Author Archives: jdtharp

Here’s to not feeling like warm death on a muffin…

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After enjoying Thanksgiving with the family, doing more in person shopping in one day than I do the rest of the year, and fighting off what was either a very brief cold or a singularly bad attack of allergies, I’m slowly working myself back into the old routine. Being Sunday, of course, much of that routine involves being annoyed that the weekend is already over. Weekends, even when they’re twice as long as usual, never really feel long enough. At least no one else won the Powerball jackpot last night, so that means I’ve still got a shot at it on Wednesday. That’s pretty much my happy thought for the first half of the week. After that, I’ll make no promises about keeping up a cheery disposition – especially since we’re now in the long stretch of no scheduled days off leading up to Christmas. The last few weeks have spoiled me with the random clumps of annual leave liberally sprinkled across October and November. Somehow I’ll manage to get by with just the normal two-day weekends for a few weeks, I’m sure.

So, now that I’m not feeling like warm death on a muffin, I’d better get on with doing the odds and ends that keep this place from falling down around my ears. With the holiday over, I’ll try to get back to something like a normal posting schedule here. In the meantime, if you really have an itch for more reading, take a look at the five “new” old posts from October 2006 that I put up earlier this morning.

Be thankful, or My Seven Favorite Sins…

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Thanksgiving is without a doubt my favorite holiday. Say what you want about Independence Day or Columbus Day, but for my money, Thanksgiving is that one most quintessentially American holiday. Basing a major national holiday around a table laden with high fat, high carb, loaded with sugar foods is just about the perfect celebration of gluttony. I have to think that no one could pull off that kind of holiday quite as well as America can and does year in and year out.

After our high calorie meal, the vast majority of us are going to spend a good part of the evening lying about the house inspecting inside of our eyelids. Score one for sloth. After we’ve sufficiently recuperated from our meal, as a nation we’ll waddle off into the cold November darkness to our retailers of choice. Once there, we’ll spend billions of dollars on trinkets and baubles of every type. If someone is unfortunate enough to get in our way, we’ll trample them in a rush to the shelves piled high with merchandise. We’ve taken a bite out of wrath, greed, and envy right there.

Now, while we’re waiting in the checkout line or once we finally get our precious haul back to the nominal safety of our respective places of residence, we’ll post on Facebook about what deals we were able to scavenge. Our friends and family will be so jealous! Nice to see you there, pride.

The only thing missing is lust, but look on the bright side… This four-day splurge-a-thon is just getting warmed up.

From the writer, editor, and publisher of jeffreytharp.com to all of you, Happy Thanksgiving!

This is definitely my favorite holiday.

Say anything…

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It’s the day before Thanksgiving, which means it doesn’t much matter what I write here. If historical precedent is to be believed, all of nine people will actually see it. Even so, it feels like I should make some kind of effort to eliminate a little more white space from the internet. That seems particularly important since throwing down a holiday edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week on Thanksgiving seems vaguely inappropriate, Besides, I want to reserve the right to skip tomorrow if that seems like a better alternative given the food coma tentatively scheduled to begin shortly after dinner is served.

In the spirit of the impending holiday, I’ve noticed that many of my friends have been listing the things they’re thankful for in a daily post on Facebook. It’s hard to disagree with most of them – friends, family, a roof over one’s head. I’m pretty sure I even saw Miller Light suck in there somewhere. I’ll simply say ditto. My list probably isn’t all that much different from anyone elses and since they’ve already covered the high points, the only thing I can think to add to the list is this: I am spectacularly thankful to have a shower that is now back in full working order. You don’t fully appreciate how nice a thing a working shower is until you’ve been living for three weeks with one that’s gone haywire.

So yeah, if last year was the year of being thankful for being back in Maryland, this is the Thanksgiving where I celebrate the marvel of indoor plumbing. Given this trend, look for next year to feature a deep, heartfelt appreciation for fire or the wheel.

Fame and fortune…

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Every artist has their medium of choice. Mine just happens to be PowerPoint. That’s convenient, because PowerPoint doesn’t demand a great deal of artistic skill. What it does demand is a willingness to go googly-eyed staring at twin monitors all day long while clicking on a selection of hundreds of small boxes in an effort to bring about the desired effect. Honest to God, sometimes after I get done with a set of charts, not even I know what they’re trying to say, but by God they look good doing it. And really, it’s all about bringing a good looking set of charts to the meeting. If push comes to shove, if they’re built right, the people in the room will be too dazzled by the graphics to be all that bothered by what they’re actually hearing.

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much of a street value placed on badass PowerPoint charts. I feel like there should be some kind of trendy art studio that specializes in this kind of thing. Like other great artists, I fear that my work will never be fully appreciated in my own lifetime. Many years from now, surely someone will stumble across a disk of my slides and realize, belatedly, that they are in the presence of a master, whose skill with a slide deck was truly underestimated.

As an alternative, perhaps I’ll start selling signed originals in the hallway after meetings. That’s a sure path to fame and fortune, right?

Lead me not into temptation…

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It’s getting to be that time of year when it becomes way to easy to fall out of the writing habit. It’s easy to skip a day here, and a day there. Then it becomes two days or three. Suddenly you find it’s been a week and despite that you still have nothing to say. After we week it feels damned near impossible to figure out how it was every part of your routine to begin with. The time starts sneaking away from you and you’ll have no idea where it’s gone.

I know it’s true not just because that’s what it feels like, but because I’ve got the numbers to prove it. November and December are consistently my worst months in terms of page visits. I’m more than willing to take part of the blame for that. I’m not as focused on keeping up the one-a-day rate when I’m distracted by food, family, travel, and friends. That’s just a fact of life. The other part of the equation is out of my hands though – it’s that there are just plain fewer people hanging around reading blogs between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know I’m guilty of neglecting many that I read on a regular basis at other times of the year, so mine shouldn’t be immune from the downturn in readers either.

I’m never going to pretent to have much of a clue about what compels anyone to read the trifles I leave here, so I can’t promise anything enlightening, newsworthy, or even particularly entertaining. What I can promise is that I’m going to do my best to keep up a steady drumbeat during the holiday season and not be led by the temptation to “take some time off” just because things happen to be a little slow. The fact is I’m lazy and getting things jumpstarted again after Christmas is just too much of a pain in the ass to want to deal with when the time comes. It’s far better to keep plugging away and let inertia carry me through the new year… or the Mayan apocalypse… whichever comes first.

I’ve been a bad, bad boy…

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It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. I don’t know exactly if that’s because things have gotten less stupid or I’m simply becoming use to the same level of stupid as before. Regardless, there are still a few moments when all I can do is sit back and shake my head.

As it turns out, I’ve been a bad, bad boy. I’ve been talking to people in other offices without the express, written permission of their supervisor. That, apparently, constitutes a gross violation of civil conduct and is an affront to the gods themselves. After half a career, you’d think I would remember that trying to get information directly from the source will do nothing but get you into trouble.

Instead of asking Person A directly for the information I need, the Official Process demands that I ask Person B, who will direct Person C to oversee the request for information and, who will thusly inform Person A that a request for information has been made. The information requested can then be transmitted back to me by the same circuitous route. Instead of taking 15 minutes, the process will take three days, involve, a minimum of two extra people, and has garnered three angry emails reminding me that “it’s not ok to talk to people from other offices without permission.” We could have saved an inordinate amount of time by any one of those three people simply answering the question rather than engaging in some half assed turf war, but there you have it, your bureaucracy in action… or is that your bureaucracy inaction?

So yes, please consider me sufficiently chastised for cheekily disregarding the standard routing of requests for information in an effort to actually get something done in a timely manner. Rest assured when it comes time to toss someone under the bus for delaying the project, I’ll have no qualms at all about reminding the Powers That Be who has been jamming their sabots into the machinery.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Now and then…

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Every now and then I stumble across several seriously good blog posts in the archive. If I do say so myself, I was in particularly good form between September 26th and October 5, 2006. If I were going to open a “Best of” section, I think four of the five entries would probably be in the running to be included. It’s hard to believe that six years ago I was just starting my start in Memphis… It’s even more surprising that I actually seemed to be enjoying it. What a difference four years and some keep personnel changes can make. Fortunately, no real damage was done, and I’ll always think of West Tennessee as my cautionary tale.

Size 12…

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Strip away the layers of technology, the fancy polo shirts, and khaki pants, and at my heart of hearts you’ll find that I’m actually a remarkably simple man. You’ll find that I’m the kind of guy who does what he says he’s going to do, when he said he’s going to do it, unless there are some truly exceptional circumstances preventing that from happening. The unfortunate side effect of that tendency is that it leads me to have that same expectation for the people and companies I deal with. There are only a handfull of things that make me as absolutely batshit crazy as taking time off, sitting around the house waiting, and then getting a call near the end of the scheduled “service window” letting me know that someone isn’t going to be able to make it out and that the appointment will need to be rescheduled for a more inconvenient time the following week. It’s even better when you call the other company who was supposed to do an estimate and they “can’t find a record of the appointment.” I’m serious. It makes me want to bash my head repeatedly against the nearest cinder block wall – right after I beat someone to a bleeding pulp with their own arms.

To the companies doing business at 866-366-2606 and 877-321-7038, I hope someone here on the interwebs hijacks your phone numbers and ties up your incoming lines for the next week or two. That would save me the trouble and the legal fees resulting from coming over there and driving one of my size 12 Doc Martens directly into your colon.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Power everything. As a rule I appreciate the power accessories that Toyota has jam packed into my Tundra. What I don’t like is that now that the days have turned brisk, my “automatic” power window has an annoying habit of going down about a third of the way and then stopping. Press the button again and It sluggishly goes down the rest of the way. It’s obviously some kind of issue with the electronics, but it means I spend most mornings hoping that it won’t get stuck halfway down when roll though the front gate at work on some 35 degree, rainy morning. I’m going to try nursing it though another 1000 miles until the truck goes in for its next oil change so I can kill both birds with one trip. Until then, I’m going to nostalgically wish that I could just make the necessary adjustments with an old fashioned hand crank rather than a rather suspect electric motor.

2. A cold dark place. Getting dark at 5PM sucks. It sucks worse when it’s accompanied by the temperature dropping like a stone. When I moved back to Maryland, part of me was happy at the idea of having an actual winter again. As the nights get longer and the ambient temperature gets colder, I’m beginning to rethink that particular part of my rationale. Since this is one of those gripes that there is absolutely no way to do anything about other than turn on every light in the house and throw another log on the fire, this has served no purpose other than making me feel slightly better by voicing my distinct displeasure at the current state of affairs.

3. Something to do. For the better part of the last week, I’ve had the overwhelming feeling that there was something I was supposed to do. I have no earthly idea what that might be, but it’s still a nagging thought in the back of my head. My Google calendar isn’t screaming that I missed anything important and I’m not getting any foreclosure or impending disconnection notices, so it can’t be anything too pressing. Knowing that it’s surely nothing important, though, doesn’t make it any less annoying.

The place to be…

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In case you’ve missed it, Sundays are special here at jeffreytharp.com. They’re the day I get to mostly turn my brain off and post some of the gems from a bygone era rather than try dredging up new material. I like to think of it as being like a TV show in syndication, except for the part where people get residuals when those old episodes show up again. Here’s it’s mostly just a good way to get all of my posts back under one roof.

While I was tinkering around with a few settings this weekend, I gave my metrics a good hard look and was surprised to see the total number of posts here steadily creeping towards the 1000 mark. After looking at the number of old MySpace posts that still need to make an appearance and doing some back of the napkin math, I’m pretty sure I’m actually already past that milestone. Nevertheless, I don’t feel right about making that official until I see the official WordPress post-counter roll over that third zero. Even with my five-every-Sunday posts, it’s going to be a few months before we cross that bridge. Don’t worry, though, I’ll be sure you let y’all know when we get there.

Like your average nine-year old, I like having something to look forward to almost as much as I enjoy actually experiencing or getting the thing itself. Since it doesn’t seem like there are any exotic trips or new toys in the immediate future, I’m pretty much throwing my lasso around 1000 as the next big thing. I know Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming, but those show up every year around this time, but how many times can you look back at six years of misspent time on the Internet and be truly amazed that you managed to come up with 1000 snarky, petulant, vaguely inappropriate, and occasionally heartfelt things to say. And it all started because MySpace use to be the place to be…