Category Archives: work

That one guy from the meeting who had a beard…

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I have a confession to make. If I’ve only met you once or twice, I’m never ever going to remember your name. If I only see you once a month, I’m not going to remember your name. If we pass in the hallway every day and I recognize you by sight but we don’t have any substantive interaction, I’m never going to remember your name.

Some people have a knack for matching names and faces – even for people they see once and then maybe never again. Honest to God, I can sit in a meeting with you. Have an entire discussion and use your name the whole time, but five minutes later I’ll end up referring to you as “that one guy from the meeting who had a beard.” I know that for a fact because it’s exactly the phrase that came out of my mouth this morning in reference to a meeting I was in yesterday.

So, I’m not good with names. I make up for it with wit, charm, and by never talking myself into a position where I’d need to use a person’s name. Studying your own handout while asking “What do you think,” is a good way to avoid the awkwardness, in case you’re interested. Just avoid eye contact so it’s never entirely clear who you’re addressing and most of the time you’ll be good to go. And sign in sheets. Sign in sheets are your friend. They’re like having a cheat sheet only it’s perfectly legitimate.

All I’m saying to the people who I’ve met already and for those I’ll inevitably be forced to meet in the future, is don’t take it personally when I can’t call you by name in a meeting, after a meeting, or really at any time. Frankly I can’t call anyone by name. Sometimes I draw a perfect blank on people I’ve worked with for almost half a decade, so it’s nothing personal. It’s not you, it’s me.

I’m sure there’s some kind of mental gymnastics I could do to power up that part of my memory that is supposed to store and recall names, but doing that would require far more effort than I’m really willing to invest in it. I’m happy enough continuing to use second and third-person pronouns to meet all my professional needs.

Turn your head and cough…

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Most nights by the time I get home I have at least the kernel of an idea about what I’m going to write about that night. Usually it’s a few words dashed out on the back of a post it note, or a voice memo on my phone, but that’s enough to get me started. Tonight is one of those other nights – the nights when despite being busy from dawn until an hour before dusk, I don’t have a single decent thing on my mind.

You’ll have to trust me when I say that’s not a function of just having been bored today. The fact is today was probably one of the busiest days I’ve had in the last few years. None of it was particularly hard work, but everything I touched was time consuming – understanding the issue, talking to the right people, making sure the right answers go to the correct places; put another way, it was an all-star day of coordinating, integrating, and synchronizing. It lasted forty minutes longer than my usual day, could have lasted another fifty minutes past that, and when I left I still wasn’t close to finished.

Tomorrow looks like more of the same. Actually, tomorrow looks like more of a continuation of today because so much of the work will carry over or worse yet because people will have had the night to sleep on it and dream up some new and interesting wild-assed questions. That’s my long winded way of saying that since around 8AM it’s felt a lot like we’ve been trying to cram ten pounds of day into a five pound sack.

It occurred to me some time this morning that Friday is a day off for me. I’m going to get my yearly physical and eye exam. Getting my eyes dilated and being treated to the old “turn your head and cough” routine sounds better than the alternative at the moment. That should tell you all you need to know about the kind of week I’ve got lining up.

Known knowns…

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The better part of a decade ago the then Secretary of Defense befuddled members of the Pentagon press corps with a discussion of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Love him or hate him, Secretary Rumsfeld had a certain happy felicity of phrase that made his press events a thing of beauty to watch. Believe it or not, though, I did’t log in tonight to talk about the former Secretary.

Instead, I came to complain about the known knows – namely that I know the weekend is ending in a few hours and I know even before Monday gets here that I’ll be working late tomorrow night. I don’t mean that I’ll be there until the small hours of the morning, but there is an unavoidable afternoon meeting that’s definitely going to step all over what is normally a very happy time of the day. In this case, it’s not exactly my fault. I inherited this meeting from someone who has moved on to practice other opportunities to excel and it was set in concrete long before it landed on my desk. I like to think you all know me well enough to know there’s no way in hell I would schedule a meeting at end-of-tour. That’s just not my style.

So that’s my known known before the new week even starts. It’s a fair bet that it’s a known that will annoy me for the rest of tonight and throughout the day tomorrow. I wish it didn’t. Things that screw with my carefully cultivated schedule are one of those things that bother me well beyond all reasonable levels. With all that said, the knowns aren’t likely to be the things that really jam up the week. It’s the whole host of unknown unknowns lurking right below the surface that promise to blow the week to hell and back.

With that said, I’ve got a bottle of wine to finish and a good book to stick my nose in for the balance of the evening. That should decisively keep both the knows and unknowns at bay for the time being.

Those days…

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Today was another one of those days. You know, the kind you spend dashing from Very Important Thing to Very Important Thing without ever slowing down to do any kind of analysis about what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. Those days are becoming more and more common lately. My read of the future is that they’ll probably become the norm rather than the exception and that it’ll happen sooner rather than later.

I’m not saying I want to be one of those occasional government employees I ran across in DC who unfolded the Post when they got in and proceeded to spend the day reading it from cover to cover, but it would be nice to be able to do more than race from one meeting to the next until they all start bleeding together into one great endless timesuck. I’m a little envious of the people who seem to be able to sit through meetings and digest all the information on the fly, compiling it into some intra-cranial database with perfect recall of how it fits in with all the other information from all the other meetings they’ve sat in. My brain, of course, doesn’t work like that. I process information best when I have time to think on it, write things out, and then aggregate it into a comprehensive whole. That’s why given the choice I’d be better served sticking with PowerPoints and information papers and distilling big ideas down into their essential elements. Needing to do it on the wing quite literally makes my head hurt.

Based on the way the last couple of weeks have gone, I’m projecting the need to lay on a bulk supply of aspirin. As “those days” become the new normal, I’m going to need them. There are a number of management philosophies that apply here – some say do more with less, some say do less with less, the one that seems to be in play at the moment is “do more and quit your bitching.”

Rest assured as long as I have a blog and an internet connection they may be able to make me do more, but I will never, ever quit my bitching.

Untied…

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It occurred to me this morning that there’s probably a deep psychological reason I’m so adamantly opposed to wearing a tie. Sure, I could give you the usual song and dance about them being constrictive and uncomfortable or about them serving absolutely no purpose in the modern world, but deep down I don’t think that’s the reason at all… even though those are all perfectly valid issues with the standard necktie.

1288298661684133102The real problem with these damned decorative bits of fabric is that I never wear them on good days. I pull one off the rack for funerals, court appearance, work, and weddings – for good or ill, those aren’t what I consider the red letter days of my life. Those days are largely depressing and/or expensive hassles in which I’d probably rather not participate. In my near 40-year life, ties always come out for the pain-in-the-ass times.

The good times are marked with jeans, tee shirts, shorts, and muddy boots. They’re ratty clothes covered in dog hair and smelling of wood smoke or of diesel fumes and salt spray after a long day on the water. Never once on one of these good days did I sit back quietly and think to myself, “Wow, this day would have been so much better if I had on a tie!” On the other hand, nearly every time I’ve ever put on a tie, I know the day would have been better if I was somewhere else, wearing something different.

So there it is in a nutshell, my basic belief that ties aren’t just a pointless throwback noose we’re supposed to willingly put our necks into every morning. In fact, they’re basically nothing more than a visual cue that you’re about to experience a wasted day.

Thanks for stopping by tonight. This has been one of those occasional posts I make to give you a little insight into what’s churning around in my head while I’m standing quietly off to the side of the room observing the world around me.

Not ready…

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I’m running down the clock on my last few hours of mid-summer vacation doing laundry, making dinner, and generally trying to smooth the transition back to work tomorrow. I’m not going to lie, there my have been a FML moment when I cracked my eyes this morning and realized I was 24 922e95ce8dd0b51f9a273eb8cd59d075short hours from diving back into the grind. It’s not that I hate work, but like everyone else there are just a trillion and a half things I’d rather spend my time doing. Such is life.

One of the unavoidable conversations you hear at the office is contemplation about how people will keep themselves busy in retirement, whether or not they’ll be able to adjust effectively to a world where a third of their day isn’t pre-planned for them. Every time I get away, I’m reminded that I won’t ever have to ask myself that question. I know with absolute certainty that I’ll manage to fill my time with activities that feel way more rewarding than ginning up a well-crafted PowerPoint or thousand column spreadsheet. Mercifully, my interests don’t require a small fortune so when the time comes, it’ll be surprisingly easy to flip the switch and get on with it.

Yeah, so while I’m not ready to get back to the so-called real world, I’ve got readiness in spades for the day I don’t have to. Talk about long range planning.

Where you stand…

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It’s Monday again and while they don’t seem so bad when you’re not shuffling off to work in the dark hours of the morning, it’s still the kind of thing that turns your mind to thoughts of the office. Inevitably, that means I’m thinking about meetings, because, in a “professional work environment” apparently meetings are just about the only thing people do.

It’s been my experience that on any given day there are more meetings than people available to go sit in them. That problem compounds because everyone inevitably thinks their meeting is the most important of the day and demand that the most senior person available attend them in order to reinforce the perception of importance. And you see, that’s where things start coming off the rails, because some meetings get stuck with guys like me showing up. When I show up unescorted by someone of senior grade, there’s a good chance your meeting isn’t nearly as important as you think it is.

It’s not that I’m in any way incapable of expressing official thoughts or ideas, it’s just that I have no standing to actually make or enforce decisions on behalf of my large bureaucratic organization. Those activities are reserved to pay grades far higher than mine (and I’m OK with that). The other thing that you really should be concerned about when I show up alone is that there’s always a chance that my filter will slip off and I might accidentally open my mouth and let my actual opinion fly out. While there’s always a price to pay for telling truth to power, I generally don’t think about that until the cat’s well out of its bag.

As it is, I’m amazed on a weekly basis how many times I’m left alone with an open mic and a naive optimism that I won’t say something stupid directly into the ear of someone at echelons higher than reality. Also, and I’ll give you this one for free, if the only time you can schedule your meeting is after lunch on a Friday, go ahead and kill your project because that’s a sure sign there isn’t a single person anywhere on the planet who actually cares about what you’re doing.

So, yeah, on this Monday morning, I’m reaching out to meeting organizers everywhere and giving them an opportunity to reevaluate their actions, how many gaggles they schedule, when they’re held, and where they stand in the grand scheme of things.

Interview with a misanthrope…

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I had an interview this morning, a something a few of you might have guessed by the fact that I had bothered to put on a tie. Generally speaking a tie is only something I wear when it can’t otherwise be avoided. As a rule of thumb, that means when the number of stars in the room is equal to or greater than five – Five one star generals = wear a tie; A three star and a two star = wear a tie; Reanimated corpse of Douglas MacArthur = wear a tie. It’s a simple rule that I adopted years ago to prevent any confusion about what to wear and when to wear it.

fBreaking with that longstanding custom today made me feel a little awkward. After all, two of the three people on the interview panel were people I’ve worked with for the last four years. Surely by now they’ve caught on to my basic reluctance to willingly put my neck in a noose each morning. With that, wearing one today felt like something of a cop out, a unilateral caving in to the throat constricting requirements of social convention. It made me feel a little dirty and a lot like a sellout.

Interviews are always a roll of the dice – especially since this is the first one of done live and in person since July of 2000 when I was hired as a first year teacher. All my other jobs over these last 14 years have been gotten as a result of phone interviews or directed moves into new positions. That being said I think I answered all their questions effectively and efficiently, while interjecting my own brand of folksy humor and sarcasm at appropriate points. How well that translates into the live interview process remains to be seen.

I work with at least half the people in the running for this gig. They’re good people with solid resumes and every bit as reasonable a claim on the job as I feel I have going for me. I’d like the chance to do something different without traipsing halfway across the country to find it. I’d definitely like the grade and corresponding income bump. Still, knowing who else is in the running I won’t shed bitter tears if I didn’t make the cut on this one… though that’s no promise I won’t be more sulky and irritable than usual for a while if the vote breaks against me.

Buggy…

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Employee morale is generally one of those “tough nut to crack” problems. The picnics and certificates that get one employee all warm and fuzzy will likely tend to add fuel to another’s fire of discontent. How to get at the core of the problem is very rarely a one-oriental-cockroach_187x116size-fits-all kind of thing.

With that being said, I think the one morale boosting solution we can all agree on is getting rid of the insect infestations that plague the place like we’re running the Egypt exhibit at Mosesland. The drain flies that have taken up residence in the bathrooms for the last few months are bad enough. This week’s addition of cockroaches en mass really falls into a category well beyond what a cubicle-dweller should be expected to deal with.

Clogmia_Albipunctata_or_moth_flyI know funds are tight right now, but the solution really shouldn’t be just throwing more sticky traps into the corner and hoping for the best. Given the number of creatures I counted on the floor in the hallway this morning, we’re well into the realm of needing massive chemical intervention. Or possibly purifying the entire complex by fire. I’m not particularly repulsed by bugs but even I’ve reached the point where I’m starting to feel creepy crawly for no good reason other than knowing they’re there hiding in the dark recesses waiting to skulk over everything when the lights go out.

I’m not sure there’s enough Clorox in the state to make me feel OK about this one. So yeah, making things a little less buggy around the office might not cure all our ills, but it would be one giant leap in the right direction.

Real independence…

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Independence Day week is, in my opinion, second only to the week between Christmas and New Years in terms of how little actual productive work takes place inside Uncle’s vast machine. It’s true that not everyone takes the week (or four days) off, but for the most part the number of people on vacation approaches the point of critical mass where it becomes nearly impossible to get anything accomplished if it requires more than two people to be part of the decision-making or work flow. I’m sure there are plenty of old hands who might deny what I’m telling you, but experience tells me that this week is a dead zone for productivity. No matter how many memos you cram into the pipeline, if there’s no one there to read them on the other end, it’s just so many trees falling in the forest.

I’ve always felt like this week was the civilian equivalent to an operational pause – a breather before the long march through summer towards Labor Day and the close of the fiscal year. There are still plenty of people giving the illusion of getting something accomplished, but I suspect that if they were all honest at least half the emails they send are greeted with an out-of-office message. By early in the day Thursday, you’re going to find even the most dedicated of employees giving up the illusion and watching the clock with the rest of us poor dumb working stiffs.

That’s just part of the magic joy that is the trinity of three-day weekends in the summer. They feel different. They’re special. Maybe they hark back to being fourteen and having the whole summer stretched out in front of us like a never-ending weekend. Or maybe we just appreciate the reminder of the life we can look forward to in 20 year, 11 months, and 1 day… if we were so inclined to count the amount of time until we’re eligible for retirement.

Talk about celebrating a real independence day.