Category Archives: work

The great leveler…

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Email, like death, is one of life’s great levelers. From the high and the mighty down to the lowest of the low, we all get entirely too much email. Shoving electrons through the network make it so easy to moving information from here to there that most of us never stop to ask if the people on the receiving end actually need the information we’re pushing at them. Because the most important thing the average bureaucrat does on a daily basis is cover his or her ass, we end up in a seemingly endless do-loop of email and instant messages.

The ability to generate an instant distribution list is possibly the worst thing to ever happen to the average office drone… because let’s face it, if the email is addressed “To” more than one or two people, no one is going to take on the individual responsibility of answering it. If you address it to 20 people, no one is even going to bother reading it at all. The only thing four pages of addressees gets you is the merciless ridicule of your colleagues and the tears of a God disappointed that you’ve used your free will for such douchebaggery.

I wish I was making this up, but four pages of recipients for a message that needs to go to three people is, politely put, a bit much. I’m the first to say that if something’s worth killing, it’s probably worth overkilling, but sheesh, even I have limits. I’m not saying an email addressed to +/-700 people makes you look like an asshat; I’m saying that by actually sending that email out into the world you are, in fact, an asshat. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one… kind of like the distinction between covering your ass and becoming an object of loathsome contempt.

First contact…

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One of the truisms of war is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Having successful spent my career not attacking anything more important than the boxes of doughnuts people bring to work, I’m just going to proceed based on the assumption that it’s a true statement. Maybe I shouldn’t think of the office as combat. Clearly it’s not quite a healthy thought process, but nevertheless it feels apt. No one should be surprised to find out that I start just about every day with a plan – whether it’s where I’m going, what I want to get accomplished, whatever. It’s a plan. And for as many weekdays as I can remember, that plan has been shot to hell no later than 8AM. I’m sure there are good and valid reasons for that and I remain exceptionally happy that I am in no way, shape, or form even remotely thought of as a decision maker. Still. Some days I sit in my cube and want to respond to every email with one word: Nuts!

If it was good enough for Bastogne, it seems like it should be good enough for me too.

Over the horizon…

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Some days you just have nothing to show for getting out of bed. As far as I can tell, this is one of those days. For the record, that’s not a complaint. It’s a simple acknowledgment of fact. It’s one of those days where the best thing you can say is that you’ve managed to do no harm – neither advancing the cause or making it substantively worse in any way. It’s a draw… and if you’re a smart bureaucrat, you’ve survived long enough to know that a draw is effectively a win, because the scales are almost always weighted in the direction of making things worse off than they were before you touched something.

I should really put a more positive spin on the day. To paraphrase what a wise man told me this morning, “Look on the bright side, it’s Tuesday. That means were as far away from next Monday as it’s possible to get.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic. After all, it’s Tuesday night now. If you strain your eyes hard enough you can start to see the first signs of the weekend coming on, even though it’s still out there somewhere over the horizon. That’s as cup-half-full as I’m likely to get, so make of it what you will.

And people say I never post anything positive. This’ll show ‘em.

Meetup…

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I’ve got an entire chapter of Nobody Told Me… The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees devoted to the nature, causes, and avoidance of meetings. Sadly, being forewarned only lets you know what you’re in for, it doesn’t automatically get you a Get-Out-of-Meeting-Free pass. It seems that no power on earth can shove a meeting off course once it has built up a sufficient degree of its own bureaucratic inertia.

Under those circumstances, you get what we’ve had here this week – which is a meeting schedule that looks something like this:

Friday Morning: Pre-Pre-Prep Meeting (1 hour)

Friday Afternoon: Pre-Prep Meeting (90 minutes)

Monday Morning: Prep Meeting Part 1 (1 hour)

Tuesday Morning: Prep Meeting Part 2 (90 minutes)

Wednesday Afternoon: Meeting (90 minutes)

Thursday Morning: Post-Meeting Meeting (90 minutes)

This is not a particularly extreme example of what takes place to in advance and following what I’ll commonly refer to as a Very Important Meeting (VIM). In this case, VIM preparation, the VIM itself, and its aftermath sucked up about 480 minutes, or eight hours. That’s one-fifth of the workweek lost to a single meeting (or one-fourth of the proposed furlough work week in case anyone at home is keeping track). I don’t even want to admit how much time gets spent scheduling, preparing slides, making sure video lines are available, and mastering the actual subject material for one of these sessions. How much time is spent preparing for and attending meetings would make the average person’s eyes water.

Look, I’m not saying that every meeting is an enormous waste of time and effort, but maybe if we could just have one or two of them instead of six, we might all be able to get a little more accomplished. Maybe I should go ahead and schedule a meeting to discuss this new and innovative concept.

You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes.

Always on…

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If your work involves a computer connected to the internet, you’ll know that there is something far more sinister that a normal network outage. When faced with a total disruption, you can at least try to make the best of it and do something that doesn’t require accessing the internet. What’s more insidious than a total failure of the network? It’s the dreaded “intermittent network connectivity issues” message that shows up during one of the windows when the internet is actually working.

As far as I can tell, the intermittent problem is far worse than a full blown outage. It means you’re going to sit at your desk and keep hitting refresh or resend indefinitely – locking you into a kind of electronic purgatory of endless spinning status icons and error messages interspersed with occasionally glimpses of the wonderfully connected word of the interwebs that exists just beyond your office firewall. For someone whose job is mostly based on gathering, analyzing, and moving large amounts of information from Point A to Point B, it’s the contemporary equivalent of Chinese water torture or death by a thousand cuts.

In any case, it’s intolerable. I’m beginning to lean towards always-on, high-speed internet streaming to your computer and phone being the civil rights crusade of the 21st century.

Darts and a blindfold…

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A few weeks ago it rained. It was a hard rain and the office operated the whole day under a policy of “liberal leave,” where people could use unscheduled leave without penalty. Now if fairness, this was allowed because a mile or two north of our waterfront paradise the snow was falling to beat the band… but still here at the office it was rainy day.

Fast forward to this morning. The roads throughout the area were covered and snow was falling from the sky at a respectable clip. Driving conditions, while not quite treacherous, was considerably less than ideal. Because the snow had started falling more or less at the same time people start showing up for work, the parking lots, sidewalks, and pretty much every flat surface was an ankle deep puddle of slush that no one had gotten around to treating yet. It would have made for an excellent opportunity to announce liberal leave or to cut the first hour or two off the work day. It would have gone a long way towards earning a little bit of employee good will in an environment where that’s in pretty damned short supply.

I’m sure there’s some kind of logic to how such decisions get made at echelons higher than reality… though based on almost two years of observation, I’m beginning to think the process includes darts and a blindfold.

Concession…

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I made my first concession to the sequestration this morning – I now have a “lunch pail.” I know that doesn’t sound like much of a big deal, but back in the early days of the universe when I was a first year teacher brown bagging lunch every day, I made up my mind that I would officially designate life successful when I could eat lunch somewhere different every day and retire the brown bags. It sounds like a good idea, until you really look at the pesky fact that subs and salads from Wawa are running you a couple of hundred bucks a month. Since the sequester seems like it’s going to hang around for a while, it seems like the better part of valor is to try cutting back the small pleasures to save the bigger ones. Sadly, Wawa’s tasty, tasty sandwiches are probably just the first of many victims of my ruthless sequestration-induced budgetary realignment. No worries about morale when you’ve got a couple of slightly smushed PB&J’s and a warm Diet Coke. War is apparently a bad business to be in when we seem determined to pretend that peace is breaking out all over.

Nothing to show…

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Ever have one of those days where sit down at quarter after seven and then suddenly look up and realize it’s half past three? Yeah. The kind of day that feels like it’s over before it ever got started. I hate days like that. I want to know where my time is going instead of just having it lost into the ether. Maybe if I had something to show for it, I wouldn’t be quite so bothered. At a minimum I’d like to be able to at least tick off one or two of the things on the day’s list of things to do. Some days you don’t even get that small pleasure. Today was one of those days. I know I got “stuff” done, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m standing around, looking vaguely confused, and wondering WTF just happened.

Redefining irony…

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Most mornings I’m greeted at the office with more than a handful of emails. Usually they’re run of the mill mass notifications that come in overnight, but just occasionally they’re something a little more than that. Like this morning, when the two messages at the top of my inbox were one providing more information on the impending furlough of federal employees and the other inviting me to take an employee satisfaction survey. It’s hard to find a better definition of irony than landing those two topics next to one another.

Let me be real honest here for a minute… no matter how much I may like my job, the people I work with, or how well the building is heated and cooled, when you tell me you’ll be cutting my pay by 20% for the remainder of the year, my employee satisfaction plummets into negative numbers. No amount of ample parking, health fairs, and access to a gym is going to compensate for that. Sorry. There’s being a team player, and then there’s getting screwed with your pants on… and I’ve been around long enough to know the difference when I see it.

In a republic, one makes his displeasure known by registering an opinion with their elected “leaders,” and yes I use that term loosely. Having expressed by disgust to the head of the executive branch, the legislative branch leadership team, and to my own elected representatives, all that’s really left is to register my profound discontent here in my very own marketplace of ideas. Honestly, stoking the fire here is probably more productive than anything I’ve bothered to send to our political masters anyway. At least here, I know someone is going to actually going to get around to reading what ends up on the page… and as a special bonus, I won’t get a form letter in response.

Dead space…

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I feel about federal holidays like some women seem to feel about shoes; I love them and can never, never get enough. As much as I love President’s Day for being one of the days I can sit back with my feet up and enjoy not doing a damned thing. Nothing in life is free, of course, and that means taking the bad with the good. In this case, the bad is that President’s Day is the last holiday between now and the end of May. Call me crazy but the months just seem to go better when you have a impending long weekend to look forward to every few weeks. Having one 90-odd days off into the future doesn’t have the same motivational effect. No one has ever accused me of being a big fan of delayed gratification.

Sure, be happy you have a job, not everyone even gets federal holidays, blah, blah, blah. All of those things may be true, but the only thing I see stretching out in front of me between here and May 27th is dead space. Well, dead space and as-yet-unscheduled days of annual leave, but mostly dead space. And please, don’t get me started on how it’s possible that it’s the middle of February already. I’m pretty sure time has been set to march past at the double quick. First world problems, to be sure, but since I live in the first world, I just think of them as the regular kind of problems.