Category Archives: work

Two o’clock donuts…

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In my experience the only way to get through the average weekday is to break it into small manageable segments and give yourself something to look forward to periodically as the time crawls slowly past. It may be simplistic, but hey, I’ll endorse just about any idea in an effort to stave off the madness.

Since they opened up the Canadian Starbucks here in the building my mid-afternoon way-point is a trip out to the lobby for the day’s two o’clock donut. I jokingly refer to it as the “highlight of my day, but you see the thing is most days it’s not a joke. Between meetings, people who can’t seem to complete the simplest tasks in a timely manner, all manner of surprise requirements, and the inevitable daily shitstorm that originate well outside my span and scope of control, the two o’clock donut is (usually) the one reliable sign that the end of another day is mercifully closer than it was a few hours ago.

Some days that doesn’t matter much, but on others it’s the difference between holding it all together or making an irrecoverable spectacle of myself. The restorative nature of donuts, however, is not always foolproof. Even two o’clock donuts don’t make up for meetings that end after you should already be home wearing your fuzzy slippers and making dinner.

The family business…

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In most parts of the country maybe people don’t really think of government as a family business. Here in the greater DC-Baltimore area – and in many small towns who find their employment life’s blood tied inextricably to dams, prisons, or other federal projects, it’s just one of those facts of life. In my last job it wasn’t at all unusual to find three or more generations of a family who have worked at one location since back before we had to go liberate Europe the second time. I have my own share of family who spent time working for or who are still on the payroll of their elderly Uncle.

I don’t know why it always comes as such a surprise to me when someone in the office mentions meeting a colleague’s wife, husband, mother, father, sister, or brother in the course of flailing around trying to get something accomplished. Jobs are competed, personnel specialists live for making sure the rules are followed, and still often the “best qualified” are those who were raised from birth hearing about the Byzantine intrigues, conference room power struggles, and petty office politics the place seems to engender. We might be the single largest employer in the country, but sometimes, aside from marathon meetings, epic delusions of grandeur, and billion dollar operating budgets, it does feel like we’re running the average mom and pop shop.

But then you get out to the parking lot – which would make the biggest of big box stores blush with inadequacy – and realize, no, it’s not at all mom and pop. It’s not the family business. And you really are located somewhere deep inside the belly of the beast.

When four equals eight…

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I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the extra four hours off this morning. I never turn my nose up at free time off. That being said, four hours is just an awkward amount of time. Given the passible but not clear state of the local roads, my commute in is going to take an hour. Given that the average driver is stupid and there will undoubtedly be more than one driver on their way home this afternoon that puts it into a snow bank, my drive home will likely be over an hour. At a commute to work ratio of less than 1:2, if you’ll excuse the phrase, it just feels like something of a waste of time – as if we’re opening the doors today just so someone can say “yes, we’re open,” without having much concern for whether or not anything actually happens inside those doors.

Liberal leave – time off for which pre-approval isn’t required – is an option. Due to the peculiarities of Uncle Sam’s timekeeping regulations, though, under these circumstances one can’t combine the 4-hour delay with an additional four hours of liberal leave. If you’re going to stay home, those four hours in the afternoon are going to cost you a full eight hours of vacation time. That was a hard lesson learned.

So now the roads could be running with lava and there could be a troll under every bridge between here and there, but damned if I’m going to spend eight to get four. The math just doesn’t work, so I’ll go in, eat lunch, check some email, bitch about the snow, and then schlep home. Not exactly a recipe for productivity, but I’m sure it counts on someone’s report card as a full day’s work.

Seditious thoughts…

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There’s no way to better be assured the long weekend is over and you’re back to business than spending two hours locked in a meeting. That’s especially true when your speaking roll takes up about 1/240th of the allotted time. It leads to a lot of looking around, checking to see in anyone has fallen asleep, and repeatedly jabbing a pen cap into your own thigh in an effort to make sure you aren’t the one who nods off.

My feelings about meetings are fairly well known. Over the course of a career I can count on one hand the number of meetings that were really worth having or couldn’t have been more effectively dealt with in an email or by just sending out the slides. Sitting there, glazed eyes staring blankly at whoever happens to be sitting across from me, my mind wanders. There are a few other people who seem obviously bored. Others are giving a good account of paying attention. I wonder if it’s just me whose mind has slipped its tether and is wandering unescorted from idea to idea without purpose or destination.

I wonder if I’m the only one who’s attention span isn’t up to the task at hand. A few seem to be held in rapt attention, hanging on every syllable while it’s taking every bit of rapidly decaffeinating will power I can muster just to keep my chin from dropping slack to my chest.

We all proceed as if things are as they should be and the happy fiction is maintained for another day. I can’t imagine the furor that would erupt if one brave soul were to stand up and call the bloody great waste of time out for what it is. In fact I’ll probably be forced to give up my Senior Bureaucrat Secret Decoder Ring for having the audacity to speak aloud of such seditious thoughts.

Sigh. The lies we tell ourselves.

Inevitable…

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The inevitable happened today. Somewhere at echelons higher than reality someone decided that there was a TPS Report that just couldn’t wait until after the holidays – that out there in the far reaches of our vast bureaucratic quagmire, some vital piece of information sure to bring democracy, peace, and justice to a troubled world was just laying around waiting to be reported upwards. Rank and high station may have their privileges, but getting dosed heavily by common sense isn’t among them.

What really happened today was a request for information was generated high in the stratosphere, it was typed into the computer and then passed to me “for action.” I immediately rolled my eyes, which is something I spend an inordinate amount of time doing if I can be perfectly honest. I then in turn typed my own message passing the requirement for this very important information down to the next level. When they receive it, someone will roll their eyes and ask what the fuck I’m smoking and then they will write up their own email and send it ever further down the line. Eventually it will reach the desk of some individual who knows at least some of the answer, they’ll write up a response, and then the whole great process gets thrown into reverse – with each level seeking out its own approvals, making a few changes, and then sending it upwards before an answer returns to my desk where I’ll realize that the answer-by-committee bears no resemblance to the question I asked originally. Because time has expired on the clock, that factoid won’t stop me from rolling my eyes and passing it on back up the chain.

It’s a clunky, archaic process at the best of times. Let me just say for the record, sending something out two days before Christmas and expecting a response immediately after the new year is not, by anyone’s definition, the best of times. What it is, however, is a recipe for a systemic failure at almost every level. It’s the operative definition of setting yourself up for failure.

But this is the season of yuletide, when a long dead saint rises up from his frozen tomb and alights onto his sleigh driven by eight super-natural reindeer to distribute toys constructed by enslaved elves to the world’s children. It’s the season of miracles like that… so if you just believe hard enough, maybe anything really is possible.

Preserving the illusion…

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And so tomorrow we begin Christmas week, or what I affectionately like to think of as Why the Hell Didn’t I Take the Whole Week off Week. During most slow periods I can fiddle around sufficiently to find something to keep myself busy, if not gainfully employed by the strictest definition. The week of Christmas always presents something of a challenge, though. You see, even in the bureaucracy, 95% of the people who are still around are smart enough not to try kicking off anything new – and the 5% who aren’t that bright can safely be ignored until the new year. Even on the off chance that something does come in hot, the chances of the right combination of people needed to resolve the issue satisfactorily actually being available are precisely nil.

It’s been my experience over the years that offices being “open” at all these last two weeks of December is almost a complete fiction. Sure, the lights are going to be on and there are going to be some people milling around for all the good that’ll do. It’s not quite farce, but it is only a step or two above illusion.

Rest assured, friends, I will do my part to maintain that illusion right up until the final buzzer – at which point I will scamper to the exit and promptly forget everything even remotely office related until the new year. And if you think “scamper” was an incorrect word choice, you’ve clearly never seen me leave the building at the end of the day. Only the interest of preserving some semblance of personal dignity keeps me from processing to the door at a flat out run most days. On the day leading into an 11-day weekend all bets are off.

Those days will go fast enough and the grind through 2016 will commence well before I’m ready for it… but in the meantime I’ll do my level best to enjoy every moment between now and then.

The nastiest of four letter words…

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Maybe it’s the fact that during a “normal” week, I spend five out of seven days at the office, but it does feel like more and more of what ends up on these pages finds its inspiration from my four by eight foot cell. That’s genuinely not intentional. God knows I’d much rather leave that mess where I drop it at the end of the day than drag it along with me here. Despite that, the office – and probably any office – provides a wealth of reasons why someone might blog, or drink, or take pills excessively. In my experience the modern office is a reaffirmation of why, in the end, work is simply another nasty four letter word that darkens our vocabulary.

As a case-in-point, I offer the following vignette:

It was suggested today that perhaps the weekly 2-hour meeting that we were all sitting in was not sufficient to get us to the root cause of any of the issues that keep getting thrown around week after week. Someone daringly offered up the suggestion that a solution might be found by way of scheduling an informal weekly follow-up meeting to the already scheduled weekly 2-hour meeting. Let that sink in for a moment. The solution to one unproductive meeting is to continue to hold it, but to then schedule a second meeting to discuss the same topics that were at issue in the first meeting.

Someone, some brave soul, might have there suggested that the solution to solving problems might be found by sending the whole group out of the conference room and back to our desks, waiting voice messages, backlogged email, and, you know, actual work. While we all cast looks askance at one another, not one intrepid fool among us floated that idea. Our fate was plainly sealed.

Some days I wonder what the hell we’re doing here… but mostly I just shrug, roll my eyes, and trudge on towards close of business.

Lost Not Found…

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As part of my highly specialized and important position, one of the duties I’m saddled with is performing oversight of a 750 seat auditorium. It’s like being on the event staff at a concert hall that never puts on an event more interesting than the 100-meter snooze or a Gregorian chant marathon.

In addition to approving reservations for such entertaining acts as Mr. Smith’s Retirement Ceremony and calling in service orders when the crack in the foundation starts leaking (again), about once a week I get to field calls from panic stricken people who have left something behind in my beautiful facility. We’ve turned up everything from briefcases, to iPads, to an entire box of key chains. More often, though, it’s a call about a cell phone or eyeglasses.

Today’s call, routed through a third party to me, inquired about a trifecta of loss – cell phone, ID card, and passport. I rolled my eyes and explained that no, no one had turned anything in matching that description. Knowing full well that the chances of any of these items being there were slim to none, I still schlepped down, unlocked the building, and poked around “where the guy thinks he might have lost them.”

Aside from a stray dime, my exhaustive search turned up nothing at all. The only thing it did accomplish is to set me thinking on what kind of human being goes the 40 miles between here and Baltimore without once realizing (or attempting to look at) his cell phone? Allowing that amount of time to elapse between checking in on the latest Tweets, posts, or headlines is just unnatural. Probably some kind of damned terrorist.

Sex Ed: 2015 Edition

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Every year, my employer requires me to attend several classes, the message of which seems to consist solely of “Rape Bad.” Now we could go in to the somewhat faulty logic of believing I didn’t know rape was bad until sometime during the 247 times I’ve sat through the training, but that’s an old story.

The only redeeming quality this training really has is that I get to sit in an auditorium with a large group of my peers and watch them get very, very uncomfortable every time any word even remotely adjacent to sex is mentioned. It never fails to entertain me to see how many middle age adults, who have all presumably had sex at one point or another, are utterly flustered by the topic.

This year’s version of the training consisted of two presenters whose variation of the content was a little more racy than usual. Parts of their schtick included having the group yell out words we use for a woman who has a lot of sex. You can probably guess most of what ended up on the list. Then we repeated the exercise by listing out the names we use for oversexed men. Likewise, the list was predictable. That wasn’t the best part, though.

The very best thing was perfectly unexpected and came about while the assembled group was listing off all the euphemisms for “having sex.” Hooking up, bumping uglies, doing it, greasing the weasel; it was a reasonable list. Then one of the younger people in the crowd – one of the few, I should note – shouted out the inevitable “Netflix and chill.”

And that’s when time stopped for a moment and a room full of middle age folks looked vaguely perplexed and then, slowly, some of the looks became decidedly horrified. Knowing the average age of the crowd, I can only presume that look of abject horror came on because many of them would have children in the age range where Netflix and chill is a phrase in common usage – and perhaps one that’s been slid past them when they ask little Johnny or Suzy what they’re doing on date night.

It made an awfully large group of people awfully uncomfortable… and that made me laugh. This mandatory sex ed stuff isn’t so bad if you just come to it in the right frame of mind. The more you know, indeed.

Flash to bang…

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The time it takes to go from “flash to bang,” is an allusion to the time between a round impacting on target and when an observer hears the sound of that impact. Essentially it’s a low tech method of determining the amount of distance between you and whatever caused the bang. There are vagaries such as terrain and weather that intervene, but in principle sound travels at about 350 meters per second, therefore if flash to bang is 2 seconds, you’re 700 meters away – and that probably makes you way closer than you want to be to whatever is being pummeled.

In common usage down on the cube farm, flash to bang is used to mean the time between when you make a decision to the time that decision reaches fruition. The flash to bang on wanting a cup of coffee to getting that cup of coffee is generally very short. For other seemingly mundane tasks which seem like they should be accomplished quickly, such as publishing things to a website or getting a memo signed, the flash to bang could be months.

There’s no good reason for it, but as a professional lifetime spend tending to such things has taught me, that’s just the way it is. The lesson here, perhaps it’s the Zen of the Bureaucracy, is to try not to take it personally, shun emotionally entangling yourself with however long “the system” takes to do something. As a cog ex machina you don’t have any actual control over those things. Like terrain or weather you can influence them a bit around the margins, but getting from flash to bang is just going to take however long it takes.