Category Archives: work

Something nice…

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If you’re like me, you grew up being told, repeatedly and often, that it’s best not to say anything at all if you can’t say something nice.

Sure, it’s probably good advice to help prevent the activation of your career dissipation light, but mostly it just prevents you from saying true things that others might find unpleasant… such as “That’s got to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard in the last 12 years,” or “If it’s not a priority for the bosses, why are we spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about it?”

Sadly, I don’t have a single nice thing to say, so I’ll just sit here quietly and try to keep my eyes from rolling all the way to the back of my skull.

A good place and a bad one…

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Personally, I’m in a good place… and that place is the time of year when I’m about to start burning off sizable chunks of vacation time to scour the mid-Atlantic region for all manner of used and vintage books. It’s a time of long summer twilights, evenings reading on the patio, and undisturbed stretches of free time. The run of days from the first week of June through the first week of July are, for me, the year’s apogee. Barring unforeseen events, there’s generally not anything better.

Professionally, by contract, it’s determined to be a season beset by stupid – both people and things. It’ll be catching up on mandatory training, and preliminary planning for parties and events that by right ought not to belong on my plate, and for whatever as yet unknown fuckery finds its way into my inbox. I won’t say it’s the worst of times, because that title belongs to another era entirely. Those days were bleak… These, in comparison, are mostly just obnoxious.

Still, it feels like an odd dichotomy. Although if one of the two must be a clusterfuck, I greatly prefer that particular dark cloud settle over the “work stuff.” I’ve spent a lot of time and effort rigging up a pretty reliable firewall between work stuff and home stuff. Whatever asshattery is taking place at work very rarely bleeds through to home. The barrier is somewhat less robust in the other direction.

By the time that first week of June arrives, it’ll have been six months since I took any significant time off. Right about now I’m feeling all those intervening days. I’m deeply, viscerally, looking forward to not needing to present the illusion of giving a single fuck about training rates, parties and events, or reviewing people’s requests to use the dumb auditorium. A few days wandering deep in the stacks is precisely what Dr. Jeff ordered as a restorative cure for the madness that seeps in from the “professional” side of the firewall.

More like Union Wrong…

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For reasons that defy any kind of human logic I’m familiar with, I’m nominally “represented” by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 1904. Being a government employee, I’m legally prohibited from striking. Likewise, AFGE can’t negotiate my salary or benefits package. Given those facts, I have no idea what services they’re supposed to be providing that I couldn’t otherwise arrange through a decent labor lawyer if the need ever arose. 

As of the most recent update last week, Local 1904 has failed to come to terms with management on the new and improved telework policy for our organization. They had 30 months of COVID and now more than six months after returning to “business as usual” to get the ship in order. Every other organization we deal with has somehow managed to get their new policies in place to the benefit of their workforce, but 1904 remains a holdout. In fact, they’re so dysfunctional in this negotiation that the whole thing has been thrown into binding arbitration to resolve. Arbitration of this type can take weeks, months, or years to reach its conclusion.

If I were in any way involved with this union, I’d be mortified at our inability to arrive at what my brother and sister organizations have found to be a dead simple easy arrangement. As it is, I’ll forever see 1904 as the toad in the road trying to stand in the way of progress and the rigorous application of common sense. Utter cockwombles, the lot of them.

I periodically see the news or social media filled with stories about needing stronger unions or organizations wanting to bring in a union to represent them. Friends, be careful what you ask for. Since 2000, I’ve been in jobs that were nominally covered by several different unions. They all like to hype the idea of being “Union Strong,” but it’s been my experience that they’re far more often Union Wrong. 

I’ll walk down the hill and throw hundred dollar bills directly in the river before I ever pay them a nickel’s worth of dues. I’ll never know for sure whose interests they’re representing, but I can tell you it’s sure as hell not mine. 

That new chair smell…

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Given the astronomical federal debt and the exorbitant amount of money our beloved Uncle continues to spend every year, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our offices must be filled with premium furniture. If you were to actually walk around the average federal office, though, you’d be disabused of that notion fairly quickly.

Our cube farms are filled with the kind of low-bidder junk I’d be embarrassed to have seen in my home. I suppose there’s really no way to make a sea of cubicles look stylish or comfortable, but it’s obvious that it’s not even really a consideration. I’m currently sitting in a budget type office chair that was bought about 12 years ago when these buildings were first raised from the swampy shores of the Chesapeake.

I didn’t realize how bad our in-office seating options were until the plague set in. One of my first orders of business when work from home became the rule rather than the exception was to set myself up with a really nice chair. Sure, I got mine at a questionably deep discount from an entirely dubious source deep in the post-apocalyptic looking docklands of Wilmington, Delaware… but that’s beside the point here. The simple truth is having a properly designed, if expensive, place to sit made a world of difference in what otherwise devolved into regular pain from my upper back to my tailbone.

Since echelons higher than reality decided it’s important that we spend lots of time back on the cube farm six months ago, I was feeling every day of it thanks to my low-bidder, decade-old office chair. However, thanks to a thoughtful note from my doctor and my willingness to be a pain in the ass by requesting a workplace accommodation in hopes of making my back feel a little less like shattered glass, I’ve got a spanking new twin to the chair I’ve been enjoying at home. Well… “have” is a word that gets us into trouble. I’m assured it’s somewhere in the building and was going to be delivered before I closed up shop for the day. Close of business came and went without me catching site of my new seat. It’s the kind of Johnny on the spot services I’ve come to rely on from the United States Government. 

I could have saved our Uncle about $1000 if they’d have just let me pull $300 in petty cash and head over to my shady source of supply in Wilmington, but hey, that seems to be frowned upon by resource managers… so, full retail it is. My fancy new Steelcraft Leap isn’t going to make days in cubicle hell any better, but it will help prevent them from inadvertently being any worse, so that’s something.

First though, I’ve got to get the thing from receiving and then inevitably spend more time than seems necessary figuring out how to put it together. Then I can take the thing for a proper test drive and enjoy that new chair smell. 

A week with business developers…

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I’ve spent the vast majority of my working week so far surrounded by “business developers.” Their mission in life seems to be hanging about being overly cheerful and engaging while trying to drive their hand into Uncle’s pocket as deeply as possible.

That’s fine. In theory at least. Everyone has a job to do and I don’t begrudge them for it. On the other hand, it puts me squarely in the middle of a room full of committed extroverts. The roar of them chattering during every break, the rush to the front in hopes of getting 2 or 3 minutes of face time with the most recent presenter, and their rank indifference to any civilized concept of personal space makes it an appalling experience.

In fact, the whole spectacle is exactly what I imagine my own personal hell would be like – loud, full of people, and entirely undignified. It’s exactly the kind of day I’d design if the intent was to set every nerve I’ve got on edge. Surely I’d starve if it were how I was forced to earn my salt.

At no time of year do I long for the dulcet tones of a dog snoring, or of reverential quiet of the region’s great antiquarian book shops, or the pop of the tonic cap before mixing it with a quality gin, more so than I do right now. The world of endless noise, grasping, and circular small talk is one for which I am constitutionally unsuited.

This is how it ends for me (probably)…

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I’ve managed to avoid the Great Plague for the last three years. Staying home and avoiding crowded places wasn’t exactly a radical departure from my normal lifestyle. Still, I’m sure that was the secret to my success at entirely missing a dread virus that ripped around the world leaving millions dead in its wake.

If I’m going to at long last be brought low by whatever COVID variant is now quietly circulating out there, I’m entirely sure I’m now deeply ensconced in the petri dish that will give it to me. I’m sitting here with up to 700 assholes who just couldn’t wait to show up and hang out in an auditorium breathing stagnant air while some other bunch of assholes reads them slides word for word for 8 hours a day across three successive days.

What reptilian brain fuckery drives people to want to show up and sit around when the information could be entirely available on a basic website or, gods forbid, through an online meeting, I will never, ever understand. As far as I’m concerned, the “human element” is entirely overrated.

This is the classic meeting that could have been an email writ extraordinarily large.

Rehearsal week…

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If it’s possible, rehearsal week can be more awful than the actual production. It’s the week when everyone realizes they haven’t been paying enough attention as the big muscle movements take place during the planning process. They find, to their surprise, that all the major decisions have already been taken.

Rehearsals are for refining the concept – not for building something new from whole cloth. I’ll spend a large portion of this week digging in my heels, denying what would have been simple requests a month ago, and generally being an obstinate asshole. Sure, there are some who could, by applying enough pressure among the right people, force me to shift… but very few are going to be willing to exert that kind of effort.

One of the most important lessons of how to be a successful bureaucrat is learning how to say no. Sometimes you have to say it with honey dipped words. Other times you have to say it with claws out. Still, you have to learn to say it to friend and foe alike – and you have to learn how to make it stick.

This will be my annual week of saying no to almost everyone. It won’t win me any new friends, but I’ll drag this rank, festering boondoggle across the finish line. Once that’s done, no one much cares how often you had to tell then no.

Just in case…

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I realized today, and not for the first time, what the hardest part of my job really is. It’s not, as you may think, that it involves holding a large number of often conflicting ideas in my head simultaneously. It’s not that basic day to day operations can be derailed at the whim of any number of layers of management and supervision. It’s not even that the good idea fairy seems to take great joy in shitting all over my head at every opportunity.

Truly the hardest part of this job is that the bathroom is on the wrong side of the secure door – which means any time you have to take a crap, you can’t doom scroll Twitter, swipe through Tinder, or ponder your Facebook friends list. In a world where newspapers aren’t a thing anymore, it as often as not means you’re stuck looking at four blank walls until boredom sets in. That’s no way to expect a civilized person to take a comfort break.

I usually explain the pile of magazines on my desk by noting how unreliable the network is and wanting something close at hand to while away the time while we don’t have connectivity. But you and I both know why I make sure my magazine stash is really always topped off… just in case.

Two week warning…

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We’re two weeks out. It’s the time of year when I should be approaching caffeine poisoning or have my blood pressure trending towards stroke territory. And yet as I sit here, I’m feeling mostly swaddled in a calm indifference.

By the time this week ends, I’ll have done 80% of everything that’s doable within my span of control to attempt pulling this circus off without too many problems. By the time next week ends, I’ll have spooled out 90% of my effort. The final 10% will burn off across three days from the 25th through the 27th. Very little of what happens during those three days will have anything at all to do with me.

By that point, I’ve given you the stage, gotten people ticketed, fought with dozens of people about getting their presentations delivered in something like a timely manner, and attended to all manner of details both petty and large. What I can’t do, though, is make everyone happy. Attendees will be mad that they’re not getting coffee and cookies, briefers will be mad that we don’t have the mic they really like, senior leaders of every stripe will be visited by the good idea fairy a few hours before show time and want to change everything.

But next week, this ponderous beast begins taking on a life of its own. As the clock runs down, the series of events begins that we’re all individually unable to stop. By then the best we can do is attempt to nudge events back towards the right path and let them flow through to their illogical end.

At this point, stepping out one more time to the edge of the precipice, all I know for certain is that in two weeks the circus will be in town. Some of it will go well. Some of it will not. And then it will be over. After that we’ll all spend six months forgetting that we have to do it all again for 2024.

Arriving at midpoint…

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In my twenty years of government service, I’m not sure I’ve done many things more useless than spending time typing out my “self assessment” as part of a mid-year review. That’s coming from a guy who has spent countless wasted hours sitting in every possible flavor of meetings ranging across topics that would alternately make your eyes water or send you deep into boredom induced coma.

I’ve always held the opinion that if we’ve gotten to the midpoint of the year and I’ve been fucking things up left and right, someone would have told me to get myself sorted out long ago. If I’m plugging along, getting things done more or less to standard, chances are the bosses are mostly leaving me alone – unless it’s to assign more work. Continually being assigned more work is a sure sign that you’re most likely on track. I was a boss long enough to know that I didn’t tend to take work from high performers and assign it to the local chucklefuck.

Anyway, I spent some portion of the afternoon carefully rewriting 2022’s year end self assessment to reflect half a year’s work in FY23. Since it’s not one of those things that impacts pay or benefits, you can rest assured that I gave it all the attention and focus that it so richly deserves.