Category Archives: work

Rework…

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Interpreting policy memos, white papers, and more informal summaries are my bread and butter. I’ve got a bit of a knack for distilling ten pages of official-ese into a one or two paragraph overview. I may not be an expert on whatever topics are dropped in front of me, but I’ve cultivated a skill at seeing through extraneous bullshit and identifying what someone needs to know versus what’s actually written on the page. Sometimes that’s a skill that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

At 10:00 yesterday morning I was given a couple of dozen pages and told to gin up a two page summary by 3:00. No problem there. That’s plenty of time to get the job done and still manage a leisurely lunch. The real issue is boss who drops by at 2:45 to provide some helpful insight on the areas he wants to highlight. While that guidance might have been helpful at some point, it wasn’t particularly useful after spending four hours developing my own salient points.

So today, I’ll spend another three or four hours covering the same ground, but putting a slightly different spin on it. Any chance I had of feeling productive this week is officially dead.

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.

Old school victory…

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For three hours this morning, I waged my own personal holy jihad against our email servers while trying to force through an message with half a dozen small Word documents attached. I tried every trick, tip, and bit of sneakiness I’ve acquired from years of working with less than current technology that we use to do the people’s business, but alas, failed miserably in my efforts to transmit six pages of text to a guy who sits thirty feet away. It seems my efforts were not going unnoticed by my esteemed colleague, who has me in the age department by the better part of three decades. After watching my valiant fight to make the tech work, he smiled sheepishly and said “You know, you could just print it out and give it to me.” I’m pretty sure he was trying not to laugh maniacally when he said it.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been thunderstruck before, but for a few seconds I truly stood slack jawed in the middle of the room. The idea of just printing the documents had legitimately never even occurred to me. I really have no idea when I stopped thinking of printed paper as a legitimate option for the transfer of information from Point A to Point B, but there was its moment of fulfillment; the first real and undeniable sign that I had transitioned completely into the digital age. Left to my own devices, I could have gone on that way for hours before managing to find a way to get the electrons to play nicely together. In this one extraordinarily rare example, I’ll concede that old school won a tactical victory against the forces of new and shiny. I don’t, however, recommend that it get use to such easy wins.

What are we doing here?

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Once every few months I catch a wild hare and start obsessively backing up everything on my work computer. At last count, I’m working on saving 2GB of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents for posterity. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood if 1500 individual files generated over the last eight months. By most standards it’s not a particularly obscene amount of storage or an abnormally large number of files. As I’m sitting here watching the “% complete” bar click higher, I’m struck with the fact that although I’m relentlessly backing this stuff up, keeping a copy for myself, and sending a copy into deep storage, I’m probably the only person on the planet who will ever actually see any of this stuff again. In a post-atomic or -biological apocalypse world, it seems unlikely that any of the survivors are going to be particularly interested in whatever brilliant PowerPoint slides I’ve managed to come up with.

All of that begs the question, what the hell are we really doing here? I think we all have some conception that we’re “adding value” somehow by performing whatever task has been set for us. We like to think that what we’re doing is good and important work; that someone, somewhere will be better off because we sat behind our monitors and smashed our fingers repeatedly against the keyboard. Since I don’t have a little laminated card telling me where to go and what to do when the warheads start landing, I think it’s safe to assume that whatever I’m doing isn’t all that critical to the preservation of civilization as we know it. Apparently I’m not a national treasure. That realization stings a little.

Look, I’m not saying I want to give up the pay and bennies and head off into the woods to start a commune or anything. I don’t think the situation is all that hopeless. Still, it’s a smack in the head about priorities and deciding what’s important and what doesn’t mean a damned thing. In the course of a career and a life, I’ve made some good decisions and some bad ones. If this serves as nothing more than a gentle smack in the back of the head reminding me to make better decisions in the future, well, then the day has been more productive than most.

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.

They say it’s your birthday…

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It’s Washington’s official birthday, which means your friendly neighborhood federal bureaucrats (and bank tellers) are enjoying a long weekend. As far as federal holidays go, this one is bittersweet. On one hand I’m ridiculously happy to have an extra day off, but on the other, it’s a reminder that it’s the last “free” day off until Memorial Day shows up late in May. As most of you undoubtedly know already, three months of normal 5-day work weeks is a very long time. It’s a shock to the system when you’ve gotten use to having one or more holidays in each month since November. With unemployment still running more than twice what it was a decade ago, the lack of holidays is probably a good problem to have, but that mental exercise doesn’t really make me feel any better about the long, uninterrupted march to summer. It might just be time to start thinking about drawing down some of the mountain of vacation time I’ve got sitting in the bank.

In the meantime, it’s off to celebrate General Washington’s birthday. What can a poor humble blogger add to the celebration of the man who refused to rule as king… other than wishing a few of our contemporary leaders would follow his example and go away after two terms.

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.

Not quite…

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There’s a difference between feeling sick and feeling too sick to show up at the office. Sometimes that difference can be measured by the width of a razor blade. One thing that’s been pretty consistent in my career, though, has been my willingness to use sick days when I’ve needed them. Those tend to be days when getting out of bed or off the couch is just more effort than I can muster. Just below those days on my severity scale are days when I feel like a big steamy pile of poo, but show up in the office anyway. The problem with days like that is even before your computer boots up you know the day isn’t going to be productive. You’re going to end up pissing away most of your time alternately halfway reading articles online, coughing up a lung, and staring longingly at the clock wishing it were already time to go home. The only thing that’s really different between these type of “sick” days is the geographic location where you waste the day.

The only possible upside of being sick and in the office all at the same time is that your colleagues are likely to beat a hasty retreat when they catch a good look at the vast array of cold medicine, tissues, and homeopathic remedies piled up on your desk. If nothing else, it might buy you a little time away from them without needing to dip into your sick time stockpile. Then again, the ones who are oblivious to everything else are just as oblivious to your dripping nose and itching eyes. Personally I always try to make it a point to cough and sneeze in their general direction. At best, they’ll end up getting whatever you’re down with and at worst, I feel like I’m exacting at least some minor retribution for their failure to pay attention.

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.

Easy does it…

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After a few days away, I usually like to ease back into the office routine by spending some time checking email, responding to voice messages, and catching up on whatever paperwork happened to pile up while I was otherwise engaged. Today was not one of those smooth transitional days. Instead it was the kind of day where Stupid showed up not long after I turned on the lights and decided to stick around for the full day. Now I don’t mind putting in a day’s work, but it’s nice when the day doesn’t demand rowing against the tide from start to finish, because honestly, after a week of less than optimal sleep and carrying around what I’m sure is four or five liters of snot in my head I don’t think a nice easy day to get back into the groove would have been too much of a request. I was, apparently, wrong about that. Let’s just hope this isn’t the start of a trend for the week.

The bad touch…

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In the last 40 hours of work, slightly more than four of those hours have been dedicated to reeducating us on constitutes appropriate versus inappropriate comments, innuendo, and/or touching. That’s more than one tenth of the last work week focused on this stuff. In my years working for this Big Government Agency, I haven’t yet run across anyone who actually thinks sexual harassment is a good idea, so I’m forced to wonder if this latest round of training is maybe a little off the mark. I mean did anyone wake up this morning thinking that they were going to come to the office and start talking about the rack size of dime piece piece sitting next to them? Even if they’re thinking it, most people have a sufficient instinct for self preservation to know that they shouldn’t say it out loud… or at least within earshot.

Look, I’m not naïve enough to think that it doesn’t happen, but I don’t think the key to solving the problem lies in more training. The response to every leadership issue for the last decade has been “obviously that happened because we’re not doing enough training.” But seriously, how much training do we need to make the point that rape, pillage, and plunder are not acceptable workplace activities? The thing is, plenty of people get the training and just don’t care. Telling people that X, Y, and Z are bad doesn’t change the way they feel even if it manages to change the way they act when they think people are watching.

From my ant’s eye view of the bureaucracy, a spike in harassment complaints isn’t a failure of training. It’s a failure of management and dare I say leadership. When management doesn’t respond to a validated complaint with swift and furious action, it establishes a climate of permissiveness and that climate says far more about how the organization feels about “inappropriate” actions than a ream of policy memos and endless hours of training. If leadership were serious about it being an issue, heads would roll every time they find out something happened, but it’s obvious to even a working schmo like me that if they keep doing what they’re doing, they’ll keep getting what they got.

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.

Proper punctuation prevents poor performance…

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Some things we do are important and can have a real impact on real people scattered around the world. Those are the kinds of things you don’t mind spending hours working to perfect. Ensuring that there are the correct number of spaces following the various kinds of punctuation doesn’t generally fall into that category. Sure, formatting and general “prettiness” of a document are important insofar as you want it to be put together enough that people take your product seriously, but somehow I don’t think it’s important enough that we need to spend 20 or 30 man-hours making sure that everything in a 75 page document that no one outside these four walls will ever lay eyes on is “just so.” Then again, I have been wrong, or perhaps only misguided, before.

Look, I’m all for providing the best product possible, but I’m also a believer in the law of diminishing returns. There comes a point where it just isn’t cost effective to keep tweaking something around the margins. We all have personal pet peeves and certain ways we like to do things, but we’ve now officially letting perfection stand in the way of good enough to its illogical extreme. But hey, I’m not the guy signing the checks or deciding who works on what and for how long, so as long as the direct deposit doesn’t start bouncing, I’ll sit here plugging away at whatever someone tells me is the day’s priority. Today, like yesterday, it seems that that priority is word spacing and paragraph alignment. Don’t ask me why that is, but I’ll keep plugging away at it until someone tells me to shuffle on to something else.

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.

Don’t go there…

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There are few things that generate a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach as fast as when a coworker randomly decides to pick my phone up off the desk and start poking around. Sure, there’s nothing technically illegal on there, but you’re just going to have to believe me when I say that there are images, files, bookmarks, and texts that would probably make their overly-sensitive eyes bug out of their heads. I’m not particularly easy to embarrass, but there are most assuredly some conversations that I don’t particularly want to have with my colleagues. That’s more to save them from mortification than anything else.

Unfortunately, some people just aren’t as good at picking up on subtlety as they are at picking things up off your desk… Which means you have to look them directly in the eye and tell them to be careful because they are going to end up seeing way more than they bargained for. It’s always fun to see the light slowly flicker on as it dawns on them what you’re talking about. It’s like suddenly your phone heated up to 300 degrees and they can’t get rid of it fast enough. For a minute, I actually thought the nosy coworker in question was actually going to drop it on the spot.

It would probably cost me a new phone at least, but maybe I’ll just let the next one get a good look at the ol’ photo archive. It might just be worth the replacement price and the week long trip to sensitivity training it would be sure to cause.

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.

Correct and factual…

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The problem with dealing with numbers is that generally there is a single correct answer. If I were to ask how many jelly beans are in a jar or how many cars are in the parking lot, someone could use their fingers and toes and physically calculate the answer. Counting other things, like people or laptops can be done in exactly the same way. All it takes is someone to physically conduct the count rather than give an answer that includes the words “about,” “no more than,” or “somewhere between.” The only thing answers that include those words tells me is whoever was responsible for the counting is pretty much a dipshit who can’t be bothered by pesky things like facts.

We live in resource constrained times, I get it. We’re all coming to grips with what it means to do less with less. Still, though, when the correct answer is somewhere between 1 and 75, I don’t think it’s too much trouble to lock in on the single factual number of widgets in the box. Then again, maybe I just have unrealistic expectations of people not being complete douchenozels. Since my perception is the only thing in this situation that I control, I have no choice but to adjust my expectations accordingly.

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.