A trip to the archives…

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I’m old enough to remember when documents of any importance came on paper – often in multiple color coded carbon copies. For someone who has converted nearly wholesale to digital record keeping, I have an alarmingly large archive of old paper copies – old bills of sale, mortgage originations, and thousands of other 8×10 inch bits of paper that were required to build a life before everything came to us via electrons.

I recently had to take a deep dive into the furthest recesses of the paper archives – searching for something I know I’d need a copy of when the happy day comes and I go to closing on my southern Maryland condo. Yes, I know, cart before the horse and all, but I like having my ducks well-ordered.

Knowing how much has changed over the last almost twenty years, I assumed I was in for a bit of leg work – and possibly a pleading phone call to the condo association asking for a copy of the neighborhood covenants and restrictions. I mean what are the chances 22 year old Jeff held on to the copy he was given in the early spring of 2001?

Turns out I’m every bit as anal retentive as people think I am. After five moves and two decades, the old 1980’s vintage neon orange binder was tucked in between the original mortgage and the property management agreement, right where I left it back when the millennium was still shiny and new.

I was tempted to see what other oddities lurked in the depths of my filing system, but it wasn’t the moment to find myself sitting ankle deep in twenty year old paperwork. For the time being I’ll just be glad I found what I was looking for on the first attempt… but I think I’m going to add “digitize and shred” the deepest layer of the archive onto my list of things to do.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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What annoys Jeff this week? Shit. I could write a book on that. There’s one thing, though, that stands out in my mind this week. It’s the mother of annoyances. The one that if it didn’t happen day in and day out with a steady drum beat, so many of the other, smaller annoyances wouldn’t exist at all.

I don’t know exactly if it’s human nature or just SOP in our little part of the world, but the propensity for people to ignore things right up until the movement when it needs to be finished drives me directly around the bend. It makes me into an absolute mental case.

When you’ve known for weeks (or months) something needs to happen, but only start looking at it a day before it’s needed – or even better – two days after it was supposed to be finished, what exactly am I supposed to think? Well, first, your time management skills blow, but that’s just the baseline. If you procrastinate everything until the last possible moment all you guarantee is that everything in your wheelhouse is a self inflicted crisis. There’s no planning, no strategic vision, and certainly no sense that some ideas require time and attention to mature into final products. If you do happen to scrape something together to meet a “surprise” requirement, it’s a giant flaming shit sandwich. As often as not it’s not even a sandwich – just the various component ingredients for making one.

At that point why bother? Just admit that you’re a enormous waste of resources who exists purely to convert oxygen to carbon dioxide and draw a salary. I’d at least appreciate the honesty of admitting that someone doesn’t give a good goddamn. Hell, it would be refreshing. I’d almost respect you for it.

As it is, at least I know why every day is an exercise in jumping though my own ass to get even the simplest of projects done – because expecting people to pay attention is our own personal bridge too far.

Business decisions are not violations of your rights. Usually…

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Most of the Second Amendment advocates on social media are up in arms – no pun intended – about Walmart’s decision to deeply scale back its sales of ammunition. Now, it would be easy enough to pillory Walmart’s press release. “Short barrel rifle ammunition” and “large capacity clips” aren’t really a thing, after all, but getting details right is less important than getting the proper spin on your public relations story.

The short version of what I’m sure will be my unpopular take is that Walmart is, first and foremost, a business. It exists as a money making machine for its shareholders. The end. Somewhere in an Arkansas-based executive suite, they made a business decision that they could afford to lose some percentage of their sales by getting out of a segment of the retail ammunition business. Unless Walmart is being run by certified morons, it was a dispassionate decision made based on dollars and cents… and no, before someone asks, Walmart isn’t infringing on your Second Amendment rights.

It’s been a long time since Walmart was just a simple chain of southern variety stores, but they are still big business in rural communities across the country. They sell a metric shit ton of hunting equipment, outdoor supplies, and yes, ammunition and firearms. Because of their ubiquity in the marketplace, avoiding their reach completely feels unlikely… but a simple check of my last year’s expenses shows me that if I simply change where I get my canned goods, dry foods, and basic groceries, I can deprive them of upwards of $5,000 a year – a bit more if you figure in other household incidentals.

One person’s changed buying habits won’t make a lick of difference to Walmart, of course, but it will funnel money into other businesses, that are, perhaps, less willing to sell out a core demographic element of their business model. A few hundred or a few thousand people determined to do the same can make a tremendous difference in throwing cash towards businesses that support, or at the very least aren’t antagonistic towards their values and priorities.

Walmart has their own business calculus and so do I.

The short week…

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Ok, it’s a short week. That’s at least one small detail working in its favor. I’m not over here trying to wish my life away or anything, but how fake would I have to be to pretend that I enjoyed these weekdays anywhere near as much as I do Saturdays and Sundays?

Telework Tuesday lets me ease back into the week without the commute and open bay cubicles adding insult to injury. That makes it hard to complain too much about the week so far. I’m sure Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday will more than make up for that, though. As always, my inner pessimist is ensuring that my expectations, even for a short week, don’t fly wildly out of hand.

As usual, coming off a long weekend there just isn’t all that much on my mind. Spending the majority of four days ignoring the news, buying up some books, cooking, reading, and spending quality time with the resident animals doesn’t lend itself to great storming posts. If you think I’m going to issue an apology for that then you’re stark raving, right out of your tree mad.

Maybe it’s time to branch out a little in order to head off these inevitable lull in material. Then again, I question how often anyone wants to read about just how many ear scratches were dispensed to the dogs or my opinions on the cathartic value of lawn mowing. Maybe we should just let short weeks be what they are, because soon enough something will agitate the hell out of me and we’ll be off to the races again.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Free gifts. As the amount of actual mail I need to send has plummeted, the number of organizations sending me “personalized address labels” as a “gift” has skyrocketed. It makes me wonder who’s running their marketing and fundraising department… and why they think this is a winning idea. I mean if you’re going to inundate me with junk mail, at least make it something that doesn’t stick to the blades of my shredder and give me an even worse impression of your organization.

2. Aggressive marketing of things I’ve already purchased. I bought a very nice marble urn for Winston. Since then I’ve been getting at least one email a week from the nice people at perfectmemorials.com offering me a wide range of other funerary items. This feels like another marketing fail to me. I mean urns aren’t exactly the kind of thing anyone need to purchase every week, right? I was very pleased with their service and the quality of the product I received and in time I would probably use them again as the need arose… but if they keep beating me about the head and neck with weekly messages in all likelihood I’ll go someone where else when the time comes.

3. Look at me-ism. There are few things I find more professionally unpleasant than people who demand attention for their ideas or presence in a room simply by virtue of position. Look, if I need a chief in the meeting, I’ll be the first one to invite them. More often, though, who I need is the person who actually does the work. If you need to be in a meeting just to feel important, maybe it’s time to check yourself.

Vague and hazy…

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It’s a short week and I should feel better about that. I mean no one looks forward to these Friday schleps around antique shops, thrift stores, and used book dealers more than I do… but getting through to Friday this week has felt like a lot more than half the battle. The week has been a long trail of stupid.

I know it’s not just me, either. I’ve listened to other people express much the same opinion that the week has just been “off” somehow. Maybe everyone is mentally checked out for the long holiday weekend marking, more or less, the official end of summer. Maybe there’s a long-discarded canister of nerve gas under the building leaking and causing everyone to operate at half speed in a mental fog. It’s not strictly impossible.

I shouldn’t admit to knowingly giving anything short shrift, but the fact is that at the moment, I’m really performing no better than the rest. The only milestone I see at the moment is 4:00 Thursday afternoon. Past that, the world gets awfully vague and hazy.

On leadership and decision making…

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As I was Frankensteining together another PowerPoint slide deck from lightly used and discarded pieces of other briefings, it really started to sink in that I’m working on the 6th yearly iteration of this project. It’s a project that was originally slated to be part of my life for “a year or two max” and then get handed off to the next lucky victim. It’s another in Uncle’s long train of bright, shiny promises that may or may not in any way be reflected in eventual reality. It’s something you get use to after enough years have sheered away.

I’m really only stuck on this topic today because it set me thinking about the various ways that whoever is sitting in the big chair influences all sorts of relatively minor details that can make life an unmitigated shitshow. What I’ll call “leadership personality” appears to be the only driving difference between a small, no frills, meeting the requirement sort of job, and one that has all the stops pulled out and all safeties disarmed.

For a moment there this afternoon, I was stuck with the towering reality of just how little years of collective expertise and experience count against a single moment of “Yeah, but I want to do it this other way.” It’s probably best that I don’t spend too much time dwelling on that. I’m sure I’d be told that’s a feature of the system rather than a bug. It’s a reasonable assessment that some people would even believe that.

The fact is, I’m very nearly agnostic when it comes to what decisions are made – especially if they’re only made just that one time and not jiggered about every six days thereafter until the inevitable heat death of the universe. I’ll provide the best insight and information I have, but once someone points out the approved direction of travel, I’ll head that way and keep moving until apprehended.

We’re maybe, possibly, somewhere in the general vicinity of a decision that may or may not have a large impact on something I’ve spent months out of the last five years tinkering around with. I’m just going to assume that level of interest in anything goin on in my sandbox is what has my nerves set to “on edge.”

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. It’s glaringly obvious to me and maybe to you too if you’re a regular reader, that I’ve slipped back into what I fondly call a stream of consciousness blogging mode. Even when I set out with a target in mind, the narrative sort of zigs and rambles around to a point where it ends kind of wherever rather than where it might find a reasonably logical finish. Maybe it’s just the kind of thing I notice because I spend four or five days a week with my own writing. Maybe it’s less annoying to outside observers than it is to me. I hope so, because not being able to keep to the thread of a previously well thought out line of thinking is pretty goddamned annoying.

2. Jorah. The dog who won’t be housebroken. We’re still mostly hanging out in the kitchen, because as adorable as he is, the little beast is not to be trusted to avoid pissing all over whatever happens to be at hand when the mood strikes. It’s happening with less frequency now to be sure, but since he’s doubled in size the volume involved has also increased dramatically. There’s also the occasional middle of the night accident in his crate, which is doubly agitating since I know he can hold it far longer than the few hours a night I carve out for rest. To counteract that bit, he’s lost his soft bedding and gets no water after 7:30 each night. Who the hell knows if that will make any difference. At ten months old and after three months of consistent lessons on how to be a decent member of the household I’m running out of ideas with this one. The next stop is probably the vet to get a once over and confirm that there are no underlying medical issues involved. After that all that’s left is a turn to a far more Prussian discipline than I usually impose.

3. Mosquitos. I’m out in the yard at night so often with these hoodlum dogs that my legs currently look like I’ve got some kind of damn scabby plague trying eat me from the ankles up. I live in the woods. I know there are going to be bugs. The number of winged bloodsuckers inhabiting my little slice of the forest is absolutely out of hand though. So it’s either spend all evening smelling like Deep Woods Off or end up West Nile Virus and methed out legs. I don’t usually celebrate the end of summer but this year I’m looking forward to a good killing frost.

Heavy nostalgia…

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I just signed the paperwork starting the process of selling the condo I bought in 2001… Back when I was a fresh faced, 23-year old college graduate just a year or so into my first adult job in extreme southern Maryland. Back then St. Mary’s County was just starting to grow up – it’s first great strides towards becoming another bedroom community for the District.

Coming out of a two room granny flat that was about the size of my current laundry room, the condo felt palatial at the time. It was 725 square feet of all mine. The first step along the path of my own version of the American dream. If my time in Frostburg molded me, St. Mary’s, and my little condo was where I was tempered and really learned how to be me outside the orbit of the known and familiar.

With the paperwork signed, I’m about a week and a half from seeing the place back on the market for the first time since I snatched it up. I’m feeling an awfully heavy dose of nostalgia tonight – for nights on Solomons, at the Brass Rail, or the Green Door, for friends made and contact lost over the long intervening years, and more than a little for the 23-year old version of me who was so very determined to bend the world to his will, got kicked around a little by life, and kept on coming.

I’ve had chances to sell the place in the past, but could never quite bring myself to let it go. Now, though, it feels right. My long time property manager is closing up his business and being a long distance landlord has lost a lot of its luster. It’s probably a few years past time, really. The place deserves a shot at an owner who’s going to call it home again. I’d like to see that… but of course if another investor shows up with a big bag of cash, I’m not going to send them away.

As much as I’m feeling and appreciate the moment of nostalgia, it does have it’s limits when it comes to making decisions with the dollars and cents.

Weekdays are interchangeable…

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Tuesdays are definitely the new Monday… even though I’d be hard pressed to tell you how it was any different than a typical Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday either. All the standard weekdays just fall into a general batch of sameness as far as the eye can see. It’s gotten to the point that the only time I can really tell the difference between them is when I take note of the day of the week marked when I shoot a handful of pills out of my classic geriatric medicine storage container.

I’m not saying the sameness is necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It’s PowerPoint, Excel, rinse, and repeat. It doesn’t take a lot of extraneous brain power unless something is slipping from the rails. Like I discovered back in my past life as a teacher, once you’ve been doing something year after year, there really isn’t much new. Most “new” efforts mean dusting off some slides I’ve been storing for five or ten years in the archive, prettying them up with some new graphics and numbers, and pasting them into wherever they need to go. It can be time consuming and monotonous, but it’s rarely hard.

I probably shouldn’t admit that. It’s like giving away some kind of trade secret. Or an invitation for fate to knock my carefully constructed web of standard answers wildly askew. On second though let’s just pretend this post never actually happened, ok?