Category Archives: work

Azimuth check…

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Tomorrow I’m going to a class titled something like “Mid-Career Retirement Planning Seminar.” Aside from the less than creative naming, it took a while for what that really means to sink in to my thick skull. This coming January, I’ll have ten years on the job. Admittedly, that’s on the low side of the “mid-career” range, but it still doesn’t quite seem possible that I’ve been hanging out with Uncle Sam long enough for a decade to slip past more or less unnoticed. Apparently I have. As a reward, Uncle wants me to find out what it’s going to take to retire to something other than an old age of dining on cat food and choosing between paying my electric bill and buying my medication.

I’ve got my own theory on how to do that, of course, and a guy who makes good money to give me advice and keep an eye on my retirement nest egg, but I’m an open minded kind of guy (stop snickering). I’m open to hearing whatever brilliant ideas this bunch of contractors came up with. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt until someone mentions Social Security being the “third leg of the retirement stool”, or working past 70 to offset potential market losses and as a hedge against accidentally living long enough to hit the century mark. Since I’m under no delusion of Social Security being anything more than a happy memory by 2040 and the prospect of dropping dead at my desk isn’t particularly appealing, I think I’ll plan for the more traditional route.

Either way, tomorrow could be anything from passingly informative to mildly amusing. That’s mostly going to depend on the performance of whoever is giving the pitch. In any case, I’ll keep my snark at the ready in case it’s needed on short notice.

Three days…

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As the second three-day weekend in a row meanders towards a close, it occurs to me that three days is not nearly sufficient. It’s not that I have major plans or a enormous list of things to do. Everyone around here knows that nine times in ten I’m just as happy not leaving the house. The hermit tendency is strong in this one. The point is, I like I’m not on anyone’s schedule but my own (duh, who doesn’t). I like not getting sucked into meetings or repeating myself by email for the third time about something that the person on the receiving end may or may not care about. I enjoy not driving for forty minutes to go sit in a cube when I’d much rather drive 40 minutes in the opposite direction and be halfway to the beach.

I’m a year older now, but don’t seem to be any closer to really accepting the idea that I’m built for work in any traditional sense. It’s not that work sucks particularly, just that there are a million other things I’d rather be dong (again, duh, who doesn’t). Look, I’m perfectly happy to have a job that pays the bills. I recognize how incredibly fortunate I am in that respect. Even so, it’s hard to think of myself as passionate about PowerPoint, memos, and meetings. It’s one thing to do it and be good at it, it’s another thing to love it in its own right. Maybe I’ve just missed the point somewhere.

Until I’ve found some way to monitize being snarky and dispensing smartassed comments, it’s a good bet that I won’t be giving up my day job. Still, in a perfect world, it seems to me that there should be a way to sit on the deck with my nose in a book and somehow scrape up enough scratch to get by. Then again, just “getting by” has never been a strong suit for me either so I guess I’d better suck it up and get my head back in the game for the week ahead.

Useless…

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There may be nothing in this great land of ours more useless than an government office on the Friday before a federal holiday. If you’ve ever worked in one, you know that’s not an exaggeration. Between people taking leave and the magic that is the Alternate Work Schedule program, no more than half the staff shows up to begin with. Around noon another 10-20% disappear to start their weekend. If anything was getting done to begin with, you can forget it after 2:00. The handful of people manning their desks are just a skeleton crew, left behind to give the illusion of productivity and even at that they’re not working very hard. Every eye falls on the minute hand as it sweeps its way around the clock to the earliest possible moment for departure.

I’ve always worked with a lot of people who take these days off since “nothing’s going to happen anyway.” I’m a bit of a contrarian about time off, though. Why burn up eight perfectly good hours of leave on a day when no real work is going to happen even if you do spend the whole day at your desk? I’d much rather save my time off for days when all hell is breaking loose. It’s a matter of extracting maximum value from every hour away from the office. Time off isn’t much good when I’m relaxed already. Feel me?

If Uncle wanted to save some scratch, he’d go ahead and shutter every office on the Friday before a holiday weekend. Whatever small amount of productivity happens is almost purely accidental and can’t come close to offsetting the cost of just turning the lights on.

Case of the slows…

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When President Lincoln fired General George B. McClellan, he cited the general’s “case of the slows” as one of the primary reasons. It seemed that no amount of prodding, pleading, or gesticulating from the White House could convince McClellan to actually use the splendid army he built to mercilessly crush the rebel Army of Northern Virginia and end the Civil War.

Now I’m not quite as opposed to a couple of slow days as Lincoln was, but I have my issues with them. First and foremost, slow days seem to drag on forever… Like when you look at the clock on the wall convinced it must surely be time for lunch only to discover that it’s not quite 9:30. Being busy can leave you battered and bloody, but at least it does seem to make the day go by. Counting ceiling tiles has its own special charm, but you can really only do that so many times before you go batshit crazy… and surprisingly, even Facebook gets remarkably quiet during the early afternoon hours when everyone is working.

Maybe the worst thing about not being particularly busy is that you start looking over your shoulder and wondering if it’s just you or if everyone else is bored to tears but just afraid to say anything out loud. I’ve been around for the better part of a decade now and know that there are two generally slow times of year; from around Memorial Day through the 4th of July and the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Every year it seems to catch me slightly off guard as I transition from whirling dervish to terracotta warrior and back again.

Seriously…

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As a rule, I think people take themselves and the value of what they do too seriously. Heart surgery? Sure, that’s serious business. Making sure prisoners don’t escape from jail, yep, I’ll sign off on that one too. Airline pilot? You guessed it, another example of serious work requiring people to be serious. Sitting in a nice cushy office tweaking version twelve of a PowerPoint presentation somehow fails to rise to the level of seriousness that justifies having an inflated sense of self importance. Lord knows you couldn’t tell that from looking around at a room full average bureaucrats, though.

To me, the only really serious issues are the once that involve life and death. Almost everything else falls into the category of nice to have/do. Some of the other stuff is important enough, I guess, but is it really “serious as a heart attack?” If you have to stop and think about it, the answer is almost certainly no… And that’s ok, because when everything is a priority, nothing ends up being a priority.

What I’m saying is I’m going to need everyone to take an operational pause, suck in a deep breath, and just relax for a minute. I promise that no matter how important you think that PowerPoint slide is, 200 years from now it’s not going to be under glass at the National Archives laying alongside the Charters of Freedom in the rotunda. It’s not even going to be stored in the Library of Congress with your Twitter feed, so take a minute, collect your thoughts, and remember that history isn’t going to give a rat’s ass who we are or what we happened to be doing on a random Friday in May.

Most people seem to find that thought a little disturbing. It disturbed me for a long time until I realized what a gift it was. Once you embrace it, being an anonymous face in the crowd gives you a remarkable sense of freedom.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Office politics. Henry Kissinger once said, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” Dr. Kissinger is a smart guy, but his thinking was too small in this case. His principle ultimately includes office politics of any stripe. Fighting over who gets credit, who’s in charge, and for the seat next to the high lord at supper are exactly the factors that prevent anything from actually getting accomplished. Useless bloody infighting over scraps is apt to make me say something stupid.

2.Colo-rectal examination. I don’t care how good a professional relationship you have with someone, the people you work with never need to hear the explicit details of your upcoming and/or previous colo-rectal examination. Some things are best left within the confines of doctor-patient confidentiality.

3. The 5-day work week. Whoever decided that the work week should be five days and the weekend only two needs punched in the face. Repeatedly. With a Buick.

Doing God’s work…

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Sometimes I leave the office at the end of the day feel like I’m doing God’s own work. Other times I feel like I’ve spent the day beating myself bloody against a great stone wall. Nothing uncommon about that, I guess. The problem isn’t that there’s too much or too little to do, as much as it is there’s no moderating influence. Monday might be silent as a tomb and the next day you run with your hair on fire from the time you set foot in the building. That’s not a complaint (seriously), just a statement of fact. Still, it would be awfully nice if there was some way to smooth out the peaks and valleys on the demand side of the equation. When I figure that out, I’ll get busy writing my best selling leadership and management book and retire with a nice royalty check. Until then, I’ll just keep my head down until the winds shift.

Since I’m always the optimist, it’s worth noting that I still smile when I drive across the Susquehanna at 4:25 every afternoon. It’s worth remembering that no matter how strange the day has been, my days were always stranger in West Tennessee than this place could ever hope to be. The benefit of having been on the bottom looking up is that by comparison, everything else looks like ice cream and lollipops.

Been there, done that…

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The thing that no one ever seems to want to understand or be willing to accept about productivity software is that it’s usually designed to meet a specific need. Word, not surprisingly, is a reasonably good piece of word processing software. Take away all the bells and whistles and right down at the center of its core functionality, it still lets you put words on a blank electronic page and then tinker with them until everything looks just right. Most people grasp this almost intuitively at some level.

The real problems creep in when things get a little more complicated… Like when someone decides to buy into an entire file-sharing and collaboration platform that’s closely integrated with the Microsoft Office family of products. When they use the platform as the programmers intended – it’s actually a remarkably effective and efficient way to manage your information. On the other hand, when you give this product to a somewhat aged group of people and tell them to start using it from a standing start, well, you’re pretty much just inviting things to end badly.

I’ve seen this story play out before. The first couple of weeks are going to go like gangbusters, but once the early adopters have had their fun, the rollout will slow to a crawl. After that, it will be a hand-to-hand fight to convince the 50% who are holding out that it’s worth doing. Eventually, it will die under its own weight and we’ll be stuck with another system that we’re halfway using. Yeah, this ain’t my first rodeo, cowboy.

Stick around long enough and I guess you’ll see history repeat itself over, and over, and over, and over ad infinitum. At least this way I’ll only have to act surprised with how things turn out, rather than actually being surprised that something so simple could go so badly awry.

Proportional motivation…

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If the last two days are any indication of how the rest of the warm months are going to go, it’s seems like it could be a very long summer. I have a working hypothesis that my level of motivation is directly proportional to the temperature. The further the temperature climbs past 70, the further my motivation to do anything indoors seems to suffer. Of course it doesn’t help that the thermostat in the office seems to be stuck on 80 degrees. Productivity after lunch? Forget it. Between the heat in the building and a full stomach, just managing to stay awake feels a bit like a full time job.

Eventually, I’m sure they’ll get around to switching over to air conditioning in this wonderful new billion dollar building. In the meantime it’s not fit for men nor beasts. If I seem more surly that usual, at least you’ll know why.

Explorer…

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Until the arrival of the new computers, the fact that many of us installed Firefox as our default web browser wasn’t quite officially sanctioned, but wasn’t banned either. I’d have still rather used Chrome, but that wasn’t even considered worthy of being an option. Now look, I’m all in favor of network security, but that doesn’t have to mean we get stuck using antiquated software – and yes, even a three year old browser feels antiquated after you’re use to using one of the other available options – you know, the ones that have been released in the current decade.

Hey, I’m super excited about getting a new computer. It’s swell that I can now unplug the machine and not have the battery die immediately. It’s just on this one little point of software where we’re having a real problem. I’m sure Internet Explorer works just fine for most people under most conditions, but on a machine that’s already bogged down with metric tons of security software and on a network that no one would call speedy under the best of conditions, IE pretty much adds insult to injury.

We’re a nation that prides itself on technological innovation, so please, for the love of God, his saints, and all things good and holy, can we find a way to look at the interwebs that doesn’t involve dragging out this old warhorse of a program? We’re seriously not doing ourselves any favors here. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and ask about the nine times I had to force quit Explorer before I went to lunch this morning.

And while you’re at it, can you please stop resetting my default homepage. I know our web address and I find it a lot less useful in my daily work than Google is. Sigh.