Tag Archives: bureaucracy

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Tax return. The half a ream of paper I’m sending over to my accountant is an absolute absurdity. I have to think my taxes aren’t particularly complex. A W2, mortgage interest, some basic investments, and a few other random deductions to itemize… and yet it’s a stack of paperwork that I’m going to pay an expert hundreds of dollars to go over in hopes of being sure I haven’t gone astray of our Byzantine tax code. 

2. Smart tech. As I was sitting here on a day of the week I’m always scheduled in the office it got to be around 9:30 and I realized it had gotten cold as blue hell in the house. I’d utterly forgotten that I’ve got the thermostat set to lower the temperature after I should have left for the day. All the smart tech, from my phone to the thermostat didn’t realize or couldn’t react to the fact that I was, in fact, home when I’m normally not. It feels like by now this is something the “smart home” tech should be capable of sorting out before I get unnecessarily chilly.

3. Motor Vehicle Administration. So here we are, two months after buying my fancy new vehicle and four days until my second temporary registration expires. Why in seven hells it should take two months for the State of Maryland to process some paperwork so I can bolt license plates already in my possession to my own vehicle, I will never know… but here we are… again… with no end in sight. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Apple Watch. I’m not 100% convinced that my Apple Watch is helpful. Cardiology recommended it because of the quick ability to run a simple EKG if my heart rate ever takes off at a running gallop for any reason. Otherwise, it’s just becoming a repository for a whole bunch of new data that I can obsess and crank up my anxiety about. A true double edged sword. Days when I’m busy and don’t check my heart rate or oxygen saturation or any of the 300 other data points it serves up at the touch of a button are fine. But the days when my brain isn’t occupied and has time to dwell, things get a little froggy. I’m not entirely sure vital statistics wouldn’t be better left in MyChart and collected only at periodic doctor’s visits. At least there, things are in context. Living on my phone, though, they’re just an invitation to deep dive Reddit threads and lose hours on self-diagnosis.

2. Bureaucracy. The Defender’s first temporary registration was slated to expire on Saturday. Land Rover overnighted me a new set of temporary plates without any trouble, but asides from kudos to them for making it relatively painless, this shouldn’t be something that even needs to be discussed. None of this would be an issue if we weren’t working through the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to get things processed through the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, both state agencies well known for the speed with which they process taxpayer requests. I wish I was surprised that something as dead simple routine as issuing new license plates apparently takes more than 30 days, but here we are, not surprised but thoroughly annoyed.

3. The MAGA party. I’m sorry, but in the year two thousand and twenty-four of the common era, I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe this is even still a thing. I know the philosopher said “you can fool some of the people all the time,” but at some point, it simply becomes less a case of misdirection and something more like willful disregard for reality. I try to mostly tune out the noise, but the fact that it exists at all is wholly absurd. 

Not What Annoys Jeff this Week…

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I generally reserve the length and breadth of this space on Thursdays to bitch and complain about whatever three things have most agitated and annoyed me over the week. In what’s probably an unprecedented move in 587 editions of What Annoys Jeff this Week, I’m not going to do that.

Instead, I’m going to use this few minutes to single out a single, anonymous person who saw the flare I sent up last week and immediately took the time, long after duty hours, to respond and start the great machinery of the bureaucracy in the direction of fixing what has been a seemingly simple to fix, yet lingering problem now for over a year.

Most of what happens in the belly of this great green machine goes unnoticed and unremarked. Such is the nature of the bureaucracy. I don’t suspect any of us ended up in this line of work because we needed a lot of external praise… but as the saying goes, when you see something, you should say something.

So, nameless bureaucrat, thank you for taking up a cause that wasn’t necessarily yours – certainly one that could have been staffed to someone else. What you do and how you choose to lead doesn’t go unnoticed.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Operating one man down. The bosses don’t want to acknowledge in any meaningful way that we’re a man down – working at 66.6% strength with 100% of the day-to-day work they still think should be happening. Of course, that’s before whatever additional surprise “hey you” random shit and odd jobs come oozing in over the side on any given day. There might have been a time I’d work myself into a nervous breakdown trying to keep up, but let me assure you those days are long gone. The wheels will come off where they come off and I won’t lose a minute of sleep over a slow-moving accident that management had months to avoid. 

2. Failure to accept defeat gracefully. Look, sometimes you can plan a party and due to timing or circumstances, or because people had a really shitty time at your last party, no one gives any indication of being interested in showing up. Once you’ve exhausted all the options, called in the favors, and done everything you can do to get people interested, you really only have two options when you’re three weeks out and only have a score of people signed up. You either cancel things in a controlled, methodical way that creates the illusion of some reason other than you couldn’t convince anyone to come to your party, or you accept that you’re doing $100,000 of planning to put on a show in an empty auditorium. Either way. At least no one will be able to say I didn’t warn them.

3. Broken encryption. We have a group mailbox in which I spend half my time working. For the last six months or more, though, the encryption certificates for that mailbox have been invalid, so any time someone sends us an encrypted email, we have to stop what we’re doing and ask them to either send it unencrypted or send it to our personal mailbox. Then, sign off the group mailbox, sign into our own, and forward the message. It’s not hard, but it’s a time suck and fucks with the basic workflow of the day. The fix to this is an easy one, just requiring us to forward some paperwork over to the IT trolls. We’ve raised it to management on more than one occasion… but bosses being bosses have decided that they don’t want to do that because they have a “better way.” It’s one goddamned simple fix to make life in this cubicle hell marginally better, but it’s too hard to do. It’s about to become my newest workplace obsession and I’ll be talking about it in every forum possible until it gets fixed, I retire, or they fire my ass.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Results. I’m a reasonably intelligent man with a fairly analytical mind, but I’m at a loss for what to do when results from something like an MRI drop into my online patient portal long before my doctor has a chance to look at and comment on them. As wide as my academic interests are, it’s never ranged as far as internal medicine, so the reports end up being a lot of gibberish with lines, arrows, and color codes that mean precisely nothing to me. That, of course, doesn’t prevent me from using Google to try gleaning a bit of understanding… which never results in anything other than low grade panic or mild confusion. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I almost miss the olden days when the doctor received the report and the patient didn’t know dick about it until the medical professionals called to explain what’s what. I’m not at all sure this current model of complete transparency is helping me in any way.

2. Retirement. In my little slice of Uncle’s big green machine, there are 3 people who do more or less what I do. We’ve been a decent little team for the last half a decade or so. One of the three (lucky bastard) is retiring in a few days. His backfill is nowhere in sight. With three people, in all but the most extraordinary circumstances, we could work around everyone’s schedules and keep the trains running on time. With two, well, I’ve already identified two days that’ll be listed with “no coverage” in the next two months. That number will explode when the other guy adds his scheduled time off to the mix. All of that’s before we’ve even talked about the week or two gap for Christmas and New Year’s. None of those issues should be surprising. We’ve been warning the bosses about it for months. But not to worry… there’s allegedly a “temporary” fill-in coming and the bosses are going to hire a permanent replacement with all the speed and agility the U.S. Government is famous for displaying. With the pace at which the bureaucracy moves, I don’t expect to see either of those things happen until well after the new year, if ever. The only thing I know for sure is that for the foreseeable future, there’s going to be 24 manhours per day of work to do and only 16 manhours of personnel on hand to do it. The math, as they say, just doesn’t math. I know I won’t magically be doing an extra 4 hours of whatever every day, so I reckon the powers that be should probably get prepared for a diminished baseline of productivity and discovering that they’re just going to have to wait until we get around to some things. That’ll go over like a fart in church, but this was an issue that could have been addressed any time in the last six months…  so, I’ll be damned if I’ll be treating the inevitable result of bureaucratic fuckery as any kind of emergency for me. 

3. Exercise. Everyone on the internet loves to tell you that “once exercise becomes part of your routine, you’ll love it.” Maybe that’s true for them, but for me, I can assure you that no, the fuck I will not. Every daily walk or session on the exercise bike is 30-40 minutes I’m allocating under protest, because it’s sucking up an incredibly finite resource that I’d much rather put towards reading, or writing, or anything that I might even partially enjoy. Maybe it’s better than being stabbed in the kidney, but as something to pass the time, exercise is easily the least enjoyable part of my day. I’ll do it because it’s being required of me by someone who has far more knowledge about modern medical theory and practice than I have. Still, there isn’t a power on earth or in heaven that can convince me I’m having a good time. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Shitshow. There’s a shitshow coming. It’s going to arrive in just about seven weeks. Although I’m nominally facilitating this burgeoning fiasco, you’ll find that I have little or no enforcement power. Sure, I can tell people when something needs to happen, but when they blow through the deadline without so much as noticing, I’m allowed no stick with which to beat them. To be sure, I can consult, encourage, and warn, but my powers of making anyone do anything are entirely fictional. As the walls close in, the best I’ll be able to manage is telling anyone who’s interested that it’s not going to be pretty. About the only tool I have in my kit at this point is to try lowering expectations to the point that anything more than not setting the building on fire will be considered a successful showing. Even managing that feels like a crap shoot. If this thing manages not to fall apart between now and the time the certain goes up, I’ll be entirely surprised… but if it shits the bed, at least I’ll have the pleasure of saying “I told you so.”

2. The equal application of justice. Here’s the thing… I don’t care if you’re the former president, the son of the sitting president, conned a bunch of little old ladies out of their retirement funds, or the crackhead who just knocked over the local liquor store, if there’s sufficient evidence that you have committed a crime to convince a grand jury that indictment is justified, I’m all in favor of the case being brought. I don’t need more information than that. I’ll never understand why that’s a contentious opinion just because the individual indicted happens to be from “your” side of the ideological spectrum. God, but don’t I miss the days when disgraced public figures had the barest degree of shame and would slink off quietly and never be heard from again. File it under the headline of “we were a proper country once,” I guess.

3. Snacks. I used to have proper snacks – chips, crackers, big hunks of cheese, pretzels (both hard and soft), the occasional Little Debbie cake, or quality Amish baked goods from neighboring Lancaster County. My “snacks” now are fruit or if I’m feeling particularly froggy, pre-measured portions of nuts or M&Ms. Have you ever really measured to see how small a “1 ounce serving” of peanuts is or how few M&M’s make the ounce? It’s goddamned embarrassing to even call it a snack. I’m not so much annoyed as I am enraged. There simply aren’t enough herbs and spices in the known universe to make a rice cake or a plum taste as good as a Snickers Bar or properly salted soft pretzel. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m actually doing anything to extend my life or whether it just feels longer because bit by bit we’re extracting every small bit of joy from it.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 37 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. Now, I’m told, the alleged negotiation has gone so far sideways that it’s been sent to binding arbitration. Resolution to that could literally take years. So, we’re going to be grinding along for the foreseeable future with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 37 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Laundry. Now that I’ve given in and paid off someone else to do most of the regular housekeeping, I find that laundry is the next highest on the list of things that annoy me around the house. The constant stream of wash, fold, put away, repeat is maddening… and that’s just for one person. I can get away with doing it once a week – or even every 10 or 11 days if pressed – and that feels altogether too frequent. I’d be ready to jam pointy sticks in people’s eyes if laundry day expanded to something that happened several times a week.

3. Party planning. I don’t like party planning, but it’s been dropped into my lap often enough now that I have a system. For big parties, those with lots of outside inputs or involving many moving parts (perhaps requiring circus tents and booking live music), I generally start planning six months in advance. Because I’ve done it often enough, I also have a solid core of mostly reliable team members assisting. As the last team to attempt putting this together is unable or unwilling to do so, here we are, four months out and there’s barely the most ephemeral outline of what the goal of this party might be – no idea what topics anyone wants to talk about (or who will be in charge of putting each of those topic together), no determination of which people will be invited to have a seat at the table (and no, you can’t invite an organization, you have to invite a person from that organization), and as best I can tell, there’s nothing even approaching a team of sufficient size and scope to pull everything together in the time allotted. I can provide advice, recommendations, and guidance, but I am not a decision maker. Until someone who is a decision maker decides to give a damn, we are where we are – nowhere. Consider this a pointed reminder, perhaps even a warning, that as we draw nearer to October, I’m not in any way going to consider a months-long lack of urgency on the part of others to suddenly become my emergency.

Subject matter expertise…

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This morning I was called in as a subject matter expert and asked to provide some thoughtful insights to an audience primarily made up of personnel from another service based on my years of experience and unique viewpoints. 

That’s fine. A normal person might even have been honored by the opportunity or enjoy receiving recognition of his peers. The problem here is that I wasn’t having my brain picked about operations, or strategic planning, or emergency management – all things that at one time or another, I have been able to speak about with some level of authoritative knowledge. Instead, I was being asked to talk to this inter-service audience based on my vast, exhaustive experience in part and event planning.

For the better part of an hour, I offered advice on real world challenges, some of our hard won lessons learned, and general commentary about your big day and how to plan it.

It’s hard to imagine why the first thing I do every morning us update my “Days to Retirement Eligibility” countdown whiteboard. Thank the gods that I don’t have any morale left to speak of, because it’s just the kind of thing that would have sent it spiraling to new, unplumbed depths. It’s just one of the mostly untold joys of being a subject matter expert in a subject you loath with the fiery hatred of a thousand suns.

Something nice…

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If you’re like me, you grew up being told, repeatedly and often, that it’s best not to say anything at all if you can’t say something nice.

Sure, it’s probably good advice to help prevent the activation of your career dissipation light, but mostly it just prevents you from saying true things that others might find unpleasant… such as “That’s got to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard in the last 12 years,” or “If it’s not a priority for the bosses, why are we spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about it?”

Sadly, I don’t have a single nice thing to say, so I’ll just sit here quietly and try to keep my eyes from rolling all the way to the back of my skull.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 31 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. Now, I’m told, the alleged negotiation has gone so far sideways that it’s been sent to binding arbitration. Resolution to that could literally take years. So, we’re going to be grinding along for the foreseeable future with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 31 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. The willfully ignorant. There’s a subset of people on Twitter who seem to have adopted Tucker Carlson as their entire personality. I suspect, but am not interested enough to try proving, that they’re likely the same as the ones who love Rothschild / CIA / Bohemian Grove global conspiracies. They’re definitely the ones begging people to “do your own research.” I’m honestly curious if these people would be capable of finding legitimate, scholarly, peer reviewed research reports. I’m almost positive they’re not out there setting up controlled, double-blind experiments or creating well-crafted research programs of their own. In fact, I doubt their ability to outline the scientific method at the high school level. There’s stupid and then there’s willful stupid. The latter, which seems to represent the loudest people on the internet, is largely unforgivable.

3. The local IT office recently changed whatever group policy governs our computers putting themselves to sleep. That’s a fact I only noticed when out of nowhere my laptop started issuing four or five loud beeps and then going blank while I was in the middle of reading anything particularly detailed, or when I ducked out to make a cup of coffee, or whenever I was actively in the middle of doing anything that wasn’t furiously typing or scrolling wildly through documents. I’m sure there’s a very good reason for why they’ve restricted our ability to tell our own computers when to drop into sleep mode, but for the end user it’s just an added aggravation. My employer, it seems, never passes up an opportunity to add one more tiny stumbling block in the workflow or make work just a little more unpleasant.