Category Archives: Life

Incantation…

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My entire life, I’ve been searching for just the right combination of words. I’ve always been convinced that words are important. They have meaning. I’m convinced that the right word and the right time can save your soul. In the right hands, words are a real thing of beauty. In the wrong ones you wonder if we all weren’t better off huddled around a paleolithic fire grunting and pointing to make our will known.

Maybe I’m biased because words are the gift I got. Other people got chiseled good looks and a full head of hair. I got words. That’s not a complaint. If I had to pick, I wouldn’t have had it differently. Words are my big gun. They’re the thing in my arsenal that make me think if I look just hard enough, put them in the right order, speak the incantation just so, I can turn the tide. It might not always seem this way, but when the moment calls for it I can be one seriously articulate sonofabitch.

I can count the times words let me down on one hand – maybe two if I really stretch way back. Those moments stand out mostly because they’ve almost always come as a complete shock. Words move people when you get them in the proper order and everything is supposed to follow from there. Except sometimes they don’t follow. Much to my chagrin I’ve had to learn repeatedly that you hit every syllable dead on and still fail to make a mark or carry your point. They’re not moments I like to dwell on, even though I’ve been doing that quite a bit these last few days.

It’s one of those unfortunate instances when best effort doesn’t stack up to good enough. It’s humbling and paves the way to all manner of self-doubt. It’s a bad head space to be in, but you can’t fight it – not directly, anyway. The best I’ve ever been able to manage is to drop my shoulder and shove through while hoping it doesn’t take too long to blunder through to a point where the world feels normally again.

Should’ve learned to weld…

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Monday evening. Milepost One in the long march towards the three-day weekend. One of my go to responses to many events at the office these days is an exasperated reminder to the world that I could have learned to weld, apprenticed to be a plumber, or picked up any number of practical skills that ensured my long term employability. I’m told that at least one of my high school teachers recommended that amidst my perpetual struggle to grasp the basic concepts of algebra. Perhaps the old crank was on to something after all.

Instead of doing something productive like learning carpentry, I went to college and promptly put the thought of alternatives out of my head. I do wonder sometimes at what kind of difference it would have made had I found myself practicing an occupation where the end result is something to physically show for your efforts at the end of a day’s work. At least part of me thinks that’s got to be personally fulfilling on some level. Or maybe from where I sit it just seems more fulfilling than being the guy who churns out the memo with the fewest spelling and punctuation errors.

At the rate my bits and pieces seem to be grinding down, I’m not under any delusions of transforming myself into a tradesman at this late date. Between the shoulder problems, lower back pain, clicking knee, and the occasional bit of foot trouble behind a desk is probably the most reasonable place in the world for me to stay. While I’m there, though, I’m going to spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking that I should’ve learned to weld. With all the wisdom of hindsight I think a career that results in something less ephemeral than a voluminous stack of PowerPoint slides would have suited me.

Absolutely inconceivable…

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inconceivableSure, I’ve been a curmudgeon for as long as I can remember, but the flood of pictures this weekend of many, many of my friend’s kids heading off to homecoming left me feeling a bit like I’d stepped through the looking glass. I mean weren’t we the ones going to those dances just a year or two ago? It’s inconceivable that anyone I grew up with could be old enough to comment about their offspring’s high school milestones.

Despite my 9PM bed time, constant state of near exhaustion, and the nagging aches and pains that seem to accompany me everywhere now, I don’t feel like all that much time has passed. I don’t feel that far separated from our younger selves. Maybe I’m better informed, a little more cynical, and a lot more medicated, but I still feel a strong connection to that dopy, awkward version of me.

Seeing so many of the next generation on the cusp of adulthood themselves is absolutely inconceivable. So if anyone needs me, I’ll be busy rejecting reality… and possibly checking to see if we can get a group discount if we all order our Life Alert systems at the same time.

Why I don’t trust Fridays…

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Almost universally people in the western world welcome Friday as the gateway to the weekend. I was like that once, but that hasn’t been for a very long time. More often, Friday’s are when someone at echelons higher than reality has an “oh shit” moment and realizes that they have a bright idea that can’t possibly wait until Monday to pass around. That leads to unplanned meetings and basically having the day’s entire agenda thrown over the side well before the end of the day.

If I can use this past Friday as my case in point, here’s the high points for the day:

– 10:00AM – Spend an hour trying to find diplomatic way to avoid taking guidance from people I don’t work for, but who outrank me by like 173 levels.
– 11:29AM – Realtor 1 calls with full-price offer on the Memphis house.
– 11:42AM – Realtor 2 calls with confirmation that the St. Mary’s Condo has been leased.
– 12:15PM – Signed acceptance of the offer on the Memphis house.
– 12:34PM – Received copy of signed lease for St. Mary’s condo.
– 4:00PM – End of Tour / Stuck in ongoing meeting
– 4:31PM – Actual End of Tour
– 4:35PM – Realtor 1 calls to say there’s a problem with the paperwork and buyer wants to reopen negotiation.
– 4:36PM – Inform Realtor 1 that I’m already giving the house away and don’t intend to get mugged too.
– 4:45PM – Truck windshield cracks
– 5:15PM – Arrive home / Find rum
– 7:59PM – Realtor 1 calls to tell me the buyers decided the paperwork was ok as written.
– 8:00PM – Bangs head on table repeatedly while mumbling softly to self.
– 9:00PM – Lights out / Quiet reflection / Fight urge to set the world on fire.

That, in so many nut shells is how I’ve found most Fridays tend to go. Whatever stupid hasn’t happened during the other four working days of the week will accrete to Friday and conspire to overwhelm you in an absolutely unpredictable avalanche of equally ridiculous, but mostly unrelated events. So yeah, you could say I have trust issues with Friday.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Decisions. I’m theoretically leading a project right now. I say theoretically because every time we get together to discuss it, we revisit and rehash decisions that I was under the impression were made a month or two ago. But no, instead of actually trying to move the ball forward, we want to spend our time going over and over and over and over and over the same damned material. I have to wonder if the weekly outcome would be any different if organizations didn’t send a different representative to this exercise in futility each week. Then maybe we could get a little institutional memory going and I could wrap up a Thursday without without my blood pressure treading dangerously close to stroke territory. All for the want of decisions that actually stick once they’re made.

2. Thursday Dinner. I try to cook a big meal every Sunday – enough so there are two or three days of leftovers and I don’t have to do any heavy cooking after work. By Thursday night, though, even the biggest of meals has either disappeared into my gullet or is just no longer appetizing. As much as a creature of habit as I am, eating the same dinner four days in a row is a touch too far for me. That’s generally how you end up having scrambled eggs and cinnamon toast for dinner on Thursday night. Not that I dislike either of those things, but after a long stupid day something more substantial would have been nice. Sadly, something more substantial would have also required far more effort than I was willing to put in.

3. Guilt. Most nights, especially now that it’s getting dark earlier, Maggie and Winston are happy to snooze peacefully under the kitchen table while I try to combine words into sentences and sentences into complete thoughts. On other nights, Winston tries to be a 40 pound lap bulldog and Maggie somehow manages to wedge herself between my elbow and the keyboard. They’ve been in “needy” mode all week… and while I couldn’t do without them, it would be nice if I’d have bothered to raise more independent children.

The paranoia of a idle mind…

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First the good news: The doc seems to think that with continued exercises and stretching, my shoulder should remain serviceable into the foreseeable future. Unless something changes, I’ve managed to escape the need for an MRI and potential surgery. It’s hard not to like that kind of report.

The next bit of his spiel was less ideal – apparently there were some “anomalous” results from my last round of blood work. The minute a sawbones breaks out the phrase “it’s probably nothing to be concerned about”, I start getting twitchy. Having blood drawn for a retest of the ol’ liver was not part of today’s original agenda… but given the last decade of being kept alive by chemistry, I don’t I shouldn’t be awfully surprised when it throws a few anomalies here and there.

While he was finalizing my chart for the day, the last thing he offered was to “throw in an HIV test” if I wanted one. Apparently that’s something they’re offering to everyone this month thanks to a new CDC recommendation. I’m assuming he didn’t offer based on my looking like an IV drug user or some kind of “deviated prevert.” Nonetheless, I figured while they have a needle stuck in my arm, why not offer up the second vial.

Up until now I’ve never so much as pondered the possibility of HIV. Let’s be honest here, I’m a middle age, overweight, wanna-be hermit who spends his free time reading, writing, and making sure the lawn is cut “just so.” I’m not sure how much sex the good doctor thinks I’m having, but apparently he thinks it’s a lot and that I’m probably doing it unprotected with complete strangers. I’m not sure if I should be proud or offended. At any rate, even though the results are a foregone conclusion, the damned test has been drifting around the back of my mind all day even though it would do as much good to sit here and worry about a satellite falling out of orbit and landing on me.

This is one of those times when living inside my head is an awfully troublesome place to be.

Gratification…

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I know my sense of how the universe works is probably a little off by “normal” standards, but I find something deeply gratifying about telling Outlook to turn on my out-of-office message. It’s one of those rare bits of the day that feel like I really got something accomplished, namely that I’ve officially told anyone trying to track me down that I won’t be checking voice messages or email for the next seven days.

That’s not strictly true, of course. I’ll still be tethered as tightly as ever to my own electronics, but for these next few days anyone looking for me at my desk or eagerly awaiting a response is going to have to cool their jets while I go do other, more interesting things.

Because there are no free lunches in this life, I know all this means is the pile of things on my desk, jammed into my inbox, and waiting on me to “push three to hear your messages now” will be immense by the time I get back next week. That’s just going to have to be next week’s problem. I’ve only got the RAM onboard to be concerned with so many things at one time and frankly none of the issues on or around my 50 square feet of cubicle are even close to making the cut.

The Rolling Stones…

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I had most of a post written tonight before that rational part of my brain took over and demanded every word of it be consigned to the the electronic trash. It was a good post with an authentic voice, but in the end that wasn’t enough to save it. Throwing those few choice words out to the universe would have made me feel momentarily better. That wasn’t a good enough reasn to hit “post” though.

I let the interwebs get a good look at most of what’s going on in my head, but as it turns out there are a few doors I’m just not willing to open – or more precisely I’m not willing to leave them open long enough for anyone to get a decent look. Some topics I simply reserve to myself not because they’re unfit for publication but because even in the electronic age some thoughts should be private. Some should fester, be mulled over, and chased in that most personal of space between your ears. Although, I’m as guilty as anyone of being in a rush to vent, break “news”, and be a self promoting spectacle on social media there are the occasional thoughts that deserve the right to stay where they are… which is a shame, because writing from one of those touchy areas with a little bit of a chip on your shoulder does make for some damned fine writing. Apparently there are still a few lines I’m not willing to cross just for a good blog post. That’s good to know, but it’s not the cathartic release I was hoping to find at the end of this post.

It seems the Rolling Stones were right all along. Who knew?

The incredible shrinking staff…

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For most of the last four years my little corner of the bureaucracy has held fairly steady at a total of eight people. Sure that’s a couple short of a full load, but close enough that the job got done without too much trouble. A year ago, one of our host moved on to other opportunities and we were down to seven. A few months ago another chose to go test the waters elsewhere and we were down to six. After that, keeping up got harder. Today, we assembled for the farewell lunch for the next to go out the door and by the end of the week our number will dwindle to five. Life will be harder yet when that work gets farmed out, but I’d be the last guy to condemn anyone for doing what’s in their best interest.

Only a fool would believe that we’ll hold at five for very long before the next departure and the next and the next. There’s a upward limit of doing more with less. There’s an equally fixed limit on even being able to to the same amount with less. Eventually you simply reach a tipping point where you accept less or you apply more resources to bring the scales back into some semblance of balance. At least that’s the way we learned it at my fancy online business school.

Now the discussion focuses on who’s covering what, who’s going to be out when, of needing to look closley scheduled leave, and how many balls we can collectively keep in the air at one time. Those are hard discussions and even harder decisions, but they’re decisions I have the advantage of not needing to make. Giving up my supervisor’s hat strikes me as a better and better decision every single day. I’m just a poor simple working drone, the part of the equation where the “equal and opposite reaction” takes place.

For me that means it’s time to start making my own hard decisions about what the future holds, what I’m willing to accept as a matter of course, and what I’m willing to push back against. Even if nothing comes of it, it’s probably well past time to start filling the options box back up. I can’t help but think that I’ve seen this movie before. I’d just hoped it would be a little longer before I got to see the replay.

What do you want?

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Six months ago as part of the annual mandatory evaluation process that pretty much everyone who has ever had a job goes through, I got asked a variation of the most common question ever put to an employee – What do you want out of your career / What are your goals? When faced with that question most people give the stock answer about gaining more experience, growing their position, and taking on more responsibility. That’s the answer everyone expects to hear when they ask that question. The call and response of that question are so ingrained in the professional world that they’re practically boilerplate.

I guess sticking to a script was never one of my strong points. When an idea pops into my head, there’s always a good chance it’s going to come flying out of my mouth in the form of words. The ones that came hurtling out of my face in response to what should have been an no-brainer kind of question still make me smile six months later. That’s probably because they formed the most honest answer I’ve ever given to that kind of question. The look on my interlocutor’s face made veering wildly off the party line all the more worthwhile.

So if you’re asking yourself by this point what is it I want out of my career or what my goals are, the answer is surprisingly simple. As best I remember, it went a little something like this:

I want to stash enough cash away to buy up 20 or 30 acres of West Virginia; a little property, maybe with a stream running through it, with lots of trees, seclusion, and a strong gate at the end of the driveway. A little cabin, a wood stove, solar panels, and not much reason to come down out of my own personal Walden. I want to spend the days writing and the long summer evenings sitting with the dogs on the porch with my feet up watching the sun drop behind the mountains. When it snows I want to not care how long it takes to melt or how long it will be until I can leave. I want to not be driven by a relentless morning alarm, six meetings a day, and an inbox that never empties. I want to balance the scale a lot more towards life and way less towards work. Those are my goals, since you asked.

Trust me, that’s not the kind of answer your boss is looking for when they ask the question. It’s not the answer I should have given and it’s certainly not the one I’d recommend anyone else giving. It does however, have the virtue of being the first time in almost two decades of work that I answered that question honestly. I still feel kind of good about that.