Category Archives: work

Too late…

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Well, you can tell by the vacant look on my face, raging headache, and random moments of blood pouring from my nose that we’re in the shit now. The curtain goes up in a little over twelve hours. It’s officially the time that no matter the eagles, stars, horseshoes, or clovers on your collar, there is virtually nothing you can do to adjust the trajectory or outcome of that which you have set in motion lo these many months ago. It’s simply too late. You have run out of time.

It’s going to roll forward as if it has assumed a life of its own. Some of it will be good, some of it will be bad, and (not) soon enough it will be over. In a week, the whole thing will barely be a whisper of a memory.

It’s probably a good time for all involved to take a breath and be reminded, however gently that, “Remember Caesar thou art mortal.”

The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight…

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When scheduling either an actual or a self-anointed VIP to come to your party and speak as a special guest, the thing you have to remember is they’re usually doing you a favor. In most cases there’s nothing that requires them to show up – and even less that forces them to have a speaking roll. Usually they do it because they think they might have something of interest to say to the other guests at your party.

When you start making their life difficult – like by changing the time they’re scheduled to speak approximately 347 times in three weeks, they become less inclined to do you this favor. In fact they might become downright belligerent and decide showing up for your party is just more of a pain in the ass than it’s worth.

So here’s the thing, if you have your heart set on having a very special guest make an appearance at your very special party, try to pretend, even if it’s just for this one moment, that you’re not the second coming of the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight. It would make your life and theirs ever so much easier.

Sitting back…

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Sometimes you just have to sit back and marvel at the inner workings of the bureaucracy – at so much time and effort allocated to generating so little tangible result; at so much collective ability to dodge and weave responsibility; at so much agreement in the moment and then barge-fulls of disagreement over the same issues later in the day.

On days like today, I’m reminded of one of my very favorite lyrics penned long ago by Don Henley. In his song, the Devil weeps over Los Angeles becoming more hell than Hell. I can assure you, it’s a sentiment that applies far outside southern California.

I am an expert witness, because I say I am
And I said, gentleman, and I use that word loosely
I will testify for you
I’m a gun for hire, I’m a saint, I’m a liar
Because there are no facts, there is no truth
Just a data to be manipulated

I can get any result you like
What’s it worth to ya?
Because there is no wrong, there is no right
And I sleep very well at night

No shame, no solution
No remorse, no retribution
Just people selling T-shirts
Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus
And winning, winning, winning

If ever a song filed itself right into the “how I feel about it” category, this would be the one. Well, maybe except the winning bit at the end, because I’m mostly living in a world where everything is made up and the points don’t matter.

36 hours late…

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Yesterday I was nervous because the day didn’t go off the rails as I assumed it would. I could easily have saved the worry, because the day I expected yesterday arrived today, only 36 hours late.

There’s a truism in planning that says basically no one of any consequence pays attention more than 30 days before something is supposed to happen. Corollary to that truism is that by the time the gap closes to about two weeks, everyone suddenly cares and feels the need to be involved, but it’s also too late to change much of anything that’s not a trivial detail. Therefore you will spend an inordinate amount of time making changes that fundamentally don’t matter. If you spend too much time dwelling on it, I assure you you’ll go quite mad.

My only enemy now is the clock itself. Every hour that ticks past means more focus and more people wanting to put their thumbprint on something by making some random innocuous change. It’s the way of things. While the storm gathers, the winds rise, and the great and the good have their say, my only defense is in watching the hands of that clock slowly spool down to H-hour… because the moment it’s come and passed, everyone will be off and churning on the Next Big Thing and bloody well leave me in peace for a few days.

Concentrated and juicy…

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I’m probably way more suspicious than I should be. It’s not so much that I’m paranoid (I’m nowhere near important enough for the universe to be conspiring against me after all) as I have a healthy skepticism about most things. It kicks into overdrive when what I expected to be a day awash in asshattery turns out to be unexpectedly quiet and uncomplicated.

Today was the kind of day that makes me look over my shoulder or peer skyward to see if I can find the other shoe to come hurtling out of the stratosphere. It was the kind of day I expected to go completely sideways from the opening bell… and then when it didn’t, I spent the next eight hours watching my back and expecting the worst. By all rights today should have been a shitshow. The fact that it wasn’t, while pleasantly surprising, leaves me with decided feeling of dread and horror at what tomorrow could bring.

This close to a big muscle movement, there should have been churn and anguish. The fact that the email was manageable and the phone calls non-existent defies every kind of logic I know. I should probably attribute this deviation from the norm to it being the day after Easter, a fair number of people using up some of the precious time off, or contending, as I am, with a baked ham hangover. Or perhaps it was a lull to bait me into optimism based on a false sense of security.

My expectations for today were off. There’s still a whole mass of stupid coming down the line, it just seems it’s taking a bit longer to get here than I anticipated… the fact that it’s a day or more late arriving just means it’s just going to be more concentrated and juicy when the time comes.

Robots…

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They say robots and artificial intelligence are coming to take all the jobs. Apparently this time it’s not just manufacturing that’s going to feel the pinch of automation, but professional services will be absorbed into the collective too.

On days when I’ve sent 87 emails and received about twice as many, all I can really wonder is what the hell out robot overlords are waiting for? Why on earth would I resist or even object to an AI system taking over the heavy lifting so I can focus in on the 5-10% of those emails that should have really gotten some academic rigor rather than just the stock answer.

As far as robots taking over the place, personally I welcome it. Let them do the drudgery and free up some good old fashioned human brainpower to deal with the stuff that actually matters.

Then again, at the end of a day like this one I’d also probably be equally welcoming of Skynet come to eradicate the species, so my judgement could be somewhat compromised at the moment.

Dark underside…

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I’ve often enough mentioned how much I generally enjoy the one day a week I get to work from home. What I don’t usually mention is that there is a dark underside to this arrangement.

That underside comes in the form of a little noticed provision of the agreement that specifies that during unschedule office closures due to things like bad weather, terrorist attack, or super volcano eruption, I’m required to either work from home or burn off a day of vacation time. Giving up your snow days is the devil’s bargain you strike for the privilege of having a regularly scheduled day where you get to skip out on sitting in a cubicle.

It doesn’t happen often, but on the days when it does, it feels like a particularly onerous paragraph buried in the fine print. The only redeeming quality it may have is that most of the people I’m required to respond to on a day to day basis don’t have such an agreement – and are therefore sitting home quietly and not bothering me with new requirements… so while this is technically a work day and I did manage to get a few things done, it was surprisingly stress free.

Now if you don’t mind I need to go check and see if telework has been authorized for tomorrow yet.

No distractions…

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The best part of the one day a week I spend working from home: The usual distractions found in every office don’t exist. It’s a rare chance to concentrate and actually do the work versus dealing with the administrative minutia of the office.

The worst part of the one day a week I spend working from home: The usual distractions found in every office don’t exist. Some days that means the requirements stream in relentlessly and being at home means you don’t have the myriad of office interruptions to force you into taking a breath or distracting you from it for a minute.

Don’t get me wrong, here – I love my day spent working from home. It’s easily 2-3 times as productive as any other day of the week. Occasionally through, that level of productivity comes at the expense of going utterly crosseyed based on the volume of electronic paper that needs pushing. Sure, that volume of paper would have still needed pushed regardless of my geography, but it just seems more onerous on days when it happens when I’m at the house.

All things considered, I should probably be glad it happened today. If the tide of emails had come in tomorrow it would have taken three days to get through them all with something like reasonably coherent responses.

Surely there’s something wrong with life when this is what passes for a “good” version of Monday.

Danger zone…

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I’m historically a guy with a long… fuse. Most of the day to day trauma rolls past little noticed and I drive along on the same trajectory doing whatever it is that needs doing. Sure I comment on it here because it makes for somewhat interesting reading, but beyond the notes I jot down in the moment, I don’t internalize much. A quick spike in blood pressure and then I can smile, nod, and keep on going.

That’s most days. Then there are the ones that  aren’t most days – the ones where you can feel your blood pressure rising continuously, until you’ve ended up with a screaming headache. They’re the days when every batshit crazy idea comes out of the woodwork and you end up wondering what the actual fuck you’re even doing. Days like that aren’t the worst ones, though.

The worst moments are reserved for the days when you have meetings stacked like cordwood at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00. 12:30, and 2:30. They’re the days when inevitably someone is going to ask why some actual work didn’t get accomplished while you were busy enduring your laundry list of meetings.

I might roll my eyes and mutter under my breath, but I’m not the kind of guy given to violent outbursts. I know from hard experience, though, that I’m a guy with limits beyond which it is unwise to push. And while that outburst may not come in the form of flipping over desks and beating someone with a three hole punch, it often comes with the loosening of the tongue and the saying of things that discretion and common sense would tell a clear thinking person are better left unsaid.

Opening my mouth and letting what’s usually my internal dialog flow out as actual spoken words isn’t the kind of thing that ends well. Mostly because what I really think is, in most cases, considered “not helpful,” “unprofessional,” or in some cases “wildly inappropriate.” I can’t quite shake the feeling that tomorrow is going to be one of those days where we’ve crossed well into the danger zone and every ounce of available restraint will be needed just to keep my mouth shut and my face from doing that thing it does when I’m abjectly annoyed.

Two hours or: The break even point…

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When serving the staff there’s something that you need to remember always. Everyone is always going to think that whatever they happen to have you working on is the most important thing that anyone is working on. They will have a tendency to want their project to take up all available oxygen in the room, every moment of discussion time, and every bit of available manpower. That leads to the typical day being a maelstrom of competing priorities and people who want something done right-the-hell-now.

The reality is, good as I may be, I am but one man with one keyboard and a finite amount of time to allocate in pursuit of whatever harebrained scheme has priority at the moment. As often as not, I determine the priority of effort among the universe of possible projects that need action with minimal outside input. I like it better that way, really.

From time to time, though, something comes along that someone wants and yet it still never bubbles to the top of the list of things to do. Eventually, though, someone high enough in the food chain gets it in their teeth and starts gently nudging you towards whatever this favored need may be. When they nudge hard enough, no matter what else is churning, it gets some attention.

That’s all my long way of saying that it’s remarkable what can get done in two hours when you lock yourself in a room, turn off Outlook, don’t answer the phone and just start writing. It’s remarkable and might even get you off the naughty list of the person who’s been asking for that bit of information for three or four weeks… but of course it lands you squarely in hot water with the 37 other people who think their projects also deserve special attention.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this place is marginally easier to contend with once you realize that falling behind is the norm and the best possible day is one where you manage to break even because with the time and resources authorized there is literally no way to ever get ahead of the volume of things that need doing. Trying to have a little bit of perspective is awfully important.