Category Archives: work

Something off…

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I should be happy that there was no mayhem and chaos to speak of today, but the wash-over foolishness from last weeks seems to be enough to keep things stupid for the rest of this week at least. Not much likelihood of catching a breath before being plunged back into it… Sort of like getting a swirly that way. It can’t be a good thing when you get use to operating in a constant state of pissed off. Normal should be like that.

I haven’t quite put my finger on it just yet, but I’ve got a sense that something is off. There’s some bad mojo working out there and I need to figure out what it is. The constant casting looks over my shoulder is getting old and being snuck up on just ain’t my bag, baby. Not that I’m expecting the world turned upside down, but my experience has been that any surprise is generally a bad one.

Lord of the Slides…

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There are few things as terrible as showing you have more than a passing competence and even the most marginally technological task. Once you have crossed that boarder between the digital world and the one that exists only on paper, you have doomed yourself to endless days of PowerPoint. Create, review, edit, review, edit, review, edit, review, publish. It will drive the tempo of your day and haunt your dreams in the darkness. It is the very beating heart of what is wrong with us.

No matter how good you are, no matter how skilled you are at filling the white spaces, by the time you distill a complex idea into three or five bullets (it’s always an odd number, by the way. An even number of bullets looks awkward on the page), you’ve eliminated its identity as a complex idea. Now it’s just two syllable words on a screen dumbed down to the point where even the slowest guy in the room can draw some conclusions. It’s perhaps the most depressing bit of technological innovation ever.

Just the thought of the three slide sets sitting on my desk right now waiting to get punched up almost makes me physically ill. The lesson here is to shoot for mediocrity. Do too much and no one ever leaves you alone. Do too little and you’ll be the first of the dead wood to fall. Find that sweet spot in the middle and you can ride out a career with as few problems as possible. And for God’s sake, whatever you do, never under any circumstances let anyone know you can build an awesome deck of PowerPoint slides.

The problem with pamphlets…

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There are a million metric tones of management consultants who will tell you that the biggest problem for everyone is communication. For a species that relies on communicating to do everything, we’re remarkably bad at it. We’re even worse at it in large groups, where there’s a fine line between getting your message out and bashing the couple of people who are still listening over the head with a brickbat. I won’t even get started again on modes and methods. You people out there who are afraid of email know who you are and there’s nothing I can say to save your souls.

I could write a dissertation on elements of communication and strategy to get your message out. Fundamentally, all of them rely on having some kind of message discipline – that is, build your message calendar and don’t let anything, no matter how seemingly important, take you off the message of the day. If the day or week is focused on training, every word out of your mouth should be focused on elements of training. Any question asked should be spun to reflect those same elements. Message discipline is what makes people sit up and notice even a low budget political campaign. Lack of discipline is the kiss of death even when you’re well funded. Get on point and beat the message into the ground and only change the tune on your own terms. Asnd for God’s sake, don’t confuse the message by running off on a tangent every time someone else wanders by and distracts you for 30 seconds. You’re going to end up with two dozen different messages that were only received by one person each rather than one message received by two dozen people.

For the record, a pamphlet is piss poor communication. If you’re lucky someone looks at it once and throws it away while maybe, just maybe remembering that they saw it at all. The chance of them remembering content: almost zero. Just the way it is. Flyers are good for a quick attention grab, but don’t expect much more from them. Of course it helps if there aren’t three people trying to design the exact same pamphlet based on ever so slightly different direction. Then what little return on investment you’ll get from the end product is diluted due to the increased labor hours expended to come up with three versions of the exact same bloody thing. Throwing a lot of manpower at this kind of thing is fine if, and only if, you have bodies to spare and nothing else that needs done.

In summation: 1) Communication is more than wandering around dispensing wild eyed, half-formed ideas; 2) Disciplined communication carries the day; 3) Pamphlets are, as a rule, stupid; 4) Using three people where one is sufficient is redundant. Knowing these four simple things could go a long way towards making those eight hours in the middle of the day seem less arbitrary and capricious.

Limits of multitasking…

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I’ve worked in some professional capacity now for a little more than a decade. At 22, I was pretty confident that I could take the world by the throat and work my will. At 32 I’m a little more willing to recognize my limitations. Make no mistake, my friends, we all have limitations; things that are just simply beyond out ability. I came face to face with one of mine this afternoon: it is physically impossible for me to multitask nine separate actions at one time. Who knew, right?

I’m not saying that nine is an outrageous number when given time to adequately research, prepare, and execute. But it is out of line when there are another half dozen or more coming down the line tomorrow, and the day after that, and so fourth and so on. And some of those projects, though seemingly small, will contradict assignments that were given the day before.

There’s a certain degree of madness in it. Repeat for day after day and it isn’t long before it turns into something of a farce (or is that tragedy). The overwhelming tide of stupid is leavened a bit by the fact that the dozen or so people you work most closely with know exactly what’s on your mind with just a look… And they’re all thinking the same thing. It makes the endless days tolerable.

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Perspective…

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Sometimes you don’t notice how things change until you have the chance to look at them from a different perspective. Last week I was on the road. The details are mostly inconsequential, other than to note that what I saw was an office that gave all outward appearances of being cohesive, professional, and productive. More to the point, the people I was observing genuinely seemed to be as happy to be at work as one could reasonably expect. That’s something I haven’t seen in a long time. Actually, it took me the better part of the first day to realize what I was seeing. When you’re in the moment, you don’t ever get to stop and see just how radically dysfunctional things really have become. All you see is the ebb and flow of day following day and the general sense that something isn’t right. You don’t catch that colleagues don’t smile when they greet each other. You don’t notice that the only kind of humor passing around the office is gallows sarcasm. The rampant desire to get eight and get out seems like something that’s just normal.

That’s what made getting back to the routine this morning a shock to the system. I mean, I knew things were bad, but I only realized how bad after I had seen things on the outside for a few days. I’m too much of a relativist to ever suggest that anything is ever all bad or all good, but I know what pretty damned bad looks like when I see it… and I got an eye full of it today. No end to that situation in sight, so now it’s all about keeping a low profile and doing your best to stay out of the direct line of fire. It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.

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Garden spots…

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The navy is at home in places like San Diego and Pensacola. The army seems to have run to the other extreme and peopled the most inhospitable parts of the country. How else do you explain Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and Fort Polk, Louisiana? Of course those exotic locales are for the “big” Army. My little part of the great green machine has managed to set up shop in pretty much every major urban center in the country; LA, New York, Chicago, San Fran, Honolulu. How then do I manage to draw the trips to places like St. Louis? The only redeeming quality seems to be that I can drive there in less than five hours. Then again, perhaps coming from Memphis, I should consider it an even trade for the week. Regardless, I’ll be on the road for a few days and that generally makes for more interesting blogging. As soon as the foolishness begins, you’ll see it here first (well, second probably since Facebook is easier to update from the driver’s seat… or possibly even third in the event I get really froggy and start updating Twitter).

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Three day…

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I throw alot of heat at the job around here, but I want to take this opportunity to mention one of the things that definitely doesn’t suck. In the world of the federal civilian, there are few perks more appreciated than the steady flow of paid holidays that loosely mark the coming and going of the seasons. These 10 days constitute the cornerstone of the sought after government employee benefits package. Coupled with the judicious application of accumulated annual leave, these days can be parlayed into a goodly stream of four and five day weekends and still leave two weeks left over to cover the end of December festivities and maybe even a week somewhere warm and tropical.

These extended weekends are even a perk for those who opt to stick around the office in that there is almost no one else around. It’s a great opportunity to actually play catch up on projects that have been lying untended in the corner of the cubicle, because there are almost no interruptions. I’m not extending the 4th of July holiday myself this year, so I’ll be in the office right up till the bitter end on Friday (if you consider 3PM the bitter end). After that, it’s off to enjoy the three day weekend… Which mostly means trying to sleep in until at least 7AM and then doing yard work until it gets too hot to see straight. Not exactly an epic vacation, but for now I’m not looking any gift horses in the mouth.

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Once upon a time…

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Once upon a time, there was a bakery. The bakery was owned by a rich and powerful man who only visited the shop a few days each month. In his absence the shop was run by an expert baker who had many employees working under him. These employees, sales clerks, delivery drivers, pastry chefs, dish washers, and far away regional sales managers were all specialized in their respective work areas and brought unique skill sets to their jobs. Though not everyone loved it, the bakery had kept its doors open and survived past the two year mark when many start-up businesses fold. It had a small, but loyal following and was working hard to make incremental improvements to how things were done.

One day, the owner called the baker and told him that the next day there would be a truck of meat arriving and that they would be running the butcher shop next door to the bakery from now on too. “But sir,” says the baker, “we don’t have the equipment or the skills to operate a butcher shop. Perhaps,” he adds, “we should hire a butcher to run this new shop.” But the owner, clearly knowing best, told the baker, “don’t worry, just go in there and hack away at things until you figure it out. It’s not that hard to cut meat and besides, we’re not really worried about quality.” Shaking is head, the baker opens the shop the next morning. His staff does their best, but none of them have been trained at meat cutting and what could have become fine steaks were chopped beyond redemption and because the entire staff was consumed with opening the butcher shop, none of the bread, or pies, or doughnuts, were baked that day. As the staff focused on learning the skills of a butcher, their skills as bakers, and clerks, and delivery drivers slowly deteriorated and by the time they were even marginal butchers, their bakery had lost its customers to competing businesses that focused on their “bread and butter.”

The moral of our story is that in a world of specialists, it’s important, even critical, to use people where there skills and training are maximized. Where new or different skills are needed, those skill sets need to be developed through training or brought in from the outside. When you ask bakers to be butchers, don’t be surprised when things don’t work out as well as you’d hoped.

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Crossing over…

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In most situations there is a magical line; a point to which you can run cursing and screaming, raising six kinds of hell, and still mostly get away with it. That’s particularly true if you manage to do whatever else you do very, very well. Of course there are times when the exact location of that line is a little hard to identify, so you’re left wondering how many more times you can poke at something before getting a swift and overwhelmingly negative response. Because I’ve inherited a mile-wide malcontent streak from my father, maybe I just tend to find myself in this position more often than other people who have learned to keep their heads down and mouths shut. Some people seem born to be rainmakers and princes of the universe. Me, I’m fairly sure I was born to follow those guys around tossing rocks at them and cracking jokes. I’m good with that.

Blogging has been a godsend for me. First, it gives me an outlet for writing, which aside from reading, is probably my first great love. Second, it gives me a fantastic venue to get things off my chest that would be wholly inappropriate in any other venue. The only real problem is that just like in the brick and mortar world, even here there are lines that I dare not cross. Sure, I’m happy to slide right up to them and maybe even nudge a few toes over it, but because it’s open to the public in the truest sense, I have to self moderate. Truth is, for every post that I publish here, there’s easily at least on I got halfway through before I realized there was no way I was going to say that out loud in front of God, a couple of dozen regular readers, and anyone else who happens to stumble on this site.

Most everyone who knows me gets that I’ve been having a love-hate relationship with the job for the better part of the last year. Lord knows there are enough lines here on the topic that it’s pretty obvious. But really, all of that just barely scratches the surface of things I’ve really like to say if given the opportunity. A lot of things don’t make the cut because I’m not willing to drag other people here by name to unbraid them. Other things, some of the best things, really, don’t make the cut for the simple reason that I’m not making my living writing a blog and do make a pretty good living at my actual job. I really wish it was different, because I have some great stories to tell and plenty of people I’d love to publicly call out (actually, that number is probably less than half a dozen who really deserve the works).

The point is, I’m working to find a balance between what to write and when to keep my pen to myself. I’ve made a career of finding that line in the real world (most of the time, anyway), but it doesn’t exactly translate one-to-one into electrons. Maybe it’s for the best that some things don’t get said… But damn won’t it be cathartic when I can cross that line, sit down, and say it all out loud.

– Posted via iPad.

Starting strong…

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If nothing else, I can say that I started the day strong. When others were getting booted and being timed out on the AT&T and Apple websites, I managed to reserve my iPhone 4 for pick up next Thursday. By 5:50 this morning, I had my confirmation email and realized, somewhat disturbingly, that I had reached what was likely to be the high point of the day. Seriously, on a work day, what’s going to be better then the moment you confirm that you’re going to have your hands on this summer’s neatest new toy?

All I need to do now is show up, hand over $199 + tax, sign a new two year contract that I have no intention of staying in longer than a year, and wait in line for the 7 AM opening of the local Apple Store. It’s like any other high holy day, except with bottled water and granola. And it’s possibly the only time of year when I don’t really mind standing in line and being forced to socialize with total strangers. Of course then there’s the inevitable anger when iTunes grinds to a halt under the volume of people trying to activate new phones. That’s part of the price of being a ridiculously early adopter.

Despite what I consider one of the better starts, the day ended, as most days do… with my being annoyed. However, I wasn’t violently annoyed in that wanting to bludgeon someone with a desk chair kind of way, so perhaps I’m making progress and getting through the anger stage into acceptance… or is that indifference? Eh, who can tell the difference anyway. See, I’m growing as a person.

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