Category Archives: work

A roll of the dice…

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You’d think that after nine days off, I’d have been rested, relaxed, and at least nominally prepared to go back to work. All those things might have been true on Sunday night, but on Monday morning exactly none of them are true. Wading in to the week deep backlog of email pretty much put an end to any opportunity for good feeling that could have bled over into the work week. Funny how that works.

One of the skills I’ve mostly mastered over the years is leaving the “work stuff” safely at work. I’ve been doing it so long now that I can even do it when the work stuff resides, for more days than not, in my home office. Once the lid on the laptop closes at the end of the day, it might as well cease to exist. It’s honestly a helpful mental trick if you can manage it. 

Unfortunately, because I like getting paid and would absolutely suck at living under a bridge or in a refrigerator box, eventually I have to start paying attention again – or at least I do for the next 11 years or so. Even so, it’s getting increasingly difficult to keep up the appearance that everything is a Big Serious Issue just because someone at echelons higher than reality says it is. 

Look, I get it that most everyone wants to believe whatever they spend their time doing is the changing the world or saving the universe. It’s comforting, but objectively it’s almost never the case.  On an average day, the average person working themselves into a lather doesn’t do much besides raise their own blood pressure.

In any case, I’m back at work for the next few weeks… and keeping my mouth from calling out every bit of fuckery I see seems like it’s going to be the project of the summer. How well that will work really is a roll of the dice at this point. 

At work (but not really)…

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Look, I am nominally “at work” this week. There are a couple of days where I’ll even schlep into our very own version of fluorescent-lit cubicle hell to prove that I’m doing my job for the man. With that said, I think it’s only fair to point out that while I may be physically present, my brain is already deeply plugged in to the vacation time that I’ll be taking next week. 

As I cast my thoughts back to 2023, I seem to remember every time I took some time off leading to some new and unpleasant medical issue popping up. As we approach leave taking season 2024, I very much would like to believe that trend can’t possibly continue. I’d like to not spend the lion’s share of this year’s vacation time not sprawled on the couch or hanging out with new doctors. 

After whetting my whistle for down time this past Friday, I’m honestly checked out.

This week is already off to a stupid start, with something I thought I put nicely to bed last Thursday before I logged off for the long weekend raising its ugly head while I was otherwise occupied. I suppose I shouldn’t be in any way surprised that it’s only after something should have been done, finished, and over that the great and the good have decided to start paying attention to it. Ass backwards seems to be the only way we ever really do anything.

I know this is just another work week, but I’m absolutely going to need people to ratchet back their expectations to the absolutely bare minimum – and then maybe go just a little bit lower. Short of someone walking over to my desk and literally setting me on fire, I’m going to have a hell of a hard time finding the motivation this week. All I’m saying is that if there’s something you need from me – and you want it done with any level of attention to detail – maybe wait until we get into June. Otherwise, you’re going to get what you get and I’ll make no apologies. 

It was the end of a decade…

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For the last ten years, approximately a third of my work year has been dedicated to party and event planning. This week is the first time since 2014 that the annual big show is set to start and my fingerprints aren’t all over it. My feelings are unexpectedly mixed.

I’m absolutely thrilled that I haven’t needed to convince dozens of presenters that they need to do things my way. I’m ecstatic that I haven’t had to deal with months of schedule changes and wanna be primadonnas making absurd demands over every detail. I’m incredibly grateful that I haven’t had to spend time discussing the best way to lay out tens of thousands of square feet of circus tents, how best to remove light poles from the parking lot, what live bands we can get for three consecutive nights of social extravaganzas, or whether it’s strictly legal for the US Government to host a whiskey tasting and cigar bar as part of an industry engagement event. 

I won’t need to figure out the inevitable chaos of registration and check in. The moment something goes wonky with the live stream won’t be my problem. I won’t be fielding complaints from people in the audience who have an outsized sense of their own importance because they’re an Executive Vice President of Who Cares. 

I’m not going to get a panicked Teams message that the bathroom is flooding. I won’t spend the night dreading the possibility that the whole tent complex could blow down if a reasonably strong thunderstorm happens to pass through the area. 

There’s nothing about that that doesn’t feel good. 

There is, however, a small part of me that will miss being a minor shot caller this week (Mostly because number of bosses who wanted their name associated with this mess was always very limited). I’ll miss working closely with some of the key players without whom the whole effort would collapse. I might even miss the sense of barely hidden mayhem and chaos that could break out at any second during a live event.

It’s just as well that this experience has passed to others this year. I’m not at all sure I’d have been in the mental or physical headspace to give it the level of attention it needs way back when planning kicked off in the fall.

I wish the team leading this ongoing, multi-year hot mess the very best of successes. I hope they knock it out of the park… if only so people will stop thinking my name is somehow inextricably linked with this particular Big Show. This week is going to feel just a little bit weird, but then I guarantee I’ll be 100% pleased as punch to have the thing be someone else’s problem. 

Not What Annoys Jeff this Week…

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I generally reserve the length and breadth of this space on Thursdays to bitch and complain about whatever three things have most agitated and annoyed me over the week. In what’s probably an unprecedented move in 587 editions of What Annoys Jeff this Week, I’m not going to do that.

Instead, I’m going to use this few minutes to single out a single, anonymous person who saw the flare I sent up last week and immediately took the time, long after duty hours, to respond and start the great machinery of the bureaucracy in the direction of fixing what has been a seemingly simple to fix, yet lingering problem now for over a year.

Most of what happens in the belly of this great green machine goes unnoticed and unremarked. Such is the nature of the bureaucracy. I don’t suspect any of us ended up in this line of work because we needed a lot of external praise… but as the saying goes, when you see something, you should say something.

So, nameless bureaucrat, thank you for taking up a cause that wasn’t necessarily yours – certainly one that could have been staffed to someone else. What you do and how you choose to lead doesn’t go unnoticed.

(Home) Office space…

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With the new and improved telework agreement now in place, I’ve arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that my home office needs to be upgraded in several ways.

My set up isn’t particularly unusual. On the personal side, I’ve got a soon to be six year old 27-inch iMac that’s still an absolute workhorse and probably 5x more powerful than anything I actually need. It’s a great machine, even if it does occupy a significant amount of desktop real estate. For work, I’m toting around a Dell Latitude with a 16-inch screen. From it, hang an absurd number of wires and dongles – USB hub, mouse, Wi-Fi antenna, headset, and camera (rarely).

Most of the time, the laptop is perfectly serviceable for anything I need to do day-to-day. There are times, though, particularly when working in Excel or PowerPoint or dealing with multiple documents at the same time, where having a larger screen would be helpful. 

I’m sure there are ways to rig my laptop to use my iMac as a monitor, but that violates my first rule of working from home – my personal computer and my work computer must never, ever meet. They can sit on the same desk, but I want them to share absolutely nothing from one system to the other. Those are two streams I never want to cross.

That’s going to mean there’s a lot of “unnecessary” duplication with two full set ups occupying my desk. I can live with that, but want it to be done in an elegant a way as possible. Figuring out what that looks like is where I am now.

It certainly means buying a more robust hub/docking station and probably a new monitor – ideally one that with a build in camera and mic that will let me dispense with headset and camera. On those days when I can’t avoid the schlep over to the office, I’d like to unplug the laptop from one cable and walk away. Currently, I have cables running everywhere and it’s just unsightly and an uninspiring way to work. It was less of a problem in the height of COVID, when the laptop mostly stayed put and in the immediate post-COVID environment when I was in the office more than home. Now, it needs to be functional and look reasonably attractive.

After the technical hurdles are surmounted, I know I’ll need new lighting. The current lamp is fine, but adding a second monitor means I’ll need the space it’s occupying. In a perfect world, I’d like to find a slightly larger desk to hold it all. Being that my current “desk” is a kitchen table I liberated long ago from a dusty shed and pressed into service, I like my chances of being able to find a suitable upgrade. In fact, I’d be absolutely willing to just buy another table, but slightly longer, as this one has worked surprisingly well for the last 8 or 9 years.

When all this might happen, remains firmly in the “to be determined” column on the calendar, but I expect to see some of it sooner rather than later.

Georgia on my mind…

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I’m not sure if I’ve written about it here before. If I have, I can only beg your indulgence. You try writing up 4,000+ posts across more than a decade while trying not to cover the same ground too often and see how well it works for you. In any case, it’s a thought that has crept up on me repeatedly in the past few weeks, so I’m giving it voice.

I assume this particular memory keeps cropping up because of the relationship I have with my employer and planning. A few of the same themes keep coming up time and time again. To understand why it has stuck with me, though, maybe I need to take you back to the beginning.

We had all, about 30 of us, just arrived at what was then called Fort Lee on the outskirts of historic Petersburg, Virginia. By just arrived, I mean I still had boxes stacked everywhere in my apartment and the ink wasn’t yet dry on my in-processing paperwork. I’d been an employee for less than a week and the powers that be announced on Wednesday or maybe Thursday of that first week that on Saturday morning, we’d all be loading up on a tour bus and using our three-day weekend to take a group road trip.

Destination: Savannah, Georgia.

It was a well intentioned notion – taking this group of fresh new logisticians in training to observe first hand the load out of the famed 3rd Infantry Division as they prepared their equipment to leave by rail and sea in route to the then new “second Gulf War.” Folk wisdom will tell you that timing is everything. Maybe “everything” is an exaggeration, but it’s important. How I know it’s important is that while we were driving down from Virginia, the transports loaded with a division’s worth of equipment had cleared port and were out to sea. The marshalling yard was empty. The railhead was empty. The port was empty. The mighty ROROs the bosses so badly wanted us to see had sailed at first light.

With nothing else to do, we were granted a DONSA – a day of no specified activities – in beautiful Savannah. Leadership extracted a promise that we would all solemnly swear to get ourselves back to the motel before departure time the next morning. So, we did what a bunch of early 20-somethings do when cut loose in a strange town and headed for the downtown entertainment district. I have no idea how many bars we hopped in and out of. I do remember there was a carriage ride and later in the evening a booze laden ghost tour in a hearse.

I have no idea how we got back to the motel. There’s a very vague memory of an over capacity taxi, but it’s… fuzzy. The motel, well, is probably worthy of a story all its own. Seedy doesn’t even begin to describe some of the business being transacted there in the dead of night.

In retrospect, it was great fun and games – or what passes for great fun and games when you’re 24. Back then, it was a guy who had just eaten the cost to move himself to Petersburg, hadn’t been paid in six weeks, and was desperately afraid every swipe of his credit card was going to be one swipe too much. That early winter of 2003 was the closest I’ve ever come to slipping sideways into default. It was horrifying and just a little exhilarating. File that under things you do when you’re too young to know better.

Anyway, I just assume it’s that early experience that’s left me deeply distrustful of whatever best laid plans this great green machine comes up with.

The summer motivation trough… 

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This time of year is not a good one for job-related motivation. June is bookended with good times – the week off I take for my birthday and the week off I take in conjunction with Independence Day. Over a span of six weeks, it creates two motivational high points and a corresponding four week motivational trough. Now they’ve thrown in a new federal holiday right between the two. All else between those two points is me trying my hardest to at least present the illusion of giving a damn… or at least enough of a damn not to draw unnecessary managerial attention.

I do a reasonable job of tying up loose ends before walking away for my early June holiday. Then I come back and find it hard to mentally justify ramping up any new efforts, knowing that in a couple of weeks, I’ll be in the middle of another 9 days out of sight and hopefully out of mind.  Throw a spanking new holiday when a bunch of other people are taking time off and making it hard to get anything accomplished and the opportunity to do much in the way of great new work is pretty minimal. 

I won’t go so far as to say I plan it that way, but it is a happy coincidence.

After Independence Day, we’re in the long march towards the fall holidays. That, of course, is demotivational in a completely different way.  As a professional bureaucrat, truly the cycles of the year have a savage beauty all their own.

An exercise in creative writing…

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I haven’t put together what you might call a “normal resume” in well over two decades now. I think of the normal resume, geared towards a private sector employer as something short and punchy – definitely not longer than one or two pages. The federal resume, containing obsessive detail about every job you’ve ever had, by contrast, seems to run on forever.

According to my extensive personal files, the last time I updated my federal resume was in 2017. That must have been the last time I was feeling especially angsty and aggrieved – because that’s almost always the catalyst for spending the time to bring things up to date. Dumping the last six years of job related activities into it brought mine up to seven pages. It’s not the longest I’ve ever seen, since past me had helpfully edited down a lot of my early work history to the bone. By the time I’m done tweaking this version, I’ll be perilously close to spilling over onto the 8th page.

Resume length doesn’t particularly matter when it comes to federal work. The objective isn’t really to impress any individual hiring manager so much as it’s to build a document so full of key words that the computer that scans the files won’t have a choice but to proclaim you highly qualified and insert your resume into the pile that eventually makes its way to the selecting official. It’s akin to the difference between being a sniper and blasting away with a shotgun, where “close enough” is good enough.

In any case, I’m using some of my down time to pretty this mess up with an eye towards finding out if I still have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to beat the computer in case I ever need to pull that trigger. If nothing else, blowing the dust off is a good academic exercise. I’ll never tell a lie – especially on paper – but it’s surely the next door neighbor of creative writing.

A message from the union…

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Well, well, well. At long last, the workforce received an email today from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 1904. Therein they officially provided notification that they had arrived at an impasse with management and the future of telework is in the hands of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (FSIP).

The actual point of this email was asking us to respond to a survey covering our thoughts on telework. Wait. What? I’m not a fancy, big city union official, but getting a sense of the workforce’s opinion feels like something you might have wanted to gauge before you decided to hold the new policy hostage for a year. The sticking point, it turns out, is management’s position of wanting personnel on site two days a week versus the union’s position of only wanting two days per pay period (i.e., one day per week). See, the thing is, either one of these proposals is miles better than the agreement we’re currently working under which requires us to be on site three days a week.

The fact that this survey is being launched almost a year after opening negotiations tells me pretty much everything I need to know about how they’re doing business over there at Local 1904. It’s now been 36 weeks since the updated supervisory telework policy went into effect. I’ve read it cover to cover and can’t for the life of me find anything in there that is so objectionable that it should hold up negotiation for a year. It’s a perfectly serviceable policy that significantly increases telework opportunities over and above the policy that’s now in place for non-supervisors. Frankly as an employee I’m embarrassed that this has somehow become an issue that rises to the level of needing to engage with the Federal Services Impasse Panel.

I’ll never understand whatever “logic” is behind the elected leaders operating Local 1904 deciding to let a good agreement now stand in the way of the perceived perfect agreement at some unknown point in the future. I don’t know any of them personally, so I can’t say they’re ragingly incompetent… but after seeing in black and white why we are where we are, you’ve got a lot of ground to cover to convince me they’re not.

Subject matter expertise…

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This morning I was called in as a subject matter expert and asked to provide some thoughtful insights to an audience primarily made up of personnel from another service based on my years of experience and unique viewpoints. 

That’s fine. A normal person might even have been honored by the opportunity or enjoy receiving recognition of his peers. The problem here is that I wasn’t having my brain picked about operations, or strategic planning, or emergency management – all things that at one time or another, I have been able to speak about with some level of authoritative knowledge. Instead, I was being asked to talk to this inter-service audience based on my vast, exhaustive experience in part and event planning.

For the better part of an hour, I offered advice on real world challenges, some of our hard won lessons learned, and general commentary about your big day and how to plan it.

It’s hard to imagine why the first thing I do every morning us update my “Days to Retirement Eligibility” countdown whiteboard. Thank the gods that I don’t have any morale left to speak of, because it’s just the kind of thing that would have sent it spiraling to new, unplumbed depths. It’s just one of the mostly untold joys of being a subject matter expert in a subject you loath with the fiery hatred of a thousand suns.