Category Archives: work

A matter of perspective…

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Sometimes I go to lunch with some of the guys from the office. When they talk about leadership problems, playing favorites, and how hard it is to get promoted unless you’re part of the clique, I mostly lean back in my chair, cross my arms, and smile. I won’t go so far as saying I agree with every decision made around here, I know from firsthand experience how much worse it can be for a working stiff somewhere near the middle of the pack. I’ll nod at the appropriate intervals in feigned agreement, but on the inside I know that unless they have served in the Court of the The Boss Who Shall Not Be Named, even the worst of their stories falls somewhere inside the range of “eh, that’s not so bad.”

I didn’t realize it until quite recently, but my time in the Office of the Damned has completely recalibrated my sense of good and bad work experiences. What a normal person would call good is beyond my scale completely now. Bad falls somewhere in the range of what I think as acceptable. The entire bottom half of the scale is occupied by things I’ve only seen the TBWSNBN do. In almost ten months, even the worst days have never been close to dropping onto the bottom half of the scale. Destroying my ability to see “normal” bad situations as being actually bad might be the only good thing TBWSNBN did for me.

Sure, it’s warped my sense of reality probably beyond any hope of repair, but that’s a relatively small price to pay for not being the least bit bothered by what sends those around me into a red-eyed fury.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Is this you?

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I find it hard to believe that a global news organization could only round up eight things that make for an annoying coworker. I mean I could rattle off a couple of dozen off the top of my head.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Style and comfort…

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In the few brief decades I’ve considered myself a traveler, I’ve come to loath almost everything associated with getting from Point A to Point B. The one grand exception is when I get to drive to wherever I’m going. I still love going, but I really, really wish there were better options when it comes to getting there from here.

Since age 18, my ire is almost exclusively reserved for airlines and the whole air travel experience in general. Today, though I’m reminded that there is one mode even more evil than your standard issue economy flight… That would be the bus. If airlines have become the busses of the air, I suppose busses have become, well, nothing really. They’re still loud, slow, uncomfortable, and leave you feeling vaguely grimy at the end of the trip. At least that part has stayed consistent down through the years.

Whoever it was that said “getting there is half the fun” must have been functionally retarded. Being there can absolutely be both fun and educational. Getting there, on the other hand, has all the style and comfort of dead moose. Let’s just say for the record that I’m happy to be in the last 90 minutes of this trip. I’m looking forward to unfolding myself from this seat, getting back in the truck, and then backtracking 40 minutes to get to the house.

When the cat’s away…

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When the cat’s away, your office will inevitably be overseen by a overly officious colleague intoxicated by their temporary power. They’re going to do things like try to change procedures that have been in place in your office for as long as you’ve been there and tell you to do things that are patently incorrect. To fill the white space in their day, this individual will flit to whatever meetings they can find and generally try to make a nuisance of themselves on what should be a nice quiet day for getting caught up on those things you never seem to get to when the boss is around. It’s like turning over the office to that annoying kid you remember from elementary school that always had their hand up, always knew the answer, and always volunteered to make copies or keep the list of “bad” students when the teacher had to step out of the room. Since it only lasts for a day or two, you’re basically in Purgatory… assuming that Purgatory is run by a mentally deficient thirteen year old, since that’s basically the level of leadership you’ll be getting.

My advice in this situation? Smile and nod whenever possible. Avoid eye contact and if necessary feign digestive distress to minimize the amount of time you must spend in conversation with your tormenter. Absolutely nothing good with come from your engaging this pseudo-leader. At best, you’ll end up having to explain to your actual boss why you called this individual as useless as tits on a bull in front of several of your other colleagues. At worst, your boss may realize the error of his ways and leave you in charge next time he’s going to be away, which makes the cure far worse than the actual disease.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Back in the day…

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The days are getting longer. The air is warming up. Another lifetime ago when I was a teacher, this was the time of year when I could start to smell summer vacation coming on. Sure, it was still two months off, but in my head those glorious two months of having absolutely nothing to do were right around the corner. My itch to get on with vacation was every bit as strong as any student’s might be. Even now, after I’ve spent three times longer being not a teacher than I spent in the classroom, I still feel the almost gravitational draw of summer vacation. When June rolls around and I’m still sitting in the office, it still comes as something of a shock to the system.

All things considered, summer is pretty much the only thing I miss about the teaching profession. Sure, a couple of the students turned out to be real people who I legitimately enjoy staing in touch with (Yes, you know who you are). But seriously, talk about a career path that someone was completely ill-suited for. Sheesh. What was I thinking? Still, summer vacation is a pretty big draw. The price you have to pay to get those two months off was just do damned high for me.

Looking out the window at a sun filled spring morning, makes me wish just for a minute that things were different… but then I remember the parents, administrators, standardized tests, certifications, low pay, general lack discipline, requirements to leave no child behind, and the unbridled hell that was “service learning” and I’m reasonably happy to be sitting here in my cube.

Hot sweaty death by PowerPoint…

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I’ve never really understood the need of management to convey information by jamming as many people as possible into a room and then throwing PowerPoint charts at them until they want to gouge out their own eyes. These events are even more near and dear to my heart when the information could have been just as easily sent to me by email so I could read it at a convenient time rather than rejiggering my calendar to free up three hours in the middle of the week – a task I accomplished by cancelling my one actual productive meeting this week.

As a rule, 120 slides constitute just a few too many in any presentation. That’s doubly true when 31 of those slides fall into the “org chart/wire diagram” category. 1) Nobody in the room can read the eight point font used to squeeze that graphic onto the slide and 2) After ten or twelve wire diagrams, they all look exactly the same. That’s just an observation from a guy sitting in the back rows, so take it for what it’s worth.

When I’m proclaimed King of the Bureaucrats, my first edict from on high will be a proclamation that no briefing will use more than five slides. Ever. If you can’t distill the essence of what you’re trying to convey into five or fewer slides or (gasp) talk about your idea without the visual aids, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll think you don’t know what you’re talking about and will be sorely tempted to send you to sleep with the fishes. Since I’m somewhere just above the janitorial staff on one of those 31 org charts we saw, I suppose everyone is safe for the time being.

But you’ve all been warned. Oh yes, you’ve all been warned.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Time keeps on slippin’…

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I got to spend an entire day this week in class. You can imagine my unrestrained joy at being given this “opportunity.” Still, there’s an old saying that goes something like “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.” Of course sometimes life happens and even the most obsessive of us can arrive a few minutes late to our destination. On any given day when how long it takes you to get back from lunch doesn’t really matter to anyone, extending your meal a bit doesn’t hurt at all. Since this was one of those moments that we were all in it together and nothing was going to happen until all the butts were back in all the seats, what possessed one car full of you to decide it was a good day to take a two hour lunch? I mean, I don’t like this class any better than you do, but somehow I managed to wander back it at something approximating on time, even if that was mostly driven by the desire to get things over with as soon as possible. You tools, on the other hand, seemed dead set on dragging a long day out even further.

I thought the lip smacking and crinkling of paper wrappers when you got back was an exceptionally well planned touch, by the way. I mean how on earth could you have spent two hours out wandering around and not managed to spend at least some of that time jamming half a sandwich into the filthy stinking sewer that you call a mouth? Your incompetence, lack of interest in anything other than yourself, and dare I say apathy, has reset the bar for the rest of us. Look, I may be an apathetic fuck, but I somehow manage not to let my own proclivities bleed over and cause problems for other people. All I’d ask is for the same courtesy of not screwing the rest of us because you’re having a bad day or can’t be bothered to do two things simultaneously.

The crowning irony of our little drama today was that we were all part of a new mandatory-for-the-universe class on improving professional conduct in the workplace. Maybe this was part of the class – A living example of how not to do things.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Endless days…

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Some days are busy and you spend them haplessly dashing between floors and buildings just to make sure you’re not late for the next round of meetings. Other days have the distinct feeling that you’re working in a funeral home and that someone will yell at you if you make a noise louder than scratching pen against paper. The thing that these two distinctly different types of day have in common: They both suck. And strangely enough they both suck for more or less the same reason.

On one hand, meetings blur together leaving you in a hopeless, glaze-eyed torpor incapable of doing much more than maintaining respiration. On the other, the day crawls by at something approximating the average groundspeed of road kill. In both cases, the result is suck. Suck and days that drag impossibly slowly. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but I’m fairly certain I’ve actually watched clocks run backwards under both sets of circumstances.

No one knows that work is just another dirty four letter word better than I do, but really, all I’m looking for is a couple of days a week that don’t feel like they’re running in slow motion. That’s probably more than I can realistically hope to see any time soon. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my cube adjusting the time circuits.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The eternal meeting…

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We have the same meeting every two weeks. I don’t mean just a regularly occurring staff meeting or anything, but rather a meeting where we all get together and discuss the exact same issue, come to the exact same conclusions, and then part company knowing full well that we’re going to do it again in 14 days just like clockwork. Nobody, myself included, has the intestinal fortitude to recommend that we stop having this meeting so it seems possible that it will continue on indefinitely into the future, just as it has been held for as long as any of the current participants can remember.

As far as I can tell, meetings are the great enemy of government work – probably work in any large organization. I’m not saying if we cancelled this meeting that my productivity would suddenly jump by 200%, but it would free up an hour or two every week to do something, anything that might be even marginally productive. After all, when what you’re currently doing is complete dead time, even a fractional improvement in how you spend your day is a huge improvement in productivity. That’s not even counting the morale bump that would come from permanently cancelling time sucks like this one. Of course the likelihood of any of that coming to pass is somewhere between slim and none, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to go to.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The first twelve minutes…

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It’s Monday. I’ve been at my desk for about 12 minutes this morning. And someone just wandered by to ask if I had read the 15 separate issue papers that arrived over the weekend. Of course I’ve read them. Somewhere between finding the coffee pot, hanging up my coat, and waiting seven minutes for my computer to boot up. I know that some people spend the weekend thinking about these things and rush breathlessly into the office on Monday to get in there and “make a difference.” I, on the other hand, am a bit like an old car. I need time in the morning to warm up before jumping into anything requiring a lot of horsepower or fine motor skills.

Even on my best day, the answer to “what have I done in my first 12 minutes in the office” is pretty universally “not much.” Check back in an hour – or 45 minutes if you’re really in a hurry – and there’s a fair chance I’ll have had time to get caffeinated and come up with whatever you need. Believe me when I say that standing there looking at me haplessly like a mammoth stuck in the tar pits isn’t going to help your cause. It’s pretty much just going to annoy me more than usual and slow down the whole process.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.