Category Archives: work

Bleed a little longer…

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Two days into the week, it looks like it’s going to be another exercise in triage – in trying to figure out which high priority item is going to bleed to death if I don’t tend to it immediately and which I can put off to let bleed a little longer. It’s a hell of a way to try to get things done and nearly impossible if any of what you’re trying to accomplish requires deep thought and analysis. Thank God nothing I deal with ever needs any of that. You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes while I wrote that last bit.

Due in part to to what feels like the never ending variations on a hiring freeze, our preternatural ability to reorganize ourselves every six months, decisions (or lack thereof) made by high management, and people moving on to better opportunities, we’re at least three hands shy of where we should be. That doesn’t sound like a lot except it roughly translates to 1/4 of the total number of people who should be working in my office. Add into that mix the normal and customary sick days, vacation days, and alternative work schedule days off, it means as often as not we’re operating half staffed or less. Some days it’s much, much less.

Whether echelons higher than reality want to accept or admit it, it creates an environment where even if good work were encouraged, it would be nearly impossible to achieve. I won’t speak for anyone other than myself, but just now it feels like any day that doesn’t end in taking water over the transom was a good one. Running flat out just to avoid sliding backwards is a lot of things, but it’s not a recipe for encouraging or enabling anyone to do their best work. It’s a recipe for struggling to stave off disaster just enough to get through the day. When that’s what passes for a win, we’re all in trouble.

For Official Use Only…

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131186317From time to time I like to offer up helpful tips about life in the modern American workplace. I consider it kind of a public service. Hopefully it’s just one of the many topics here that people find useful or at least vaguely entertaining.

Tonight’s tip goes out to all those office drones who are walking around with a “For Official Use Only” credit card in their wallet. For most of us, you can count on one hand the number of times in a year (or in a career) when you’ll actually need to use that card. What you might not notice is how much that FOUO BigBank Mastercard looks nearly identical to the personal BigBank Mastercard that you’ve also been carrying around for years.

In fact, until you get an email from your boss wondering why there’s a $500 deposit charged on your official credit card, you probably won’t even notice that you’ve slipped the wrong one in your wallet and used it to book the hotel for your upcoming vacation. In case there’s any confusion, even I can’t manage to spin that one into the “official business” category.

I’m sure I’ll spend a big hunk of the next few days trying to get that straightened out and back onto my own card where I thought it was all along. Just when I think I’ve done every stupid thing a career bureaucrat can do, I run out and set the bar just a little bit higher for myself.

The more you know…

Suiting up…

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Due to circumstances beyond my control, I wore a suit to work today for what was possibly the first time in nearly four years. Given my regular “uniform” of solid colored polo shirts, khaki pants, and Doc Martens, apparently the appearance of a suit was a sufficiently big deal as to require the taking of photographs as documentary evidence. Had I known it was going to be a thing, I would have found something in a nice plaid or maybe a classic of the leisure variety. Alas, I’ve missed that opportunity.

As a dweller in cubicles, the idea that I should wear something that seems designed to be as uncomfortable as possible while spending eight hours in my little 6×6 slice of the world just strikes me as patently ridiculous. I’m not sure where anyone would have ever gotten the idea that wearing a tie will result in generating more fantastic PowerPoint slides. If I do say so myself, my slides are already pretty freaking fantastic. I’ve got this funny way of being more concerned with the end results than I am with how someone looks while getting there. Usually that leaves me a bit out of step with generally accepted practice. Trust me, I’ve gotten use to being out of step. It’s a role that feels like it suits me – no pun intended.

I don’t want anyone to think this represents the beginning of a great change in my personal dress code. I’d show up every day wearing ratty jeans and beat up boots if I didn’t think it would cause the worst crisis to face the government since the beginning of the Great Recession. As long as we can keep the suit wearing to once every thousand days or so, I think it’s a compromise we can all live with.

Stress…

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Stress is a funny thing. Actually, that’s not right at all. Stress is a pain in the ass thing, but what it does to people can certainly be funny. Based on my observations, there are two basic types of people: 1) Those who “externalize” stress and fly off the handle with little or no notice when put under pressure and 2) Those who internalize stress and let it seep into their pores and really fester. I tend largely to fall into the latter category. I’ve learned through hard experience that almost nothing good happens when you fly off the handle. I do my best to respond accordingly. Some people, though, they just let it blow. To each his own, I guess.

Cracking jokes on your way out the door when you’re seething inside is something of an art form. Conveniently, it’s also less detrimental to your career than putting your fist through the nearest available sheet of drywall, so there’s that too. Sure, it helps you better align yourself for he inevitable middle-age heart attack, but it beats all hell out of letting anyone know they’ve gotten under your skin. The cardinal sin in the animal kingdom is showing weakness. Experience tells me that we’re all just about a step up from our primate cousins under the best of circumstances – just a better dressed version of the animal kingdom. Therefore, I try to keep weakness showing to a bare minimum.

I walked away today without twitching, sneering, or picking a fight. I should get a goddamned medal for that, though I won’t dare hold my breath. Just one time it would feel incredible to let myself go off like a rocket. It would be bad on every other level imaginable, but God it would be so cathartic.

Variations on a theme…

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The week to date has been all about variations on a theme. Unfortunately, the theme of the week has been “everything is going to turn to a giant steaming pile of shit in your hands.” Today’s example comes in the form of a not inconsequential event in the life of a typical big government organization. It’s not uncommon to start planning for something like this many months in advance. HellBy the time you get down to the few days before the thing actually kicks off, you should mostly be down to making sure the details are covered.

What you shouldn’t be doing three days before the big show is deciding that while the plan to do everything indoors has been well and good for the last two months, what we really should do is throw most of those plans over the side and instead plan on doing it outside, open to the weather, and subject to whatever nature decides to throw at you that day. That’s a fine enough approach if you’ve had months to do all the extra planning that goes into having an outdoor event, but it rarely leads to good things when it’s sprung on you with way, way less than a week to go. What you end up with under those circumstances is a Frankenstein’s monster tossed together with whatever parts and pieces you’re able to get your hands on without prior notice. Those pieces are generally not ideal.

So, we spent most of the day today inventing Plan B as we implemented it, making up details up as we went along, and having a vague hope that it all might hold together just long enough to get through the next few days. If history is any guide, the wheels will come flying off sometime late Friday afternoon, so there’s that on the horizon. It would certainly be in keeping with the week’s theme.

The only up side that I can see is that by this time next week it’s all going to be over no matter how badly we botch the implementation. Many years ago, one of my fellow teachers was fond of saying “the important part is setting your goals low and achieving them.” If his advice doesn’t apply here, it doesn’t apply anywhere.

Should have known…

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I should have known what kind of day it was going to be when I woke up 20 minutes before the 5AM alarm – too early to be awake, even by my standards, but not nearly enough time to make going back to sleep a worthwhile endeavor. I should have known then that it was a sign to pick up the phone, make a call, and burn off a sick day. But instead I pressed on with the morning routine.

The day fired one last warning shot across my bow when I got to the office and was met with a message that someone had sent me what they thought was a very important email and they needed to talk to me about its contents immediately (or when they got in at 8:30, whichever came first). Of course the problem there was they might have sent the email, but as we all know communication only happens when information is transferred between the sender and the receiver. Whatever it was their very important email said, it had been lost in transition from their mailbox to mine. As a rule I try not to comment on documents I haven’t had a chance to read, so the 8:30 phone call was, shall we say, a bit brief. I really, really should have pulled the plug at that point and called it a day.

Instead, in the middle of trying to prepare for a meeting (with the person whose email finally showed up around 9:00), I was then shanghaied into seat filler duty for 75 minutes. That led into a 30 minute pause before the next hour long meeting, which led to 20 minutes of frantic post-meeting emailing, which begat the next 75 minute long meeting. By now it’s 2:30 and that’s when I finally sat down to shove a sandwich and a few handfuls of crackers into my face today. That may be perfectly reasonable for some people, but tends to be a little late when your official day started at 7:30 and you’re legally obligated to leave the premises at 4:00.

I at least got to leave on time this afternoon. As I understand it “on time” was just a few minutes ahead of the last violent shitstorm of the day. I missed getting covered in that one by the skin of my teeth. Unfortunately, now I know what’s sitting there waiting for me when I wander in tomorrow. I was definitely a happier human being before I knew what to expect, but I’ve been at this game long enough that I should have known better than to have any expectations at all.

Expectations. That’s where the day really started skidding off the rails. Yeah, I really should have known better.

Reaction…

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I consider myself lucky to rarely be afflicted with the trouble some people seem to have when it comes to making decisions. I might not always make the “right” decision, but I’ll make one on the fly if for no other reason than even a wrong decision feels more productive than dithering back and forth about what to do. I’m a great many things (some of them even good), but a ditherer I am not.

Under normal circumstances, I don’t see that as a weakness, but the problem comes when I find myself in a position of having too many moving parts demanding attention at once. That leads me to making reactionary decisions about everything. Jumping from one issue to the next with no real rhyme or reason behind it is not exactly the recipe for great decision making. It is, however, the recipe for making a metric shitload of otherwise easily avoidable mistakes. Easily avoidable mistakes make me sad.

I’m not asking for an endless buffet of free time, but a few minutes now and then to evaluate, plan, and analyze would go a long way towards letting me churn out a product that’s not halfway embarrassing. Absent the time to do the required leg work, I’d advise everyone to go ahead and get ready for a lot of checking off whatever box needs checked without giving any actual thought to how any of it relates to the bigger picture. Look, I’m fine playing it that way, as long as we’re all willing to concede that running half blind from reaction to reaction is a piss poor way of getting anything done. Really, I just want to make sure I’m on the record as having said that here in print.

A conference by any other name…

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Given the “constrained fiscal environment” and fuss made over the excesses at any number of government sponsored conferences over the last four years, the very word “Conference” has been formally stricken from official usage. No matter what you’re doing, no matter how much it smells, looks, and acts like a conference you can never, ever call it that for fear of bringing down the wrath of the anointed – and even worse, the attention of the Washington Post.

Despite the official prohibition against staging (and largely against even attending) conferences, there sure are a hell of a lot of people fully engaged in planning for and attending workshops, councils, boards, reviews, forums, and very large group meetings. Under other circumstances, they’d be called conferences and no one would bat an eyelash, but great pains are taken to make sure they’re called anything but what they are.

Now, I’m just a cog in this great machine, but when I see our most senior leaders sitting before Congress begging for permission to cut pay and benefits while they’re still allowing grip and grin sessions and a hundred other boondoggles to happen with a nod and a wink, well, you can rack up mine as a vote of no confidence. There’s plenty of waste in this vast bureaucracy… and most of those on the inside would be happy to point it out if anyone were going to take a serious swing at eliminating it. But while we’re still in the business of wasting time and money on conferences by any other name, citing payroll as a major cost driver just doesn’t pass the common sense test.

Thank God we apparently never grade that test.

More bad juju…

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So, I was sitting here fat, dumb, and happy marveling at the free time I’d managed to carve for myself this evening before the realization set in that what I hadn’t done yet was sit down and knock out tonight’s blog post. Usually I have the stub of an idea or at least a few hastily scratched notes before I bug out of the office for the day. Today? Not so much. I left there this afternoon at a dead run in fear of touching anything on my way out. You see, every single thing I touched today turned into a big steaming pile of shit in my hands. I’ve discussed this mysterious reverse Midas touch before, but I’m always just a little surprised and thrown out of sorts when it shows up. It’s arrival means the day is going to be chaos from start to finish. No exceptions. No easy outs. Just me, trying desperately not to brush up against anything I can avoid until it passes.

Today was most decidedly one of “those” days. In fact sitting down to write this at all caused great fear and consternation that whatever was plaguing me all day at the office might somehow have survived the trip home. Since you’re reading this, no doubt those fears have been somewhat put to rest. It means at least that I’ve got a few hours respite before I walk back into the hot mess that I left on my desk this afternoon. I hope those brief hours are enough to purge whatever bad juju settled on me today, because honestly two days in a row of everything ending in disaster is just too much to contemplate. If tomorrow wanted to top today in terms of sheer wastefulness of time and effort, well, my desk might actually have to burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp. Given my track record so far this week, I’ll just ask that you believe me when I say that doesn’t really sound like much of a stretch.

Three tips for workplace survival…

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I make a concerted effort to steer this blog away from specific issues at my own office and more towards a general discussion of work in general and the foibles of the workplace writ large. However, like the modern cop dramas that everyone seems to love these days, the following issues are ripped from the headlines of real life experience while working in an office somewhere in Maryland. No bureaucrats were physically harmed in the writing of this post, but their souls might just be a little more crushed for the experience.

1. Don’t send an email and then immediately walk over to the recipient’s desk to tell them you sent an email. Thanks to the little glowing screen on their desk, they probably know this already. Plus, there’s a good chance they’re working on something and will get to whatever issue you’re having in its order of importance to them, not based on the number of times you ask for it. In fact, multiple requests for the same information will result in all of your messages being shifted to the bottom of the pile.

2. If you’re working in an office far removed from lunch options, there’s a safe bet that you’ll do at least a little eating at your desk. While it’s sad and depressing in its own right, the thing people need to remember is that the lunch break is sacrosanct. It should be inviolable, except under the most extreme of circumstances. If you approach someone’s desk and they’re stuffing half a sandwich into their face, that shouldn’t be considered an open invitation for a long winded discussion about anything. That’s especially true if the victim of your verbal deluge is trying to read a few pages of a book or magazine while jamming his face full of food – pretty much the universal sign that they’re on break and not working at the moment. If you’re one to be stuck eating at your desk on the regular, picking up a Do Not Disturb or Out to Lunch sign to hang on your cube at appropriate times might not be a bad investment.

3. If you think you’re having a discrete personal conversation on the phone in your cubicle, think again. Everyone within earshot knows if you’re blowing up at your wife, behind on your mortgage, or recently contracted the herp. Yes, we all know having those conversations from the comfort of your office chair is convenient, but sometimes everyone would be better served if you wandered off somewhere and had that discussion on your cell phone. When you’re forced by your profession to sit shoulder to shoulder with them for eight hours a day, you can at least do them all the favor of not discussing your most recent bout of hemorrhoids?

If you found these tips useful, remember there are plenty more hints and tricks handily outlined in Nobody Told Me: The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees.