It’s a case of now you see it, now you don’t. After five weeks of haranguing the property manager about getting the junk Expedition out of the driveway, I was forced to demonstrate my level of resolve. I guess most people gripe and complain initially, but then accept whatever is happening and quiet down. I’m not wired that way. Never have been. I start off complaining, ratchet up the noise level, and then, when I’ve pretty much exhausted every other option I can think of, come out swinging. Today was pretty much that day. And was really the first major improvement/repair project around here that went exactly by the numbers. I called the towing company, they sent out a truck, and the POS Expedition that had been mocking me by its very presence for the last 32 days was gone before I got back to the house this evening. Getting my belongings delivered felt good. Getting them unboxed felt better. But getting rid of this eyesore is the first time in a month that I feel like I’ve really accomplished something. Plus I know it’ll piss off the property manager to no end since he says he wanted to part it out to recoup someone of the money they lost on the last tenant. I guess putting that thumb in his eye makes it $200 well spent.
Author Archives: jdtharp
Free to a good home…
Today marks the official one month mark since I moved in. That’s enough time to finally have things (mostly) settled and to figure out how livable the house is. All things considered, the place itself isn’t bad, really. There are a few layout issues and plenty of things that I would have done differently if it were my house – like the magenta bathtub and toilet. I mean seriously, how on earth did anyone ever thing that was a good idea? Other than that, the place seems to have good bones and is suffering only from the obvious neglect of the previous tenants and the general laziness of the property manager… Which of course brings us to the crux of the matter: A full month after moving in, there is still a Ford Expedition sitting in the driveway.
If someone drove up with a rollback and “disappeared” this Expedition, I certainly wouldn’t be filing a police report. I’d probably be willing to give them a hand loading it on the truck. It’s got a little body damage and I don’t have keys or anything, but I’d guess that you could make a good profit parting it out. I don’t have the time or energy to do it myself… and the point, of course, is to get it out of my driveway and into someone else’s. Maybe I’ll put a “Free to good home” sign on it before I leave for work in the morning.
Since I think 30 days is more than sufficient for the property manager to take care of this issue (and since the car seems to meet the legal definition of abandoned), I’ll be calling the Motor Vehicle Administration and the local police tomorrow to start the process of formally declaring it abandoned. That takes about 30 days from start to finish, but after that I can file for title and then sell the damned thing myself. I hoped I wouldn’t have to be a douchebag about this, but from here on out that seems to be the way we’re going to have to handle things. That’s probably what I should have done from the beginning. Serves me right for trying to be a nice guy.
Neighborly observation…
I watch people. I don’t mean that so much in the Creepy McCreeperson kind of way, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated in watching people and trying to figure them out. Most of the time, it’s pretty easy to read them. It helps that most people are pretty dumb and almost all of us are predictable on some level. I’ve had a few weeks to watch the family next door now. It’s surprising what you can see when you don’t have a six foot privacy fence between you and the rest of the planet, but I digress.
The thing I’ve noticed most often is how tired the guy who lives next door looks. 6:30 in the morning leaving for work, he looks tired. Cutting the grass in the evening, he looks tired. We all work, pay bills, and keep up with the endless list of things that need done to keep our houses from falling in around our ears. We all get tired. The difference I’ve noticed is that even when I’m tired, I go to bed, sleep for a few hours, and wake up refreshed. All you’ve got to do is look in this guy’s eyes and you can tell there’s no waking up rested going on there. He’s a nice enough guy to say hello to, but he’s got that vacant 1000 yard stare that speaks of being completely exhausted. It’s that look of exhaustion that really made me think.
We never really know what’s going on in other people’s lives, but I always look askance at couples who claim they can’t get everything done. Seriously? There are two of you doing what one of me does. That would be cleaning the house, doing the laundry, cooking, yard work, washing the car, grocery shopping, running errands, making the money, and generally managing life. The difference between us is that I’m doing it with half the manpower you have available. Without knowing the intricacies of your life, it seems that if one of me can manage to get it all done, two of you should be able to at least keep up.
Inner teenager…
It’s Friday. Before a three day weekend. I’m more than a little surprised that there are more than three people even in the office pretending to work today. Even with a mostly full staff pecking away at their keyboards, it’s painfully obvious that the biggest game in town today is watching the clock roll on towards 4:00… or 3:01 if the powers that be keep up with long-standing pre-holiday tradition. Either way, it’s safe to say we can mostly write today off as professionally useless.
On a related note, I’m usually accused of being a 60 year old man at heart, but long weekends have a tendency to bring out my inner teenager. The anticipation of being turned loose. The rush of heading out the door. Rolling down the windows. Turning the radio up. Forgetting about work for a few days. For me, at some basic level, that’s what freedom feels like. Maybe that’s not such a bad way to kick off the Independence Day weekend.
40 hours…
The 40-hour work week where everyone arrives and departs at the same time each day probably made eminent sense when it was instituted for a country with a massive manufacturing sector committed to assembly line methodologies. When you’re living in an electronic age and the output product of your efforts live in a storage device as a series of ones and zeros, a fully regimented work schedule is a little harder to understand. In a plant where they build cars, you can expect X number of frames to roll by a given point on the line each eight hour shift every day of the week. OK, a standard 8-hour day makes sense there. In the information sector, Wednesdays might be the heavy volume day and represent 11 hours of required work while Monday only requires five hours of work. Even though the requirements have shifted, we largely cling to that magic eight hours a day, five days a week concept.
If I were king for a day, I’d propose a new standard for information workers. In this system, you’re paid your base salary for 2080 hours a year. On days when you get the work done in 5 hours, feel free to go on home. On days when workload is high, plan on staying a little longer to get it done. All things being equal, I’d be willing to bet that in most cases, the time would even itself out over the long term.
Of course we know that all things are not equal. Some people are going to abuse a system based on them being honest about their workload. Some people will work half days every day and others will put in 12 hours every day. So yeah, I intellectually understand that there are pretty high barriers to getting away from the standard work week. I get that my new system is a managerial nightmare and completely impractical, but on those days when I blow through my assignments in 4 hours, it sure would be nice to have the option of punching out for the day rather than sitting around watching the clock tick on towards the end of the day…. because let’s face it, when their actual work is done, no one is sitting around dreaming about what other great things they can do for the overlords, right?
The process…
I wish I had more time to just sit and write. There are always enough things that need to get done that writing never seems to fall at the top of the list, but there are still hundreds of ideas, even one or two big ones, that are just screaming to get out. Finding the time to massage them through from concept to notes to drafts to reality, though, has been the challenge that I haven’t been able to overcome.
One of the definitive characteristics of writers, of course, is that they write. They have a process. My process is mostly jamming 150-300 words down on a page in whatever free minutes of the evening I have available. It’s hard to work out the definitive history of anything 150 words at a time. And thinking about telling the epic tale of the rise and fall of a small government organization a paragraph at a time? Forget about it. You’ll end up with pages of notes and a couple of intro paragraphs and then lose focus completely.
For me, the process is not working. Maybe I’m not supposed to write an epic. Maybe the story is supposed to come together in 200 word segments; one blog post at a time. Maybe I need to change direction completely with my idea of what it means to write. Whatever the case, I need to find a new process – one that works better for me and one where I can start seeing the threads of the story coming together. It could be time for a change of focus around here.
Message received…
As much as I try to be a good trooper, there’s just something in my personality that seems to pick up on the snarky, the jaded, and the slightly bitter. What can I say; government service brings out the best in my inner malcontent. That makes it hard not to pick out and focus on the little sound bites that hit your ear on a daily basis. Like first thing this morning, when I heard a snipped of conversation between a vexed young line employee and a not particularly grizzled officer turned civilian. She was asking why things needed to be done a certain way, which based on my understanding of the issue seemed like a perfectly reasonable question. His response, though, was telling: That’s the guidance we got from higher; we don’t ask questions, we just do what it says.
That pretty much tells me what I need to know about how to go along to get along in this little part of Uncle Sam’s extended family.
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.
Being local…
Although I’m one of the last in, I think I’m actually one of only two native Marylanders in the office. As far as I can tell, everyone else has come to the north eastern corner of Maryland from their pre-BRAC homes in New Jersey. For years now, I’ve spent a good portion of my free time griping and complaining about how jacked up things were in Memphis and just how different and therefore bad it was. I’m realizing that these people are in the same boat, though in a different location. For them, it’s Maryland that’s strange and different… and nothing here is right. The traffic is jacked up. The network blows. They’re still working on the building when it was supposed to be done six months ago. Crime is terrible. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to find their favorite food. Everything I ever said about Memphis, they’re saying about Aberdeen… though I sort of chuckle when I pass by and hear someone complain about driving the whole two and a half hours to get back home. If nothing else, it’s fun to watch them get worked up.
Especially when you know they’ve got it all wrong. It must be terrible to be this close to the center of the universe and not even know it.
OCD Takes a Night Off…
One of the ongoing challenges with my self-diagnosed mild-OCD is that there are a whole bevy of things that normal people seem able to put on a back burner that stay a priority for me no matter what else is going on. That shaggy grass is going to get cut no matter how god awful the neighbor’s yard looks – and it’s going to get trimmed to. The laundry is going to get done once a week even though I could probably go three or four weeks without technically needing to wash clothes. Things are going to happen on a schedule even though there’s no rea practical reason why they need to. I’m a creature of habit, we all know this.
Tonight was the first night since I’ve been in the house when the compulsion to “do things” hasn’t been triggered the moment I walked in the door. The guest bedroom still needs put together and the basement looks, well, like a basement, but tonight I just came in, sat down and watched television rather than listened to it while doing three other things. It was sort of nice in a complete slacker kind of way. That’s not saying that the little voice inside my head that likes everything to be “just so” won’t make himself known again by this time tomorrow, but for tonight, everyone including the dogs seem content just to let things be.
Signing on…
No PC? Check. No phone service? Check. No building ID card? Check. Two year old three ring binder full of outdated briefings to spend your first week “reviewing?” Check. No cell coverage at your desk? Check.
It’s fun to be the new guy. It’s a new week… It’s a new job… but it sure does have a familiar flavor.
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.
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