Tag Archives: bureaucrat

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The two weeks of Christmas. I was sitting in a meeting this week where the great and the good were calling for all manner of things to happen in the next two weeks. It’s cute when they’re optimistic like that. Experience tells me that even the most dedicated senior leader is going to find it hard to get jack-all done when 75% of his or her workforce is sitting snug in their homes or on the road for the week before and after Christmas. It’s good to be ambitious. It’s good to have goals. It’s also important to know your limitations, especially when you’re working with a skeleton crew just barely large enough to keep the lights on. Reason 7,471 I have no interest in bossing ever again.

2. Not knowing when to STFU. There is a time and a place for raising new topics or for asking every question. When the guy sitting at the head of the table is trying to close things out and the meeting has already run twenty minutes past its scheduled ending, though, is neither the time nor the place. That’s when you should have been a bureaucrat long enough to know that it’s time to sit there and shut the fuck up.

3. Emergency slide flipping. If there’s anything worse than being stuck in your own meeting, it’s being unceremoniously suck into someone else’s meeting because their computer crapped out and getting it fixed takes days. Look, a) It’s not my program; b) I actually have my own work to do; and c) If we keep finding work arounds to the shit tech support we get it will never have a reason to improve. Being a slide clicker on your own material is bad enough, but the number of times I’ve been yanked away from whatever it was I was doing to flip slides for someone else is astounding. It’s like no one in this place has heard of opportunity cost or return on investment. There are days when I’m entirely convinced I’m the best paid clerk/typist in the whole damned country.

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The Gods on Olympus are in the process of rolling out a new pay system. Right now they’re in the phase of that process where they’re going all out to sell it as a step ahead and “in the best interests of the workforce.” That means lots of memos and meetings about what we can expect to get out of this new system. They’re trying to get employee buy in – acquiescence if not consensus. In my experience the only reason anyone ever does that is because some special expert on management theory has told them it’s important.

I’ve been on the job now just shy of 15 years. Most of that time I’ve worked under the old General Schedule, the pay tables that have racked and stacked bureaucrats since 1949. The General Schedule is dull stuff. Movement through the pay table is predictable based on your grade and years of service. For a hot minute in the late 2000s, I lurked a while under the National Security Personnel System before it faded away ingloriously as a massively expensive but failed program. Since then, I’ve again been a creature of the general schedule.

I’ve been around long enough to come to appreciate dull and predictable when it comes to how your pay is governed. Fancy new systems with layer upon layer of review, no transparency about how your final rating is arrived at, and no way to predict from year to year how much money might be available in the pot to pay out “performance bonuses” make me all kinds of nervous and jerky. Experience tells me that if the big bosses are trying to sell something this hard, it’s a good time to put my hand on my wallet so I can make sure their’s doesn’t get there first.

The price or: Being caught at my desk…

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Nothing good ever starts with the boss coming by asking “How busy are you this week?”

The answer, the answer I should have given, true or not, is “I’m busier than a one-armed paper hanger, sir… Doing great things for God and country.”

Instead the answer was “Meh, what do you need?” I made the cardinal mistake of showing even the least semblance of interest. I made a mistake and the consequences were swift and certain.

One little slip up, friends, is precisely how you get yourself drug into the middle of a three and a half hour meeting on Friday that up until just a few minutes before was none of your damned business.

I’ve lead the internet in warning future bureaucrats about the dangers inherent in volunteerism. In my career, I’ve never been rewarded for putting up my hand and asking for more work. Although it leads the list by a fairly wide margin, volunteerism isn’t the only form of creeping workload adjustment that can ruin your day.

While I didn’t quite volunteer today, I did present myself as a convenient target of opportunity. Just being at the wrong place at the wrong time can result in two reports and a half a day worth of briefings ending up slipping from someone else’s pile to yours before you even realize what you’ve done.

“Surprise!” Says the universe. “That nice easy week you were planning… the one with the low pressure slide into the weekend? Yeah, you can go ahead and forget all about that.” The universe is a real son of a bitch like that.

That’s what I get for being caught at my desk. I know better. And now I’m going to pay the price for not turning that knowledge into action.

What do you do?

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When I worked in the District, the most important question asked at every social engagement was some variation on “What do you do?” or “Who do you work for?” The answer, of course, would immediately raise or lower your social standing or level of attractiveness. There was a while there I was introducing myself as Jeff, the young and idealistic Chief of Legislative Affairs for Some Random Made Up Hippy Dippy Non-Profit. That had way more cache than being a bureaucrat from deep within the bowels of some big agency.

To those who know me, I often answered the question with a touch more realism. When asked what I did, my stock response was almost always “I do PowerPoint.” For long stretches of my career it had the additional benefit of also being largely true. There was a while there I could diddle a PowerPoint the same way a virtuoso can make a Stradivarius violin sing. Plus it always seemed just a little bit funnier than the usual, “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

Now if people ask, well, the answer always comes with a little less humor. What do I do? Depending on the day you ask, I either have meetings about meetings or I’m the Organizational Party Planner in Chief. The irony of an arch misanthrope being the touch point for planning your next 1500 person event isn’t in any way lost on me. It’s one of the reasons I know the universe has a sense of humor.

At least when the time comes to punch out of here, I’ll know that I am fully prepared to begin my second career as the most overly officious and bureaucratic wedding planner in all of human history… because dealing with overly sensitive, emotional clients who want their special day to be just perfect sounds an awful lot like dealing with the day-to-day demands of your run of the mill general officer. The only thing missing is the poofy white dress.

​Pushing paper…

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I’ll admit that pushing paper doesn’t have the same gritty-sounding edge as breaking bad, but that doesn’t make it any less of an exercise in futility. On this particular Monday, I had the good fortune to review and/or revise an After Action Report, a “fragmentary order”, an “operations order”, two separate requests for information, and several requests for echelons higher than me to pass information upwards through the chain of command. The only thing that really unifies all those efforts is that it’s helpful to be good with words and to know just where in the bowels of the organization something might need to go in order to have a prayer of being answered.

It’s an unfortunate skill that I seem to possess, at least in some limited quantity. If that’s the superpower I got, well, let’s just say I got the short end of whatever stick they were handing out that day. Oh, it pays the bills and keeps a roof over your head, sure enough. Still, it’s not exactly what anyone might call a passion project unless they’re into a deeply warped kind of S&M.

So we trudge on at this petty pace from day to day, fueled almost exclusively by over strong coffee and too little sleep. Until we grind down all the world’s forests to cover the globe with reams of paper carefully checked at the margins and printed in 12 point Arial. Even then, on that long coming day when the last report has been printed, the last order cut, and the last briefing printed… somehow there will still be paper left to push. Worse than a nightmare, this is real life.

A blessing and a curse…

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Government work isn’t exactly bad when you can get it. There are, of course, strings attached. One of the most off-putting strings by which I am tethered to the job is attending a series of monthly meetings that may or may not have any actual relationship to my profession. Since I’m well known as a team player and an undeniable physical presence in any room, I show up, listen attentively, take notes, and regularly report back only that there is nothing significant to report. Sitting through an endless series of meetings doesn’t require a real human-sized brain, but separating the mind from the body is generally frowned upon. Since my General Schedule overlords seem pleased enough with this arrangement, I too will leave well enough alone.

Look, I’m the first one to rock the boat whenever I think rocking it might actually do some good. Fighting city hall over the number of random meetings people get stuck in isn’t one of those occasions. I’ve been a professional bureaucrat long enough to know that the only thing worse than being in too many meetings is not being in them – because that’s always when someone gets the bright idea to make something your responsibility and not actually bother to tell you about it. So in a way, making sure all the meetings are well attended is a warped kind of self defense mechanism.

So baring a Powerball win, my foreseeable future would seem to include spending the hourly equivalent of at least one full week a month doing nothing more than sitting in meetings where my only real responsibility is signing off with “No sir, nothing to add here.”

This is the life I chose… it’s a blessing and a curse.

Hot sweaty death by PowerPoint…

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I’ve never really understood the need of management to convey information by jamming as many people as possible into a room and then throwing PowerPoint charts at them until they want to gouge out their own eyes. These events are even more near and dear to my heart when the information could have been just as easily sent to me by email so I could read it at a convenient time rather than rejiggering my calendar to free up three hours in the middle of the week – a task I accomplished by cancelling my one actual productive meeting this week.

As a rule, 120 slides constitute just a few too many in any presentation. That’s doubly true when 31 of those slides fall into the “org chart/wire diagram” category. 1) Nobody in the room can read the eight point font used to squeeze that graphic onto the slide and 2) After ten or twelve wire diagrams, they all look exactly the same. That’s just an observation from a guy sitting in the back rows, so take it for what it’s worth.

When I’m proclaimed King of the Bureaucrats, my first edict from on high will be a proclamation that no briefing will use more than five slides. Ever. If you can’t distill the essence of what you’re trying to convey into five or fewer slides or (gasp) talk about your idea without the visual aids, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll think you don’t know what you’re talking about and will be sorely tempted to send you to sleep with the fishes. Since I’m somewhere just above the janitorial staff on one of those 31 org charts we saw, I suppose everyone is safe for the time being.

But you’ve all been warned. Oh yes, you’ve all been warned.

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.

The secret, little discussed 10th level of Hell…

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There’s a special level of hell reserved for the bureaucrats. Conveniently, you don’t have to die to get there. All you have to do is show up, day after day for 40 years and suddenly somewhere along the way you realize you’re already there. You find yourself sitting in meetings that have been held every Tuesday since before anyone in the room was even an employee. You’ll find yourself updating a PowerPoint slide that you updated two months before, and two months before that and backwards in time to the dawn of the electronic age and into the land of acetate view graphs and overhead projectors before that.

Maybe somewhere in the mists of time there was a legitimate need to do these things, but so many of the time killing tasks we face day to day seem like they’re on autopilot that it’s near impossible to tell the important from the other stuff. Want to free up millions of dollars in resources? Cancel every repeating meeting on everyone’s calendar and only schedule meetings that are actually needed. Meetings shouldn’t be a weekly excuse for coffeecake and social time. Poof. Suddenly you’ve saved yourself a million man hours a month. Want to save more money? Never prepare PowerPoint charts unless they are absolutely necessary to express a complex concept. Our caveman ancestors used their words to spread ideas. Surely we can manage to do the same.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be toiling on the next series of charts in the 10th level of hell… my half-walled cubicle. Now if I can just figure out where they’ve put my stapler.

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.

How you know it’s been a good meeting…

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Bureaucrats, as a group, are big fans of meetings. When we’re not sitting in them, we’re preparing for them, discussing how they went, or pondering what other topics are important enough to warrant having their own meetings. If you plan your day just so, you can step from meeting to meeting and never once have to risk accomplishing anything that might accidentally be considered a productive use of time. Pretty much the only guaranteed think to come out of a meeting is that there will be more work on your desk once it’s over than there was before it started.

If you step back and honestly asses your own experience, when was the last time you walked out of a meeting feeling good about how much you’d accomplished? Alternatively, how often do you walk out of a meeting feeling like you had just spent two hours of your life that you were never going to get back? Personally I can’t remember the last meeting I was in where the salient points couldn’t have been dropped into an email and circulated to those with a need to keep track of such things. More often, the whole thing could have been avoided if two people passing in the hallway could have had an “oh, by the way” moment and restricted the exchange only to the people who actually care about a specific topic or issue rather than subjecting the entire office to an afternoon of torment.

If you’re a proponent of meetings, do you know when you’ve just had a good one? I do. It’s when the senior person in the room stands up at the end and asks if anyone has a clue why we just sat through that and then walks off shaking his head.

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.

200 and climbing…

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For those playing along with the fun filled and exciting game of How Many Resumes can Jeff Send Out Before Losing His Bloody Mind, the total now stands just north of the 200 mark. This is perhaps more impressive in the fact that it was at the 199 point that I ran out of available positions to apply for with the Army. So from here on out, we’re broadening the scope to include Army and every other government agency in the MD-DC-VA-PA area. Thank God for http://www.usajobs.com. I don’t know how anyone ever did this back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and resumes were delivered on paper.

If you’re curious about what lucky #200 was, that would be a Strategic Analyst on the Joint Staff. It’s a little vague on the duties, but it’s a pretty sweet title. Nothing appeals the heart stings of a career bureaucrat like a title bump… well, a title bump and a kickin’ retirement system. In the also-ran category for the #200 place of honor was Senior Advisor to the Treasurer of the United States. If you think the Joint Staff is vague, try figuring out what a “Senior Advisor” is supposed to spend their day doing. I read the job announcement twice and still didn’t really figure it out… but apparently the Treasurer needs two of them.

Winning the creepiest job announcement of the day is Army Intelligence, with a position that called for, among other things, background checks, urinalysis, polygraphs, credit checks, and psych evaluations. Those things aren’t really a problem, but when I came across a “condition of employment” that read: 7.) Must be willing to work unusual extended hours and forego conveniences normally afforded to civilian employees in CONUS/OCONUS, I decided that foregoing normal conveniences probably wasn’t something I was going to be interested in. That ones’s a rare pass.