Author Archives: jdtharp

Treason…

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This Monday Rasmussen released a poll that proclaimed a “pre-revolutionary” sentiment in the United States. Watching the home grown violence gripping our allies in the UK, in Spain, and in Greece, we should take a hard look at what it means to be “pre-revolutionary.” A revolution isn’t just tearing down the machine with no ideas about what the next best thing should look like. Can you imagine George Washington or Ben Franklin simply throwing out the British and then going home to hope for the best… but only after looting all the stores in Philadelphia?

I know there are plenty of people out there agitating and that there are a few of them who have no purpose other than just wanting to see the world burn. Our forefathers granted us a republic and we owe it to ourselves and our own posterity to avail ourselves of every built in electoral and procedural safeguard to maintain it. I swore an oath to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. When I took that oath, I never dreamed that it would be the latter that most worried me.

If there is doubt for anyone reading this, let me go on the record in as loud and clear a voice as I can muster: The faceless mob, the rabble, who use the present adversity to feed into this call for insurrection deserve nothing more than a traitor’s death. In a turbulent world, we are still the last great bulwark between civilization and the abyss. Should be stumble or if we shrug, beyond here there be monsters.

Nervous condition…

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I’ve slowly come to identify a condition in one of my new colleagues. Apparently when working on short timelines or under stress, this individual’s default setting is “talk, nonstop.” It doesn’t seem to make much difference that if one is on a demanding timeline usually that means we are all plugging away on our own similarly pressing issues. I’ve tried the usual “polite” responses of keeping my responses short, answering while continuing to peck away at the keyboard, not making eye contact, etc. Next we’ll be moving along to the less gentle “look, I’ve got a lot of work, let’s pick this up later” or the even more blatant listening to my iPod at my desk routine although that’s usually just me sitting at my desk with earbuds in not actually listening to anything. If that fails, it’s possible that I’ll have to bludgeon this person to death with a hole punch and hide the body in the “protected wetland” (aka swamp) behind the building.

I have no earthly idea what would give someone the impression that I’m a good listener and even less of an idea why they think anyone at all would care about the inane prattle that dribbles out of their filthy sewers. Let’s be honest, I’m here to do a job and get paid. If I want to talk about something that’s not work, I’ll call one of my actual friends. While I’m here, all I need you to do is STFU and let me do a day’s work, ok?

Awesome.

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.

In the stretch…

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The last two weeks have been the longest stretch since I moved in that something hasn’t gone horribly wrong. Nothing has broken. Nothing is leaking. There’s no new mold to report. No one has dropped of a junk car in the driveway. Things have settled into a relative state of normal. If anything, normal makes me nervous. It’s like the prelude to something worse. The calm before the storm if you will. It’s the new normal, means that I’m in a perpetual state of waiting on the other shoe to drop.

I should probably just embrace it and try to ride out the last two days of the workweek into a long weekend and trip home. There will be plenty of time for mayhem and chaos after Sunday. For now what I really need is a nice calm couple of days leading into what is looking likely to be the closest thing I do this year to taking a summer vacation. All is well. Things are good and my stress level is way, way down… so why do I feel the need for some all-American debauchery bubbling just under the surface?

Reunion…

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This weekend the Westmar High School Class of 1996 will celebrate its 15-year reunion. A decade and a half. Three lustra. Fifteen years. Nothing in terms of geologic time, of course, but long enough in the hear-and-now world. These five year anniversaries are as good a time for reflection as any and you know from reading that I’m not one to let a good anniversary pass without saying something sappy about it. So here it is …

I have a confession to make. I don’t feel all that different from the much younger version of myself. The thinking part of my brain keeps insisting that I should. That I should maybe feel like more of an adult somehow. I’ve added some paunch around the middle and lost more hair around the top, but I really feel pretty much like the same guy I was then. I mostly like the same food. I mostly like the same music (don’t judge me). A lot of the things that were important to me then are still the ones that are important to me now. Maybe I’m a little more moderate in my politics than I was when I was 18 and knew everything, but that doesn’t seem to make much difference because ultimately, I’m still me at the core.

I know there are plenty of Wildcats from that long-ago class who have their own high school age kids. There’s a thought that sticks with you. Surely they feel different, right? Metaphysically changed somehow by the passage of years and accretion of responsibility? I’ve been out there and seen whole big swaths of the world. I feel like I’ve seen it all… and I’ve mostly done it all. Sometimes to my own detriment, but always good for a “life experience” credit. I’ve done great things and I’ve had my self confidence shattered. Hell, sometimes it’s happened on the same day. But through it all, I don’t feel any different. Same guy, just with a few added layers of experience.

I get up in the morning, put on a sharp shirt and a tie and spend eight hours pretending that I’m a knowledgeable professional… but at heart I’m still the same guy who mostly wants to hang out with his friends and stay up too late shooting pool or sneak up to Frostburg to see a girl. Under the thin veneer of adulthood, I still like driving too fast and going to Denny’s at odd hours. If having a house, holding a steady job, and paying your bills is the defining characteristic of being “grown,” I’ve got it covered. If it’s some deeper change in your psyche, well, that’s a little more problematic.

It’s one of those deep thoughts I have lying in bed before sleep comes: Am I the only one who feels this way? Is everyone else really an adult inside their own head and I’m the only one who feels like he’s playing a part just well enough not to get caught? Maybe I am… in which case this entire post as served as nothing other than a 500-word admission of guilt. Surely I’m not the only one out there faking it, right? Even if we’re all not kids any more, I’m looking forward to seeing the old gang again.

Potty talk…

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Depending on where you work, there are many things that must be handled in a “right now” time-sensitive manner. Without question, sometimes minutes or seconds count. In fairness, though, 99.997% of the time, what we’re doing doesn’t fall into that category. We’re not defusing bombs and we’re not performing heart surgery. We’re writing reports and creating PowerPoint presentations.

Occasionally, because of pressure being exerted from echelons above reality or our own inflated sense of importance, we’ll mistake our report writing and PowerPoint building for an actual life or death situation. I’m going to go on the record here and say that no matter how important you think the issue is, there’s nothing we’re doing on a day-to-day basis that can’t wait until we step away from the urinal.

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.

Citizen…

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It took two months to get the widgets lined up and a particularly bruising two hour visit to the Motor Vehicle Administration, but I’m pleased to announce that as of two days ago, I am now officially licensed and registered in the State of Maryland. Add that to the recent income tax deduction from my pay and it seems that I’m a citizen again and not just a resident alien. I sincerely hope that this brings to a close the saga of moving home from Tennessee. After this experience it’s safe to say that I have no intention of going anywhere ever again. Well, technically, I think that means I’ll be leaving my stuff here. I still have a little too much of the old wanderlust to stay put completely. But as far as a home base goes, it’s me and Maryland till the wheels come off.

Suggestion box…

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Every organization that pretends to focus on customer service has a suggestion box, or comment cards, or some kind of web survey for the good intentioned or flustered to “make their voice heard” by management. That’s all well and good, because usually at the bottom of the suggestion box is a black hole that devours any kudo or complaint before it has a chance to ever again see the light of day. Sadly, sometimes a well intentioned someone will mistakenly take one of these pearls of wisdom to heart and launch an all-out blitz to review an unsolicited recommendation.

Now usually I can avoid these academic exercises, but recently I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got tagged with giving one the once over. The truth is, what’s being suggested might actually be a good idea, but I’ll never know because the form was written in a language caught somewhere between incomprehensible gibberish and techno-babble. Instead of writing this off as the rambling of a well-intentioned crank, I’ve got to try to track this whackjob down and pick his brain before we send along a formal thanks, but no thanks letter.

Meh, that’s time well spent.

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

4 hours…

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I took four hours off tomorrow afternoon. Normally that’s good enough reason for celebration, but in this case it’s time dedicated to hanging out with the fine men and women of the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration. Come on… The filling out forms. The taking bad pictures. The standing in line. The standing in another line. The filling out more forms. And finally forking over a fistful of cash. That sounds like some real kicks on a Friday afternoon, right? If this goes as smoothly as everything else involved with this move, it should be finished with everything sometime next Tuesday. With the stack of paperwork I’m taking with me, I think I have all the bases covered… Which practically guarantees things will go horribly wrong in a new and interesting variety of ways.

Superpower America (or How’s that for Mixed Metaphors)…

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The actual future is going to look different than the future we thought we were going to have. That’s true if only because we’re notoriously bad at predicting the future – We’re all still waiting on our flying cars, right? I don’t think it’s going to be radically different to the point that Canada starts being cool or Hollywood starts making good movies (that would be some kind bizzaro universe). I actually have a sneaking suspicion that the future is going to be painful. Painful in that we’ve spent the last 30 years binging on cheep booze and grease ball cheeseburgers and now we’re about to wake up with a national hangover the likes of which none of us has ever seen. The fight to raise the debt ceiling ain’t nothing compared to the battle that will be joined when we realize we’ve got to actually start paying down the debt itself.

The future is going to seem painful because there’s every possibility that we’re about to experience a world where Superpower America isn’t. Those of us who grew up beyond the shadow of the cold war are going to have the hardest time adjusting because we’ve never had to moderate our expectations about anything really. You guys know I’m not exactly an alarmist, but my read of the situation is that bottom line: Superpower America is too expensive. How we go about fixing that with the least pain possible (the no pain option is well off the table), remains to be seen. So too does whether we have the national will to collectively make hard decisions about what is in the long term national interest and what isn’t; what we can pay for and what we can’t. These decisions matter. Economic realities matters.

Don’t believe me? Ask Superpower USSR how it works out when you pretend economics is an imaginary science. Spending ourselves into oblivion isn’t an option, but I wonder who’s going to be the first to offer up their sacred cows so we can try to avoid slaughtering the whole herd.

The Big D…

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Attention Colleagues:

Open bay cubicles are not the appropriate venue to discuss the ongoing drama of your divorce proceedings, the backbiting antagonism of your ex-husband, or details of the child support decree that you’ve decided to fight. As interested as the person you’re talking to might find this tragic tale of woe, the other 12 people sitting in the room aren’t nearly as interested. Well, technically, I suppose they are, but mostly because it’s grist for the lunchtime gossip mill.

I wouldn’t go so far as suggest that there is a firewall between your professional and personal life, but perhaps it would be wise to install some kind of filter on what you decide the entire office needs to know. Really, it’s as much for your own good as it is for ours.
Thanks for your kind attention in this matter.

Very respectfully yours,

Jeff

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