Author Archives: jdtharp

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Asking for volunteers. Send out the email as many times as you want, but no way, no how am I volunteering for a “special project” without first getting the skinny on what I’ll actually be doing. It’s not personal, but over the last decade I’ve learned that sticking your hand up and asking for a surprise almost never ends well.

2. Gay marriage. If you’re against gay marriage, then by all means, voice your dissent by not having or participating in one. But in since it’s 2012 and not 1612, could we all just stop for a minute and try not to inflict our own brands of puritan morality on everyone else in the room. If you’re going to call yourself conservative, then act like a conservative and tell the government to butt out of all aspects of our collective personal lives and not just the parts or actions that you personally agree with. That makes you a hypocrite, not a conservative.

3. Underwear bombs. If your God teaches you that filling your drawers with C4 and lighting the fuse is a guaranteed all access pass to all the best parts of the hereafter, you’re doing religion wrong. I’m serious, damnit. Why on earth are you praying to a supreme being that wants you to blow your own naughty bits off? Those 72 virgins aren’t much good to you when Mr. Happy gets vaporized. Asshats.

Fast food, but not really…

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There was a time in my life before I found myself fully entrenched in the middle of the organizational quagmire that is the federal bureaucracy. During that time, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, one of the many jobs I had was flipping burgers at the local McDonald’s. There’s a better than average chance I worked there with some of the people reading this post. Since I spent the better part of four years doing every job in the place from fry cook to cashier, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I can speak from experience, if not with authority on the issue.

If I remember my cheesy video training correctly, it’s considered bad form for a “guest” to wait in line for 35 minutes to place his order and get his food handed across the counter. Sure, if a couple of buses show up, it’s no unheard of, but for your standard lunchtime rush, it’s pretty much frowned upon. Especially when there are only seven people in the line in front of you. This isn’t rocket science after all. We’re putting pre-pattied portions of cooked meat on buns and deep frying potatoes until the buzzer rings for us to take them out and add salt. I’m pretty sure if I took of my tie and dug up my old apron, I could still show you how everything is done.

I’m sure there were extenuating circumstances. There almost always are. Even so, there’s never a really good reason for a burger joint to take more than half an hour to produce a regular menu item… especially when my only option for getting out of line at the point is elbowing my way through to the end or climbing over or under the stanchions. That’s just bad business and the only reason I’ll need to take my business next door whenever I feel the need for a greaseball cheeseburger.

Euro Trash…

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Free and open elections are wonderful things, except for the part where people tend to elect the kind of leaders they deserve instead of the kind they actually need. Getting yourself elected on a platform of more spending, lowering the retirement age, taxing the rich, and saying the hell with the global finance system is pretty much a cakewalk. Politics 101 is pretty much focused on telling the people whatever they need to hear to give you their vote. Unfortunately, Politics 410 is the real world practice of how to govern once you find yourself taking over the plush new office you won in the last election. I suspect our friends in France are going to discover that governing is a far more problematic exercise than simply getting elected.

We live in a wildly interconnected world, particularly when it comes to the economy. Unrest in Europe, bad decisions, and blatant disregard for economic fundamentals will ripple across the Atlantic and wash up on our shores as tidal waves if a balance in the system isn’t maintained. For a hundred years, the United States could be counted on to prop up the international economy in times of distress. This week, this month, this year, the story is a little different. We aren’t in a position to flood the market with liquidity. We’re just barely in a position to eek out positive GDP growth for ourselves, keeping our proverbial head above water as it were… Even that’s required borrowing completely unsustainable amounts of money.

The system, for the moment, is in a perilous balance. Trying to go it alone based on election year promises seems like a sure recipe for upending what small measure of stability the marketplace has managed to achieve this year. I just hope our friends across the pond have the good sense to know the difference between electioneering and governing. If they don’t, well, the global economy and our own personal economies could be a much more brutal looking place a year from now. Might as well open the door on a new bloody Dark Age.

See, and people say I can’t be hopelessly optimistic.

Monday…

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It’s Monday. That means I should write something even if all I want to do is ignore this whole writing thing and vege out in front of the television. It occurs to me that writing is a lot like exercise that way. No matter how much you know you should do it, you head concocts all sorts of new and interesting reasons why you should really put it off until tomorrow. After all, tomorrow you’ll be sure to have plenty of motivation and time and energy to spare, right? You see that’s the catch. It’s always easy to start something, but seeing it through the nowhere land between the beginning and the end is something else entirely. Still, writing is way more interesting than peddling away on that damnable stationary bike I have sitting in the basement. It’s possible that I may have stumbled upon a way to keep myself motivated on these many nights I don’t feel like I can churn out another word. All I have to do is remember that my other option is spending quality time spinning my wheel and going nowhere. Maybe it’s not the most healthy kind of motivation, but on Monday night, I’ll take what I can get.

Jackpot dreams…

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A disturbing number of things I say every week start with the phrase “When I hit the PowerBall…” Usually that’s leading to some discussion of buying an island somewhere in the South Pacific and doing my best to ignore the rest of the world. It occurs to me that my needs are really much more mundane. Sitting here tonight, I suspect I could be bought off with much less than a full-blown lottery jackpot. Sure, the island or a well fortified Montana compound would be a nice touch, but I suspect I’d be perfectly happy just sitting here on the porch with the dogs at my feet and my nose stuck in a good book. I think I could potentially entertain myself like that for years, as long as I didn’t have a tiny little voice in the back of my head reminding me that I have to get up at first light tomorrow to go sit in a cube for eight hours. It seems the better the weekend, the heavier the weight of Sunday night bears down. Bugger all.

Deliverance…

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May 4th isn’t a day particularly noted in the annals of world history. To me, though, May 4, 2011 resounds with just as much meaning as July 4, 1776 or October 14, 1066. May 4th, you might remember, is the anniversary of my deliverance. It’s the day I got the long sought after call to end my long, unhappy exile in Memphis and return forthwith to my right and proper home in the great State of Maryland. I may have spent happier days, but I’m sure I can’t remember when.

It’s been a turbulent, chaotic, and altogether expensive year setting things right after they went so badly wrong, but I don’t begrudge it an instant of the aggravation or expense. It would have been a deal at ten times the cost as far as I’m concerned.

A year’s distance has softened the worst of the hard edges that surrounded my departure. In fact, some parts of my time in Memphis I can even look back on fondly now. Knowing that 90% of my problems there were attributable by a single individual is still a bitter pill to swallow. Then again, if it hadn’t been for that narcissistic prima donna I might be in Memphis still, rather than having fought my way back to the shores of the Chesapeake.

Every time I’ve gone away I’ve always managed to find my way home again. This time I’ve landed where I belong and it’s going to take a pry bar, a court order, and high explosive ordinance to get me to budge.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Office politics. Henry Kissinger once said, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” Dr. Kissinger is a smart guy, but his thinking was too small in this case. His principle ultimately includes office politics of any stripe. Fighting over who gets credit, who’s in charge, and for the seat next to the high lord at supper are exactly the factors that prevent anything from actually getting accomplished. Useless bloody infighting over scraps is apt to make me say something stupid.

2.Colo-rectal examination. I don’t care how good a professional relationship you have with someone, the people you work with never need to hear the explicit details of your upcoming and/or previous colo-rectal examination. Some things are best left within the confines of doctor-patient confidentiality.

3. The 5-day work week. Whoever decided that the work week should be five days and the weekend only two needs punched in the face. Repeatedly. With a Buick.

Occupy What?

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I’ve always loved a good protest. Mostly because I enjoy both pointing and laughing. Even so, I was delighted to see the particularly dismal turnout for the “General Strike” called by our friends at Occupy. In case anyone out there missed it, yesterday was May 1st, also known as International Workers’ Day. Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, it was marked my parades and rallies in Red Square. If you’re a kid of the 80s, you’ve got to remember the footage of smiling, waving Soviet strongmen standing atop Lenin’s tomb watching the cream of the Red Army passing in review. You could always depend on the USSR to put on a good show. Their dependability is something I’ve come to miss in an international adversary as of late, but I digress.

Occupy Wall Street was a media darling last Fall. They were going to change the world and now they’re barely a whisper. It’s got to be hard for a movement when even their own spokesmen can’t really identify what they’re for and against, or even really what they’re doing other than causing problems for working stiffs like cops and small business owners unfortunate enough to be in the areas they’ve decided to “occupy.”

So it seems their call to action went largely unheeded by rest of us who celebrated International Workers’ Day by, you know, going to work and earning our pay for the day. Now that’s something worth celebrating. Happy belated IWD, Comrades.

Off…

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You know the day has gone off the rails when you sit down to write a blog post about how off you’re feeling and just can’t quite muster the right words to deliver the message. It’s not been a particularly bad day, a busy one, but not bad in the grand scheme of how bad days can get. I think I just need a few hours of uninterrupted quiet. Even as I’m sitting here writing this, the drone of the air conditioner in the next room is starting to get annoying. A more introspective person might wonder why that is. For now I’m more firmly in the camp of those who say “meh” and head to the kitchen to find a cold beer. I usually like to watch television programs that teach me something, but tonight I think I’ll be more than pleased to find something that lets me be perfectly mindless. Have you seen television lately? Yeah. I don’t think that will be a problem.

Chet Arthur…

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Once a year, I order a set of “proof” silver coins, a proof silver eagle, and a 1/10 ounce gold eagle from the US Mint. I don’t think of them as an investment so much as I think of them as pretty objects that I enjoy collecting. Maybe they’re worth marginally more now than they were when I bought them, maybe they’re not. Either way.

I appreciate the fine work the mint does. Their process for engraving and stamping coins is pretty much the pinnacle of an art form that’s been around since the beginning of recorded history and will probably be dead before the century is out. My level of appreciation, however, does not go so far as making me desirous of ordering a Chester A. Arthur Presidential $1 Coin 100-coin Bag. As impressive a specimen as I’m sure they are, I don’t have a clue what I, or anyone else, would do with a 100 count big o’ mint-y fresh Chet Arthurs… Though I have to give credit to them for smacking a label on the bag and marketing them as a collector’s items. I guess that’s what happens when you wake up one morning and realize that the money-spending public doesn’t want a dollar coin any more today than they did Susie Anthony got her mug on a dollar in 1979.

I don’t know why anyone would ever say that the government doesn’t pay attention to the will of the people? As much as I apreciate the email letting me know it’s available, I think I’ll take a pass on this once in a lifetime opportunity.