Category Archives: work

Checking boxes…

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I got my annual reminder today that I had successfully completed almost none of my mandatory online training for 2016. Training is important, or so we’ve been told. It’s so important that in at least one instance I successfully completed the exact same training module once a year from 2007-2016. Yay Constitution Day Training!

I spent two years earning a teaching degree and another two and a half years actually doing it. I’m a voracious reader and self-educate on any number of topics. You don’t need to convince me of the importance of training or education. With that being said, if you want me to think of it as a priority, perhaps you might consider changing up your program of instruction once or twice in a decade. No matter how fine a narrative I consider a book like Team of Rivals, it ceases to become informative if I read it every year and can predict with near 100% accuracy what’s going to appear on the next page.

On the other hand, if the intent is to simply make sure that one of the multitude of annual training requirement boxes is checked off before time expires, well the powers that be are doing a fine job of course development and instruction. When I know that’s the goal, I can box check with the best of them.

Hard versus stupid…

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I don’t mind working hard. The powers that be are paying good money to rent my brain for 8 hours a day and I’ve got no compunction about whoring myself out like that. When push comes to shove I’d much rather be doing hard work with my brain than hard work with my back. The brain seems less likely to give out at an inopportune time and leave me lying flat on the floor or chewing muscle relaxers like candy corn.

Although I don’t mind working hard, I hate the living hell out of working stupid. I hate reworking the same ground two or three times and changing every happy to a glad. That’s not hard work. That’s not focusing on content or intent. That’s focusing on the style over the substance and the fact that anyone has time for that in this business should tell you a lot about how their time is being spent. I don’t mind if they want to waste their time turning the latest memo into the great American novel, but I’d appreciate it if they didn’t try dragging me along into their own personal hell. I’ve got worries enough of my own without keeping track of who likes one space after a period and who likes two.

The things we choose to focus on tells a lot about the kind of person we are when we shed the artificial constructs of rank or grade. It tells me everything I need to know about who “gets it” and who is way the hell out in the tall grass. Other people might not notice details like that, but I do. The Lord might tell us not to judge, but I think in this case He would make an exception.

What do you do?

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When I worked in the District, the most important question asked at every social engagement was some variation on “What do you do?” or “Who do you work for?” The answer, of course, would immediately raise or lower your social standing or level of attractiveness. There was a while there I was introducing myself as Jeff, the young and idealistic Chief of Legislative Affairs for Some Random Made Up Hippy Dippy Non-Profit. That had way more cache than being a bureaucrat from deep within the bowels of some big agency.

To those who know me, I often answered the question with a touch more realism. When asked what I did, my stock response was almost always “I do PowerPoint.” For long stretches of my career it had the additional benefit of also being largely true. There was a while there I could diddle a PowerPoint the same way a virtuoso can make a Stradivarius violin sing. Plus it always seemed just a little bit funnier than the usual, “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

Now if people ask, well, the answer always comes with a little less humor. What do I do? Depending on the day you ask, I either have meetings about meetings or I’m the Organizational Party Planner in Chief. The irony of an arch misanthrope being the touch point for planning your next 1500 person event isn’t in any way lost on me. It’s one of the reasons I know the universe has a sense of humor.

At least when the time comes to punch out of here, I’ll know that I am fully prepared to begin my second career as the most overly officious and bureaucratic wedding planner in all of human history… because dealing with overly sensitive, emotional clients who want their special day to be just perfect sounds an awful lot like dealing with the day-to-day demands of your run of the mill general officer. The only thing missing is the poofy white dress.

Go ahead, ask me…

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After a couple of weeks of relearning how to spend most of the day without a cell phone, I can say that it’s at best, unpleasant. I’ve made a few necessary adjustments to my personal workflows that have made the circumstance a bit less onerous, but I’m afraid there is just no good substitute for having my digital life at my fingertips at all times. Technically I guess I could go back to the dark ages and start carrying around a paper planner all day, but at that point why not just switch back to stone tablets and chisels? At least I’ve managed a few work around that keep me mostly connected during the day. They’re not seamlessly integrating my life, but they’re at letting me limp along, which I suppose is better than nothing. Just barely.

The real issue I’ve run into after becoming essentially phoneless for large chunks of the day is that I’m losing track of the myriad of notes and reminders I’d regularly send myself throughout the day. Outlook does a good enough job of keeping me on track with most official functions, but I’m feeling the absence of emails to remind me to look at one particular memo or stop for milk on the way home. I’m really missing the ready place to keep track of the copious number of ideas that passed the “I should write about this” test and made it onto my running list of possible blog topics. So it turns out the next step in the process of learning to live with traumatic loss is to come up with some kind of system of recording notes and ideas that doesn’t depend entirely on me seeing the right post it note three minutes before I’m going to need it.

Go ahead and ask me how much I enjoy creating solutions to problems that really have no need to exist at all in the 21st century.

The day wherein I get nothing accomplished…

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I had four meetings today, which isn’t unusual in and of itself. The real issue was they were scheduled in such a way as to make sure that I had no more than 45 minutes between any of them. The longest uninterrupted stretch of “work” time I had today was the 90 minutes at the start of the day… and the first thirty of those minutes were spent rebooting repeatedly and trying to coax my computer into playing nicely with the network.

That’s pretty much a nice way of saying that I did absolutely nothing productive today. I listened to a number of people talk about the many, many productive things they thing we should be doing, though. If my understanding of bureaucracy is in any way accurate, we give full credit in either case. It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference whether you talk about doing things or you actually do them. More and more of my time seems committed to the former.

I’m fighting an ongoing battle with my innate sense that getting things done is important versus the reality that just showing up in the meeting about the thing that needs done. On days like this it’s helpful to be reminded that there are eight hours in every work day and however Uncle wants me to spend them is his business. For as long as I’ve been doing it, it still feels like an awfully strange way to spend the day.

The game of telephone…

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“You’re going to be able to keep you current phone number,” might just prove to be as much of a joke as “You’re going to be able to keep your doctor.” After seven days of not having a phone at work, I now possess the capability to have voice conversations with people who are too far away for a good strong yell to be effective. That’s a plus. I didn’t realize how many times a day I used the damned thing until I suddenly didn’t have it. That’s the good news.

The bad news, because there’s always bad news, is that the number people have to dial to reach me is not the old number that “I get to keep.” That, it seems, is a “phase two” of this particular project. Given the sloth-like speed at which phase one has been carried out, I expect to still be waiting for my actual phone line to be assigned sometime when I get back from my Christmas vacation.

In the meantime, the telecommunications gurus have come up with a work around by which apparently every telephone in the universe is forwarded to a different number, somehow magic happens, and calls to our original number end up ringing through at our new location. It’s safe to say that I lack faith in this particular arrangement to be anything more than one of Uncle’s standard cluster fucks. Clausewitz tells us that in war even the simplest things are hard to do. It’s no less true in peacetime as it turns out.

I should have long ago given up on the idea that anything might just work as advertised, but God it would be nice to be pleasantly surprised just this once.

To make us better…

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I feel like I should start off by saying there are a number of relatively decent things about my current employment situation. I’m paid reasonably well, I’ve got a fighting shot at retiring instead of dropping dead in my traces, and I don’t have to sling 50 pound bags of anything from one end of a warehouse to another. It’s important to acknowledge that, I suppose, before I start ranting and raving about whatever utter asshattery takes over any given day.

As a sat at the office for a second day with no working telephone and people getting increasingly irate that I was “avoiding them,” though, the perks felt largely insufficient. Look, I loathe talking on the telephone, but in an environment where “communication” is right there in the name of the organization, basic telephone service a pretty damned significant tool. The only thing worse than having one on your desk is not having one. It’s just one of those petty, but constant sources of irritation that makes the day to day minutia of getting anything done exponentially more difficult.

I don’t have the energy to get started tonight on the dull hum of two massive televisions spewing news in every direction or the dozen shouted conversations from one end of the room to the other or the score of other distractors that are apparently going to be a fact of life for the foreseeable future. But, the wise leaders tell us, this change will make us better. While I won’t entirely rule that out of the realm of the possible, thus far it hasn’t proven to be anything more than an enormous pain in the ass.

New cubicle day…

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To start a week in which I’m doing me as well as covering down in part or in whole for three other people, I arrived at the office this morning to discover that it was also new cubicle day. I’d made as much peace as possible with the fact that we’re pissing away money redesigning and reconstructing an office that is only five years old, but due to the general delays and slow-motion progress of all government sponsored design and construction projects, I’d mostly written off the whole exercise as something that would probably never see the light of dmilton-office-space1ay. In one of those rare bits of accomplishment, though, this is the week we start shuffling underlings so we can build more offices for our increasingly deep multi-level management structure.

I’ve lost count of the number of reorganizations, restructurings, rightsizings, drawdowns, plus-ups, or other periods of office growth or detriment I’ve lived through in the last fourteen years.  One a year sounds like a pretty likely number, though. One or two of them may have been reasonably well thought out. The rest, the lion’s share, are slapdash affairs dreamt up with approximately a ninth grade level of academic rigor. That’s fine. Ours is not to reason why and all that.

Today marked my fourth cubicle move in as many years. Each move marks a progressively less desirable location as the ranks of management swell and the number of line personnel decrease. Hard to believe anyone ever accused headquarters organizations of being top heavy. My new cell away from home doesn’t have a working phone yet. The storage cabinets haven’t arrived yet it’s missing three wall panels, but at least there are no windows and no outside electronic devices allowed. The great irony is the powers that be are in a dead rush to fill this space so they can immediately begin construction inside that same area. By some truly bureaucratic feat of logic, someone decided that building out four private offices would be best accomplished by first filling all other parts of the room to capacity and then beginning the cutting, drilling, and hammering. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had to make up.

If I somehow don’t manage to lose what small sliver of my mind remains somewhat same between now and the end of the year, I will quite simply consider it miraculous beyond words. Alas, it’s truly just another day serving our increasingly crazy Uncle.

It staves off the madness…

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Spend enough days in a row sitting through meetings where nothing is ever decided, writing emails that no one ever reads, and dreaming up good ideas that will never see the light of day and one might be forgiven for tending to adopt a healthy cynicism about their profession. In a bureaucracy where every cog has its own agenda and can through even the best laid plans off the rails, frankly I’m surprised when anything gets done at all. It’s practically a cause for celebration.

I suspect that’s why I spend so much of my “off” time doing things that can demonstrate a tangible result. Reading and writing are easy. Finish the book, draft a new chapter, and either way at the end point you have something to show for the effort. It’s measurable. I suspect it’s also why I throughly enjoy mowing the grass, running string trimmer, and cutting back another few feet of encroaching saplings. Adding two hours of physical work after eight hours of repeatedly banging your head against you desk probably isn’t everyone’s idea of good times… but it makes me unreasonably happy, even as it leads to increasing exhaustion.

In that one small way, I’ve carved a bit of order away from chaos. It’s not making the world safe for democracy, or curing polio, but it helps stave off the madness and that contribution shouldn’t be undervalued.

Pro tips from the office…

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Here’s a pro tip from the average American office – if you’re bored and casting around for something to do, the answer should never be to park yourself in front of a colleague and then as many stories about your childhood, medical experiences, coworkers as you can come up with. Feel free to stop by to say hello, or to ask a question, or to relay some important tidbit of information, but for the love of all that’s holy, don’t look to the people you work with to entertain you when you can’t come up with anything better to do with your time.

It’s not necessarily a matter of interrupting anything important or time sensitive so much as it is that I simply have no desire to be your default method of passing the time. Do what everyone else does: piss away your day on Facebook, or walk down to the lobby and spend a few minutes watching TV, or take you cell phone and go sit in the john for 30 minutes. The important thing is that you not just make the rounds engaging everyone in 15-30 minutes of conversation from which it will prove difficult or impossible for them to escape.

I get it. We’re all bored. There are 746 million things we’d all rather be doing, but adding a person who doesn’t know when to STFU and move on to the mix adds insult to injury and makes one wonder what case could be made for justifiable workplace violence. In the average office, I’d be willing to bet a very large percentage would be willing to testify for the defense if you were to ever accidentally bludgeon your office talker into unconsciousness for the greater good.