistically hasn’t changed much from the 19th and 20th centuries into the 21st. It was one of the first times I think I really appreciated just how slow time can move out there in the hills.

It’s the rare moments like this one that fill me with the idea that maybe someday I’ll go back to stay… but before long other realities of time and space crowd in and the moment is gone. There are real reasons I’ll never really go home again, not to stay… but those reasons will never, ever be because I’ve gotten tired of the view from down the crick.

The wearing o’ the pink…

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Six or seven years ago, one of my many other duties as assigned was to endure a monthly series of meetings that were barely tangentially related to anything happing in my office. There was the main meeting at the end of the month, prep meetings for that meeting, pre-meetings for the prep meetings, and host of other “pick up” meetings getting called with no notice. In any given month I could be guaranteed that 15-20 hours were going to be wasted staring at the ceiling in the conference room and wondering why people couldn’t just shut the fuck up once they made their point.

Around that time several pink shirts came into my possession. I started wearing these Pepto pink shirts on days when these random pointless meetings were scheduled – a silent protest. I needed a full suit of Pepto because I was well and truly sick of these meetings.

Eventually these meetings evolved into something else and landed on someone else’s desk, relieving me of the burden of enduring them. The pink shirts remained, though. Most of them are long worn out, but there’s one left. It’s a bit tattered and not fit for the office now, but it’s not quite bad enough to throw out.

It’s my first day back in the saddle after a long and restful break… and there was my last remaining Pepto shirt hanging in the closet this morning practically begging to be worn.

So yeah, if you must know, I’m wearing the pink today. I can’t think of anything that better suits today’s mood.

What I learned this week…

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I’ll keep this simple because my 16 day weekend has now dwindled down to just a regular length weekend.

What I learned this week is that when the time comes to hang up all this nonsense with going into the office and pecking away at PowerPoint, I’m really going to be fine. I can spend days on end searching out $1 used book gems, fiddling around with conserving the ones that need a bit of attention, and reading until my eyes go blurred. It feels like something I could keep up indefinitely… and mercifully doesn’t need to be particularly expensive to be satisfying.

A few weeks is a long difference from “forever,” but I feel more confident now than ever that filling the days and keeping to the budget won’t actually be the problems that some insist on making them out to be.