Category Archives: work

Essential…

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In light of what seems to be an impending shutdown of the United States Government (yeah, Congress, I’m looking at you), there has been much discussion about what makes one an “essential” part of the workforce. Air traffic controllers? Yeah, makes sense. Nuclear submariner? Yep, you make the cut. But where the line of essential stops, there is a vast gray area of things that seem important, but no one can say for certain that they are technically speaking, essential to public safety.

That being said, there’s something profoundly disheartening about getting the official email that not only are you nonessential, but so is your entire office and everyone else in your building for that matter. In fact, you’re so nonessential that when the funds run out, you’re going to turn the lights out, lock the doors, and just walk away. It does give someone given to a somewhat cynical outlook reason to ponder what that could really mean in the teeth of exploding deficits and a Tea Party that seems to want a federal government that operates under the Article of Confederation.

It’s fair to say that my PowerPoints aren’t going to put an end to the war(s) or inspire an economic rally, but I have a secret, unredeemed belief that with the right (or any actual) leadership, both here locally and at the highest levels things do not have to be as they now are. If not essential, we can certainly be productive… but only when we have leaders worthy of good and faithful followers.

It’s still friggin’ freezing in here…

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The thirty-day hiring freeze and 30-day extension are now something on the order of 65 days old. Now of course there’s some logic to waiting to see if the jackrabbits in Congress can actually manage to pass a budget before sending us all home on Friday, but maybe a word of “hey, standby. We’ll let you know after Friday” would be better than the overpowering silence coming from the civilian personnel office. It’s the 10-ton elephant in the room that they refuse to address other than referring back to a memo put out over two months ago.

If you’re going to extend it, just announce that already so we can get busy retooling our resumes for jobs outside DOD. If it’s going to be dropped, how about a scientific guesstimate of when they machinery of civilian hiring might start moving again. Even with the cynicism that I usually bring to the table when discussing issues of competent leadership at pay grades above reality, I can’t believe that the decision hasn’t already been made somewhere about whether it’s time to fish or cut bait. Of course I could be completely wrong about that and the denizens of that five-sided concrete cobweb could be even more jacked up than I thought possible.

The total tonnage of backlog that’s going to exist after continuing to make announcements and conduct interviews, but not make selections is certainly going to be enough to stun a mule team in its tracks… Especially considering that mules are a damned sight easier to work with than the personnel office. Let it run another month or two and I’ll be dropping retirement papers before they manage to get it cleared up. Pay freeze, hiring freeze, and no budget in sight… It’s getting very hard to love working for Uncle.

Cubicle stalker…

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I came back from lunch to find one of the more emotionally needy members of the team standing in my cube. You know the ones; they need special reassurance that they’re doing the things right… every time they do anything… regardless of how basic the task. Yeah. That guy. I’m sure you’ve met him.

According to sources in a position to know, he had been standing there for 15 minutes. Standing in my cube, while I was at lunch, for at least 15 minutes. Just standing there. And waiting. Standing there waiting to tell me that he had uploaded some documents to our network drive.

In the future, it would be completely appropriate under these circumstances to send me an email. Leave me a note. A voicemail I’ll even get eventually. Though really, you can feel free to upload files to the network to your heart’s content without my direct supervision. That’s probably another issue altogether, really.

I can’t fathom why, in the name of all things good and holy, it might have seemed like a good idea to spend 15 minutes standing in my cube waiting for me to come back from lunch. Were you expecting a treat of some sort? Up until today, that was the only 55 square feet of real estate in the entire building where I feel even a modicum of sanity. You’ve taken that from me now. The sanctity of my cube has been violated.

I can’t tell you how much I don’t need a cubicle stalker in my life.

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

Friendly advice…

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If you have a cube with a direct line of sight to the Executive Office of the UberBoss, it’s really best not to fall asleep watching the TV mounted to the wall across from you. It makes you look like a dumbass. Far more importantly, it makes me look like a dumbass.

Maybe I should just confiscate their desk chair tomorrow. It’s probably harder to fall asleep if you’re standing up… Though I’m not sure I’d be surprised to see it. I wonder if that’s even legal. I think that’ll be on the list of things to ask the lawyer tomorrow.

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

Welcome douchbag…

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We’re getting a visit from one of our regional managers. That’s not really unusual. It seems there’s always one of them wandering around the building for some reason or another. This visit is only special because the manager in question is pretty much a giant douchebag. That’s actually speculative on my part because the guy has never actually bothered to show up or call in for any of the regional managers meetings that have been scheduled in the six months he’s worked for us. So really I don’t know anything about him other than he doesn’t do meetings, or return phone calls, or think policy applies to him. Come to think of it, I’m pretty ok with standing firm on my assessment of douchebag.

The issue isn’t so much one of the guy being off the reservation most of the time as it is that no one in a position to do anything about it seems to a) know it or b) feel compelled to take action. That’s just a solitary example of why having actual leaders in leadership positions might actually be important. You’d think by now I’d have developed a better ability to manage my expectations. It’s probably best to just go back to my cube, keep my head down, and get the day over with with as little increase in my blood pressure as possible.

Do you think hanging up a “Welcome Douchebag” banner in front of the building would be considered somehow inappropriate?

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

Send me the electrons…

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I’m always happy to consult with a colleague whenever they have an issue or need to talk through a new idea. Really, I think of myself more as a facilitator than as a “do-er.” That is to say I specialize in getting the person needing the answer and the person who has the answer together so they work together to find the mutually acceptable solution. In practice, that means I need to know where content lives more than I need to know actual content. Knowing how and who to ask for things is every bit as important as being able to do the actual work involved. The two live in symbiosis – knowledge and action.

The real problem starts when you run into someone who neither has the knowledge or the ability to take action. Take the example of Mr. X for instance. At least twice a day Mr. X comes to my little section of cubicle hell and asks me to proofread and email he wants to send – usually a message asking for something or verifying some type of information. These emails are all well and good – I mean the rapid transmission of information is one of the reasons email is a great form of communication – but it’s not really an “email” when the “draft” you send me to look at is scratched out on the back of an old memo.

Seriously. I don’t know how exactly many times I can tell someone to just “send me the electrons” before it sinks in that I’m not going to spend time making “pen and ink” changes. Of course the need for these changes could be eliminated if we could all just take responsibility for knowing our own jobs and being able to formulate a simple request for information from someone working in a different office. As it turns out, that’s more than I can reasonably expect.

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

Still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

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If you would have told me back in August when I decided it was time to pull the plug on my Memphis experience, that I’d still be firing off resumes on the first day of spring in the following year, I simply would never have believed you. The irony of coming here in the first place was that I’d alwayherdsrd that getting back to the DC area was easy because no one from outside the area had any interest in going there. That may or may not be the case, but I’ve found that in most cases for jobs inside the beltway the typical number of resumes submitted for consideration is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 with some running north of 500. I’ve got a healthy level of professional self confidence, but the odds get pretty long when you start talking about numbers like that.

There are still a couple of “maybies” out there that I haven’t written off yet, but it’s definitely slot slower going than I remember the last job search being. The department’s hiring freeze extending over the last two months, of course, hasn’t helped. The personnel office points only to the most recent memo that calls for the freeze to be reevaluated by April 1st to decide if it will be extended or to announce how hiring might be handled moving forward. It’s not reassuring that the hiring system will get back to something approaching situation normal any time soon, even if it starts up again in April. With a two month backlog and a notoriously slow process to begin with, things could be ugly for the forseeable future.

There doesn’t seem to be much to do now other than to continue piling my name onto as many heaps as possible and hope it turns up at the top of one of them. The federal government’s a big place and something will come along eventually, but this exercise in patience is wearing very thin. In hindsight, I’m sure this experience will be character building or something, but in the moment it’s enough to drive a man around the bend.

Perspective…

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There’s nothing like a retirement party to put a career in perspective. We all like to think of our working lives as being productive and valuable and perhaps that maybe after 30 years of work, we’ve left our mark. Most of us, of course, would be wrong in thinking that. Sure, there are exceptions – Hyman Rickover is the father of the nuclear submarine force; Henry Bessemer made steel economical; Watson and Crick identified the double helix structure of DNA – but for the average schmo sitting in a cubicle there aren’t going to be entries in even the most obscure history book – unless you create your own entry in Wikipedia.

I attended a retirement luncheon – a function that no one ever really wants to go to, but that guarantees a long lunch without anyone getting on your case – and had the dismaying realization that even the people working next to you don’t really have a clue what you do on a day to day basis. The highlight of the “ceremonial” portion of the event was the soon-to-be-departed employee’s supervisor saying a few kind words. One would hope to hear how they made the workplace better, or contributed to the war effort, or saved homeless kittens in their spare time.

What this particular career boiled down to was this: A supervisory musing about how he’d “always remember the great report you wrote about the problems in Peoria.”

Wow. That’s perspective.

For most of us, that’s how a career is going to end. Think on that next time you’re working late on an “important” project or skipping vacation days to make sure a project is finished on time. In 20 or 30 years when your middle of the road colleagues are sitting around a table at a middle of the road restaurant bidding you farewell it’s likely all you’ve done is written a great report about Peoria.

Live your life accordingly.

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

Hard copy…

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With very few exceptions, all of our documents live on one of several network drives available to every employee in the building. I theory that means if ask where something is, I should be able to say “it’s on the Q-drive in the folder titled Big Expensive Project.” Thus armed, a reasonable person could be expected to go forth and find the file they need. Of course our people aren’t necessarily reasonable… and the concept of a networked drive Dot Matrix.jpgmight as well be a blueprint for a time machine.

I’ve been using a tablet to tote all of my paperwork for the better part of the last year. It’s great. I make changes in a meeting, at my desk, or sitting on the can and whatever I’m working on propagates through the network to my laptop, my desktop, and even my phone. With the exception of a very few things that require, for some inexplicable reason, a manual signature, I don’t need paper. And I don’t want it. Paper is going to get lost. My electronic files are going to get backed up once an hour and then stored off site at the end of the day.

You can, perhaps, understand my level of frustration when an employee, let’s call him Mr. Turtle, comes to me with a hand illustrated packet that explains one of the new concepts we want to put in place. Seriously. He had hand drawn graphs and had cut sections out of other documents with scissors and taped them into his “presentation.” Literally. Cut. And. Paste. I’m a pretty smart guy, but I have no idea where to even start dealing with that level of ineptitude from a long-serving “professional” member of the staff.

It’s possible that I’m going to have to pummel the next person who comes to me wanting hard copy of something with a ream of 11×17 paper to drive home the point that this isn’t 1870. Everybody doesn’t need a dead tree edition of everything. Actually, almost no one needs a hard copy of anything any more. Of course that would mean that they’d have to figure out how to use the glowing box on their desk for more than a place to stick Post-It notes.

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

All news, all the time…

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So I’ll ask you a question. If a newsletter is published and only the Uberboss reads it, is it actually a publication? That question is, sadly, not rhetorical. Every quarter, our staff spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 man-hours planning, organizing, editing, and publishing the “official” organizational newsletter. Actually, we spend more time than that because we usually end up writing most of the articles ourselves because our “call for contributions” generally goes unanswered… and when someone does answer the call, we generally spend even more time rewriting their bit because it seems possible that English is their third language. Or possibly their fourth. That, however, is a separate rant.

Our usual circulation is about 20 print copies plus an electronic version posted on the organization’s intranet site. Last quarter, the electronic copy was accessed something like 37 times. We have several hundred employees. You can do the math on how well this product is being received. Since the majority of our employees work away from the home office, it doesn’t even have the virtue of being used as birdcage liner for most of them.

The workflow for this product is something like this:

• Complete final draft
• Perform editorial review
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Rewrite or change layout at request of Uberboss
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Have “editorial board” meeting with Uberboss
• Rewrite or change layout
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Wait until Uberboss is out of office
• Publish
• Ignore for 2 months
• Repeat

Given the hours required and the pay rate of those involved, the cost to publish breaks down to something like $12,000 per quarter… or $210.52 per view.
Putting up numbers like that, it’s hard to believe that Uncle Sam is ever short on funds.

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