Author Archives: jdtharp

Sunday traditions…

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As often as not, Sunday dinner at my grandparent’s house meant roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, and all manner of home cooked food. While I may not have a dozen or more gathered around my table at 5PM on the dot, at least once a month, my house fills with the savory smell of roasting beef as I do my best to keep with tradition. Sure, I’ve made some tweaks to the recipes – I use more garlic than my grandmother would have ever dreamed of, for instance – but the underlying idea is still the same. Sunday dinner is important, if for no other reason than it’s a touchstone with the past.

While we’re on the topic of touching the past, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that this week’s posts from the archive are now available for your reading pleasure. Pulled into the present from the last half of June and July 2008, today’s posts are a bit more pithy than they’ve been in the last few weeks. They feature a few more explanations of some of the more colorful words and phrases that show up in my vocabulary from time to time. Get your dose of the archives soon, because from the look of things, in two months this particular Sunday tradition will be drawing to an end.

A giant case of meh…

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A giant case me “meh” is what I’ve had all day for some reason. No motivation to do a damned thing. Don’t want to write, or read, or talk, or watch TV, or cook, or clean, or really do anything that my seemingly addled mind could come up with. So here I’ve sat, pinging from thing to thing without Red Stripetaking an interest in any of it. For the record, it’s not going to make my list of recommended things to do on a Saturday. Eventually, even though I still don’t really want to write, I turned up here because in the end that’s always what I do. I write, I rage, I rant, and hopefully when I finish my brain is clear of whatever cloud has descended on it. If that doesn’t work, there’s always cold Red Stripe in the fridge. That doesn’t so much clear the cloud cover as make me less apt to care about it being there in the first place. Sometimes, that’s every bit as good as finding an actual solution. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pillage the fridge. Hooray Beer!

Open wide…

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Life is full of ironies. When I was a young careerist just starting out you, I barely had two hours of vacation time to rub together. What I did have were almost limitless invitations to go places, do things, and generally raise hell while I was young and stupid. Since I never seemed to have the vacation time, I took a pass on most of those opportunities and hoped against hope that I wouldn’t get sick and need to burn off any of my limited reserve of days off.

Now, after a a decade or so of experience, I’m sitting on a pretty respectable war chest of paid time off. What I seem to be lacking are the invitations to raise hell and be stupid. While that’s probably for the best, there’s something disheartening about taking the vast majority of days off over the course of the year to do things like having bloodwork done and going to the dentist. I’m sure this is not how 25-year-old-Jeff planned to spend his days off when he was 35, but there you have it.

Sure, it’s a four day weekend, but I’ll be spending a big part of the first day with my mouth hanging wide open letting complete strangers poke, prod, drill, and fill. If I can manage not to spend the afternoon drooling all over myself, I’ll consider it a victory.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Semantics. Listening to the news over the last few days, I’ve been surprised (shocked and appalled), to hear the talking heads from the party of fiscal responsibility saying that even if the debt ceiling is not raised, the US Government won’t technically be in “default” as long as it continues to pay the interest and principle on the existing national debt. And while it’s true that in that sense, the government won’t default on its sovereign debt, it would absolutely default on a host of other payments – to include veteran’s benefits, Social Security, salaries, and contracts for goods and services. I’m the first to admit that words and their meaning are important, but to say that the government will not be in a state of de facto default if the debt ceiling is not raised is a little like making a differentiation between dying of dysentery and dying of the dehydration caused by having dysentery. Either way you shit yourself to death, the rest is just semantics.

2. Obamacare. I’ve never pretended to be a fan of this first step in the headlong rush towards nationalized healthcare. While having access to affordable medical care is definitely a good thing, I’ve always been of the opinion having the federal government step into the fray adds nothing more than unnecessary layers of bureaucracy between a person and their doctor. Despite the best efforts of the right wing nutjobs, we’ve got it now, so c’est la vie. What really annoys me more than having this program foisted on the taxpayer is the fact that they had three years to design a website and couldn’t manage to do that correctly. If I were launching the capstone initiative of my administration, you can be damned sure I’d make sure it worked properly before it saw the light of day. The fact that the average guy with a “Websites for Dummies” book, a DSL line, and rented space on a server can set up and host their own website and my kindly old Uncle Sam can’t does not fill me with an abundance of confidence when it comes to letting him help me make decisions about my health. I’m screwing that one up just fine on my own, thank you very much.

3. Sports talk. I don’t know quite how to phrase this other than being blunt. If you come at me talking about last night’s baseball game or this weekend’s football lineup, you’re going to be met with a blank stare and a fairly blunt, “I don’t follow sports.” Then I’m going to disengage from the conversation. I’ve tried being a good trooper and faking my way through these conversations, feigning an interest, but I think I’m over that now. If you want to have a conversation about technology, science, history, current events, or occasionally the foibles of pop culture icons, I’m your huckleberry. You want to talk batting average and passing yards, you’ll need to look elsewhere. In this one, small segment of life, I’m just tired of pretending to care which group of millionaires are better than which other group of millionaires.

Value added…

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About six times today I heard the phrase “valued added.” Each and every time I heard it, I wanted to punch a baby in the throat. Look, maybe I should care about “demonstrating value added,” or team building, or joining hands and giving peace a chance, or whatever. All I’ve ever wanted to do anywhere was the best job I could within the confines the job itself placed on me. With those confines growing increasingly tighter week by week and month after month, we’re all going to have to get use to the idea that how we define “doing our best” is going to change for the worse.

Over short periods of surging to meet the unexpected, people have a remarkable capacity to do more than expected. In a pinch, they can even give the illusion of doing more with less. Most people, most of the time, want to contribute and do their part to make sure the trains run on time. Relying on that capacity as a long term “get well” plan, however, generally has consequences that are less than good. Under sustained pressure to perform above optimal levels and with diminishing resources with which to do it, even the best are going to pull up lame eventually. I can’t cite a scientific study that tells me this is true, but I’ve spent more years than I want to admit watching people and seeing how they respond under pressure.

The truth is some people just handle a high stress environment better than others. A few people might thrive on it, but the vast bulk of them are going to hit a wall, burn out, fade away, or otherwise just stop giving a good goddamn. That’s a dangerous place to be for any organization. The slippery slope from actually doing more to getting less is really more like falling off a cliff. One day everything will hum along at top speed and the next it’ll be in free fall towards the jagged rocks below.

I’d never argue that this is a universal truth, but it does reflect my personal observations based on a little more than a decade as a decidedly interested observer of bureaucratic processes. There are always options available and B does not always have to follow A in this case. Preventing this outcome requires someone with enough horsepower to drive a change and make it stick to realize there’s a problem and for them to do something about it. Unfortunately, my best advice is to not hold your breath waiting for that to happen unless you have some kind of weird workplace oxygen deprivation fetish.

Survey says…

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Two days after calling the vast bulk of the Department of Defense workforce back from our legislatively imposed furlough in the dead of night, some unmitigated asshat at echelons above reality decided it was a good time to launch a “command climate survey.” For those who don’t speak bureaucrat, these surveys are conducted a couple of times a year and are supposedly designed to gage employees feelings about leadership, their work environment, colleagues, managers, and get a general sense of the survey-saystemperature of the organization. At the best of times I’ve always thought these surveys are of questionable value. A week after being told by my political masters that I’m nonessential, well, my immediate response was a stream of under my breath swearing and a resounding facepalm.

After six days of furlough this summer, four days of furlough last week, a sequester that means reductions in defense personnel are matter of when and not if, and a political class that’s bound and determined to undermine the long term stability of the nation, you really want to know how I feel about my job? You have absolutely got to be shitting me.

Morale? In the crapper. Opportunities for advancement? Nonexistent. Faith in our leaders? I won’t even dignify that one with a response. Work area has sufficient light? Well, at least you’ll get good marks on that one. They’ve managed to keep the electricity flowing to the building. I suppose under the circumstances, that’s a milestone achievement.

Walk around the building and you’ll learn all you need to know about the “climate.” We’re frustrated and we’re angry. We’re exhausted from being loyal pawns in some half assed urination contest… and we’re more than a little sad to see the strength of the nation being pissed away for no purpose other than the misguided self-aggrandizement of those we elected to lead.

If they’re dumb enough to asked how I feel, I’m just hostile enough these days to tell them how it is. Now they know. Now you know too.

First day of school…

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After almost a week of Congressionally imposed exile, it’s back to work for most Department of Defense Employees. It feels a bit like the first day of school after a long summer of not giving a damn. Suffice to say that I am something a little less than motivated. What can I say, I’m having a significant emotional response to being told for a week that my services are unessential and then getting a call after 9PM on Sunday to hurry up and get back to work. Look, I know the old hurry up and wait is the Army Way and all, but seriously, taking care of your people should involve more than jerking them form pillar to post around the time many of them are headed to bed. Decent behavior and a basic level of respect are apparently expectations that are all out of proportion to reality. Good to know.

The great irony is that I’m going to be missing at least part of this first day of school. Instead of being on my way to the office, I’m killing an hour or two before heading out for my second root canal in the last seven days. Is it bad that dental surgery almost seems like a better way to spend the morning? It probably is, but Uncle Sam is currently ranked higher on my shit list than the dentist. As sad a state of affairs as that is, it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable.

On schedule…

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It’s Sunday morning, and despite the continuing government shutdown, the looming debt ceiling debacle, and my general annoyance with both Congress and the administration, that means it’s the day we focus on the past instead of the future. This week’s posts from the old MySpace blog are from early June 2008 and cover a good range of issues from changing jobs, to having a lead foot, to the joys of having some kind of flu bug. No great rants this week, but it’s safe to say we’ll run into a few more of those before our Sunday visits to the archive wrap up over the next few months.

Unlike our government, I still believe in the importance of keeping things on schedule, so enjoy today’s blast from the past and check back tomorrow for what I’m sure will be another rants about Congress… or perhaps a diatribe against dentistry following my second root canal in the last seven days. I supposes it’s good to have a variety of topics, but I’d happily pass on either one of them.

Money for nothing…

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I appreciate the bone that House Republicans are throwing at the 800,000 federal employees who spent most of the past week sitting at home waiting to go back to work. While I won’t presume to speak for 799,999 of them, all I can say is as much as I appreciate knowing I’ll receive money_for_nothing_and_chicks_for_free_tee_shirts-rd194f0e52ea54c9789c11f90415607c6_804gs_512back pay for the time spent locked out, it’s just a handout. What I really want, what I expect of my “leaders” at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, is that they will take action to actually put the federal government back to work. As hard as it might be for the political class to believe, I want to be allowed to work for a salary rather than receive a fist full of dollars through the largess of Congress.

A cynical person might say that Congress is trying to buy the silence of 800,000 people who are directly impacted by their actions in the Capitol. While I’ll cheerfully take you money, and it will pay my rent and buy my food and pick up the tab for Monday’s root canal, what it won’t buy is my silence. It won’t buy my willingness to be complicit in your halfassed power plays. Money for nothing almost always comes with strings.

The historic response of Congress to any problem they encounter is to throw money at it. I suggest at a time when it’s becoming more and more clear that our financial well is running dry, it would be better for all involved to actually pass a budget or a continuing resolution and put the 800,000 back to work instead of handing us money for nothing. Then again, I’m just a guy who’s been sitting home for the last five days growing a beard, so what do I know about it?

P.S. I am however, very interested in your Chicks for Free program. Go ahead and sign me up for that one.

Ten thousand generations of evolution…

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I’m a cynic. I’ve learned to embrace it. That’s probably why the very first words out of my mouth when the initial report came across the air that there had been gunfire at the Capitol yesterday was “Wow… I’m surprised it took three days for someone to shoot the place up.” I’ll admit that might be a pretty dim view of people and the world in general, but I stand by the assessment. Frankly, given the tenor of the political debate in this country for the last decade, I’m a more than a little surprised it doesn’t happen on a regular basis. That we don’t generally see armed assaults on our government institutions is more a tribute to the forbearance of the average American than it is any sign of respect for how well our institutions fulfill their obligations.

It seems that yesterday was the final desperate act of a crazy woman, but it should remind us all the world we live in is covered only by the thinnest veneer of civilization. When people are pushed to the wall, or when they think they are, we can’t act surprised when their response is all out of proportion to what’s considered the norms of civilized behavior. Ten thousand generations of evolution has taught us to fight or run when we’re threatened. That instinct doesn’t go away because we drive a Lexus or put on a neck tie when we go to work. Just under that veneer of civilization is just another apex predator capable of both great acts of kindness, but equally susceptible to moments of inconceivable madness.