Monthly Archives: August 2023

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Cat food. For two small mammals who used to live rough outdoors, my cats seem to have an overdeveloped sense of pickiness when it comes to food. I’m trying to get them off their wet kitten food onto wet adult food and it’s…. not going well. The number of “premium” brands and flavors I’ve purchased only to find them rejected is, honestly, embarrassing. I’ll be handing the scores of castoff cans to the local shelter in due time, but it’s still money and effort I’d have rather not spent. I’ve been at this for a month now and haven’t found a single thing they’ll touch.The more expensive the food or better quality the ingredients, the less interested they get. They can’t stay on Pro Plan salmon flavored kitten food forever. Probably. I wonder if they still like the Friskies blend they were getting at the shelter.

Vegetables. Look, I like vegetables. I just don’t like them in the quantity you need to eat them to make them calorically significant. A nice dinner plate has no business being five or six ounces of meat and then 37 metric tons of green beans, asparagus, and squash. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t. And then doing it all without any decent sauces is just adding insult to injury. I’ll do it, but there’s not a power on earth or in heaven that can make me like it.

Warm body duty. This week, the prevailing schedule found me schlepping over to the office one day so that I could remain in compliance with the guidance that “everyone must show up in the office one day each work week.” Whatever. It’s a radical improvement over being there three times each week, but still, it can’t help but feel a little bit contrived when you spend the day doing absolutely nothing that you couldn’t have done at least equally as well from home. I don’t think I’ll ever entirely understand the managerial obsession for having someone performing duty as the designated warm body, at a specific desk, in a specific room. I’ll dance to the tune they call, because they paid for the band, but you’ll never convince me that “just because” is a good reason to do one thing over the alternative.

(Home) Office space…

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With the new and improved telework agreement now in place, I’ve arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that my home office needs to be upgraded in several ways.

My set up isn’t particularly unusual. On the personal side, I’ve got a soon to be six year old 27-inch iMac that’s still an absolute workhorse and probably 5x more powerful than anything I actually need. It’s a great machine, even if it does occupy a significant amount of desktop real estate. For work, I’m toting around a Dell Latitude with a 16-inch screen. From it, hang an absurd number of wires and dongles – USB hub, mouse, Wi-Fi antenna, headset, and camera (rarely).

Most of the time, the laptop is perfectly serviceable for anything I need to do day-to-day. There are times, though, particularly when working in Excel or PowerPoint or dealing with multiple documents at the same time, where having a larger screen would be helpful. 

I’m sure there are ways to rig my laptop to use my iMac as a monitor, but that violates my first rule of working from home – my personal computer and my work computer must never, ever meet. They can sit on the same desk, but I want them to share absolutely nothing from one system to the other. Those are two streams I never want to cross.

That’s going to mean there’s a lot of “unnecessary” duplication with two full set ups occupying my desk. I can live with that, but want it to be done in an elegant a way as possible. Figuring out what that looks like is where I am now.

It certainly means buying a more robust hub/docking station and probably a new monitor – ideally one that with a build in camera and mic that will let me dispense with headset and camera. On those days when I can’t avoid the schlep over to the office, I’d like to unplug the laptop from one cable and walk away. Currently, I have cables running everywhere and it’s just unsightly and an uninspiring way to work. It was less of a problem in the height of COVID, when the laptop mostly stayed put and in the immediate post-COVID environment when I was in the office more than home. Now, it needs to be functional and look reasonably attractive.

After the technical hurdles are surmounted, I know I’ll need new lighting. The current lamp is fine, but adding a second monitor means I’ll need the space it’s occupying. In a perfect world, I’d like to find a slightly larger desk to hold it all. Being that my current “desk” is a kitchen table I liberated long ago from a dusty shed and pressed into service, I like my chances of being able to find a suitable upgrade. In fact, I’d be absolutely willing to just buy another table, but slightly longer, as this one has worked surprisingly well for the last 8 or 9 years.

When all this might happen, remains firmly in the “to be determined” column on the calendar, but I expect to see some of it sooner rather than later.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Chili. I’ve made hundreds of pots of chili over the years. It easily makes a menu appearance once a month. I generally use whatever variety of kidney beans I have on hand. Sometimes canned, sometimes dried. It doesn’t make much difference in the final product. This week I happened to have dry beans, which I dutifully put in water to soak overnight before going to bed on Saturday. The next morning, while throwing together the rest of the ingredients, I encountered some kind of mental block and ended up throwing the raw beans directly in the pot with the rest. That wouldn’t have been an insurmountable problem if I had realized my error immediately, but I didn’t discover the error of my ways until hours later, when the whole batch was steeped in raw kidney beans. That’s problematic for two reasons: 1) Raw beans taste awful and 2) Raw kidney beans are just a little bit poisonous and tend to lead to an unpleasant level of “digestive distress.” Anyway, for the first time in my life I threw away an entire gallon and a half of chili. The brain fog I’ve been contending with has improved marginally, but obviously isn’t resolved.

2. Republican primary candidates. I spent the vast majority of my adult life as a registered Republican. More often than not, I’ve ended up voting for the eventual Republican nominee for most offices. What Wednesday night’s debate between Republican primary contenders revealed was that I continue to have less and less in common with this modern incarnation of the GOP. The party use to be a bulwark for things like a strong national defense, opposing Russian aggression, restricting the role of government in public life, and lowering the tax burden or at least reducing the deficit. Last night showed barely a mention of those issues. It’s probably time I accept that the Republican Party I was a member of for so many years is dead, buried, and unlikely to return. It’s a shame, because in my estimation our form of government is at its best when there are two parties that can passionately articulate what they stand for and why it’s the right vision for the country. From what I saw last night, all the Republicans are offering is some variation of fear and loathing in America and promises to support a convicted felon if he’s nominated. That’ll be a hard pass from me.

3. Content. With the arrival of my new and improved telework schedule, I’ve been forced to admit that the number of things that annoyed me this week was precipitously low. It’s almost as if quality of life is perhaps inversely proportional to the amount of time spent traveling to and sitting in a place I think of unfondly as Cubicle Hell. I’m sure as the new, new, new normal really takes hold, other more subtle issues will crop up, but for this week it’s really put a crimp in my regular Thursday evening bitching and complaining. As it is, I suppose I’ll just have to be annoyed that this week I’m struggling for content. 

I was enchanted…

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I had an absolutely bonkers dream a few nights ago. I found myself attending a concert somewhere in Cumberland in the far western stretch of Maryland. I never really quite identified the venue, but it was a small room, certainly not a concert hall or an arena. I’m assuming it only exists in my head and doesn’t in any way reflect reality in western Maryland. Don’t ask who was on stage, because I don’t have the vaguest recollection of that part. 

My seatmate, though, was arguably the most recognizable living American. For reasons defying any kind of human logic, my fever dream fueled hallucinating brain paired me off with “the music industry,” Ms. Americana herself, Dr. Taylor Swift. She was a good concert buddy. 

She ended up inviting me to dinner at some off-brand Denny’s. They had no clean tables and everyone was staring. It was awkward, but we talked for what felt like hours before leaving to drive around while the sun came up. 

Dream Tay was very insightful, even if her driving skills were questionable. Dream me was a wonderstruck. I like to think that didn’t stop me from being the same brand of sarcastic bastard everyone knows and loves. 

As the night of being hood rats in Allegany County drew to an end, Dream Taylor did finally catch me off guard. 

“I’m engaged,” she says. 

“I know,” I reply. 

“That doesn’t make this awkward?”

“I don’t know why it would. I don’t want anything from you.”

“Really?”

“Really.” 

At least dream me is definitive and my subconscious didn’t turn me into some variation of douchebro chowderhead, so I’ve got that going for me. 

It was the kind of dream that was profoundly out of character because of a) Who played the leads and b) the fact that I remembered it at all. It was so unusual that I felt compelled to scribble down the highlights before I even got out of bed or fully woke up.

Still, I was entirely enchanted. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Management. I spent the better part of a year beating on AFGE 1904 when they were standing between me and a perfectly acceptable new telework agreement. Don’t think for a minute that I won’t give management the same treatment now that they’re the ones dragging their feet. The new policy was signed and went into force on August 4th. We waited while management called a huddle on the 8th and then dropped our updated packets that afternoon… to be told to wait, hold up, management still has some details to work out. Here we are two weeks later with no word on when or if our little office might decide to comply with the approved organization-wide policy… or any explanation for what’s actually holding up the works this time. Management had almost a year of knowing 95% of what was going to be in this new and improved policy, but from where I’m sitting, it appears to have taken them entirely by surprise and without any plan for how it might work when they were told to execute. File that under disappointing, but not in any way surprising. Until they get around to doing the right thing, I’ll continue to take this and every other opportunity to poke the bear.

2. Rice cooker. I’ve been a long time fan of what is commonly called whole grain – white rice, brown rice, barley, oats. It features on the menu a fair number of times a month – even if only to serve as a bed to sop up whatever sauce comes along with the meal. It’s become more prevalent recently… and I finally gave in and purchased a dedicated rice cooker after many years of grousing that a stand alone machine for rice was just an appliance on the kitchen counter that I didn’t need because doing things on the stove top was perfectly fine. It turns out I was absolutely wrong. That stupid rice cooker is a game changer. I’m both annoyed that I was wrong and that it took me literal years to find that out.

3. Failure to read and comprehend. For the last five or so years, whenever I have been in the office, one of my “key duties” has been to push the button to open the door into our office area. To date, I’ve pushed the button approximately 770 times. The damned bell that rings when someone wants into the area is the kind of obnoxious that you end up occasionally hearing it in your sleep. The good news is that (sometimes) procedures change. For instance, we’re no longer supposed to push the button when people want into the room. Now there’s a much more convoluted procedure they need to go through that doesn’t involve a bell in any way. We sent out a memo… and even put up a large sign, neither of which anyone seems to have read, because now we just have a vestibule full of people grousing about not being allowed inside. Expecting anyone to read and follow directions is probably a bridge too far, so I expect we’ll be back to being glorified doormen before long at all. Whatever. It would just be nice, though, if people occasionally did a little reading for comprehension.

Editorial Note: We were, in fact, back to being glorified doormen less than 24 hours after I wrote up this week’s third annoyance. 

Flying trees…

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There was a formerly magnificent oak tree in the back yard that was dying for as long as I’ve had the house. Its leaves always looked a little battered and brittle and its canopy considerably thinner than its immediate neighbors. Four years ago one of its main limbs plunged into the yard while I was eating dinner on a summer Saturday night. Anyone under it would have had an awfully bad day.

That was worrisome, but the rest of the tree looked to be in decent enough shape and without any more obviously dead branches. This spring’s drought, it seems, was more than the old girl could take. It stood there showing shades of nothing but brown since sometime in early June. Once this particular tree came down, it was obvious that sometime in the last decade it was lightning struck. The scorch marks around the top of the trunk were plain – and it had a six-inch hollow from nearly root to crown. It was going to come down sooner rather than later whether it was planned or not. 

A dead tree in the woods isn’t necessarily cause for worry in and of itself. This one, though, had a bit of an awkward lean to it. In that condition, I expect it could easily have toppled directly on seven or eight segments of split rail fence that I didn’t especially want to replace. It also overhung one of Jorah’s favorite spots in the yard. I like the idea of replacing him even less than the thought of replacing a big section of fencing. 

That’s all a lot of lead up to say that I hired an arborist to deal with what was well beyond my own scope and abilities as a homeowner. Over the course of a day, his team took down the dead oak as well as a living one that hung precariously over the garage. They also cleared out several smaller trees that all overhung my bedroom. Due to their problematic locations, nearly every cut was tied off and hoisted by crane – some to be disposed of naturally in the woods and some to be hauled off site.

Each lift weighed in somewhere around 3000 pounds according to the crane operator. Having a ton and half of dead weight flying over the house all afternoon was, in a word, unsettling. It absolutely unlocked a brand new variety of homeowner fear. I hate the idea of taking down perfectly healthy trees, but after seeing how big these oaks are once they were on the ground, the thought of any of them landing on the house is nightmare fuel. 

If you’re envisioning a small project, I’m not describing it properly. In fact, it’s likely only the first third of what we’ll end up doing over the next two or three years to beat back the trees that have encroached on the house since the building site was cleared 23 years ago. This year we took on the worst offenders – those trees or parts thereof that were deemed most likely to fall directly on my head.

It’s not the home improvement project I had planned to take on or budgeted for this year, but once you’ve committed to having a crane set up in the front yard, it feels like you should make the most of it being there. At least I know again this year why I won’t be going anywhere that even hints of a vacation. Hopefully the tree guy at least goes somewhere fun. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Donald Trump. Do I honestly even need to add any additional commentary here? The man is a sociopathic threat to the republic. And even if he weren’t, putting forward the argument that West Virginia is the proper venue for his impending trial for attempting to overthrow the government because the jury there would be more “politically unbiased” and demographically balanced and “more diverse” borders on laughable. Or it would if he and his legal team weren’t serious. I have a huge soft spot for West Virginia. I grew up within spitting distance of the south bank of the Potomac, but it’s hard to imagine a more thinly veiled argument for moving his trial. The crimes Mr. Trump is accused of took place in DC and there his trial should stay. Let his lawyers challenge jurors “for cause” rather than shamelessly hoping to find a more politically favorable group of twelve.

Low salt. Before the cardiologist got a chance to yell at me, I’d already started casting out salt. Salad dressings, sauces, just about every recipe I’ve mastered over 20 years, even my beloved giant burrito should be on the forbidden list. So far nothing tastes good. There’s a limit to how much bland stir fry one should be expected to endure. Food should be a joy. Now it’s more something to jam into my face as quickly as possible in hopes I don’t taste much of it. No, it’s not the end of the world and yes, I’ll probably eventually strike on some recipes that aren’t awful, but I’m feeling just a little bit sorry for myself and that might just be the most annoying thing possible.

Management. With the new telework policy signed, management is having entirely predictable trouble with figuring out how to implement this thing they’ve known was coming for almost a year. I’ll illustrate. The policy was published by the executive office on Friday. Wait, wait. Don’t do anything until the directorate has a meeting about it on Tuesday. Fine, you might think. Sit through the Tuesday meeting, get the guidance in person and then send your package in for what should theoretically be simple review and approval as long as you crossed through all the appropriate wickets. No. Now we’re on pause waiting for additional guidance and determinations to be made at the “branch” level, because there’s “more information” to put out and analysis needed.  Maybe more info and analysis is the sort of thing that should have had some academic rigor applied before the thing hit the street instead of piecemealing it out after the fact. Just get on with it. Continuing to bottle this up isn’t winning management any new friends. And their old ones are getting awfully skeptical. If you had almost a year of knowing 90% of what was coming and then seem to be confused and befuddled when it finally lands on your desk, shame on you.

Good news… it wasn’t a heart attack…

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There are, as you know, things that I don’t discuss on social media. It’s an old fashioned notion, even sharing as much as I do, that some things at least ought to remain private. I say that only to note that what follows is an incomplete telling of the tale. The salient points, however, are unmolested.

My trouble started on a Wednesday night. I wasn’t doing anything more dramatic than sitting in the living room watching TV after dinner. Out of nowhere, my heart revved up to a roaring gallop and stayed there. No pain. No trouble breathing. No light headedness. I’ve never understood what people meant when they said they experienced an impending feeling of doom. I do now though. All in, the trouble lasted maybe an hour or 90 minutes before it began subsiding.

After first trying to power through it and then consulting the family medical professional, I eventually conceded that it was probably something I needed to have checked out. Shortly thereafter, I was being given the once over at the local emergency department, where they quickly ruled out a heart attack and monitored me for four hours before sending me on my way.

The next night, same time, same place, same experience. Well, not quite. It wasn’t as bad and didn’t last as long. It was still deeply disturbing and I spent the rest of the night felling like absolute trash.

By Friday morning, I still felt decidedly “off,” for lack of a better description. I later described it as feeling like someone had filled my head with wool and then pressurized it. I knew if I called for emergency services they’d just dump me back where I had been on Wednesday night. That wasn’t an especially comforting thought.

Whether it was entirely advisable or not, I drove myself over to the “main campus” facility of the local hospital system. After many of the same tests given to me two days earlier, but finally having met with two cardiologists, they confirmed that I wasn’t having and didn’t have a heart attack. Their most likely diagnosis was supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) – essentially a (probably) not life-threatening electrical problem in one of the upper chambers of my heart that can cause an erratic heartbeat.

They prescribed some new meds to slow my heart rate and scheduled me in for a proper cardiology appointment after which I assume we’ll start the full battery of diagnostic tests and determine a long-term treatment plan. My first proper cardiology appointment is later this week. 

I haven’t had any more incidents, but I spent the better part of a week feeling entirely wrung out. If it wasn’t for needing to feed the herd, it’s hard to say how little I’d have forced myself up off the couch. All told it was every bit of two weeks before my head stopped feeling wooly and I was able to concentrate for any length of time. Even the meds they gave me as a temporary expedient aren’t entirely benign. Over the last week or so a couple of side effects have gotten more pronounced and working with the medicos to get that dialed in has been significantly less than fun.

Look, I’m thrilled that the diagnosis is “not a heart attack,” but going into the second month of feeling like warm trash isn’t exactly the summer adventure I envisioned for 2023. I’ll know soon enough if this week marks the end of the beginning or if just kicks us right back to go. Given the abuse I’ve hurled at my body for 45 years, I should probably be impressed that it’s just now starting to seriously object. I only wish the good times would last a little longer. That not being the case, we’ll just have to play the ball from where it lies.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The end of a long-running gag. Forty-four weeks after the new telework policy for supervisors (that was also supposed to be the new telework policy for employees) was published, my employer and AFGE Local 1904 were finally forced into terms by the Federal Service Impasses Panel. In their Solomonic judgement, the best solution was to split the baby. Rest assured I’ll cover that in more detail in a separate post. That said, the inability of the union and my employer to find their ass with two hands and a flashlight has featured in the lead off position of What Annoys Jeff this Week for the last 40 weeks. While I am pleased that a separate government entity has finally forced them to come to terms, I’m just a little bit sad that it’s a regular and recurring crutch I won’t have to lean on week after week. As I have yet to learn how my employer will choose to actually implement this newly imposed policy, though, I can’t help but believe we haven’t seen the last of telework being a prominent topic on Thursdays. 

2. Bad chicken. It’s not unusual for me to load up the crockpot on a telework day and cook up a dish I can eat multiple meals from over the course of the week. What’s helpful in doing that, though, is when the chicken I’m about to use isn’t something that should have been taken off the shelves a week before I bought it. Look, I absolutely blame the retailer here. There’s absolutely no reason poultry should be anywhere near a consumer a full week after its sell by date. That’s just absolutely shitty staff work. It would be easy to think about taking this rancid mess over to the customer service desk, but ultimately, I’m the one who picked it up, looked it over, and mistook the “9” for a 19. In the spirit of personal responsibility, I’m going to proverbially eat the $11 loss and heave the chicken parts over the fence in hopes some of the local wildlife won’t gag from it the way I did when I opened the package.

3. New meds. As part of the initial treatment for my suspected tachycardia, the doctors prescribed a new pill. I know there are a lot of people who object to being on medication of any kind, but I’m a big believer in better living through chemistry. If my issues can be mitigated with a pill, just tell me when to take it. To some degree that’s what they’ve done. One of the inconvenient side effects, though, is that in addition to driving my pulse down, it’s also got me feeling like my brain is operating at about 70% of normal speed. I’m still perfectly competent and can do everything I could do previously, but thinking it through takes a little longer. Even if we assume for the moment that this little white pill is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, I’m absolutely not a fan. Fortunately, I’m told it’s one of those side effects that should wear off once my body is fully accustomed to its new chemical make up. After a month, I’m still finding that some days are better than others, so file it firmly under “we’ll see.”