Tag Archives: management

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Every year around September I opine that there isn’t anything more useless that a formal performance evaluation. Every spring, though, I’m reminded that I’m wrong, because truly it’s impossible to imagine a more pointless “management tool” than the yearly midpoint assessment. It’s all the aggravation of spending time putting paperwork together and none of the remunitative reward of getting a performance bonus. Midpoints are a 100% paperwork drill out of which there’s no significant accomplishment. If I’ve been a turd for the last six months and management hasn’t said anything, they obviously don’t care. If I’ve been an all star for six months and don’t know it, than that’s 100% my own problem. All the midpoint process does is ensure my copy, paste, and update skills are just as sharp as they were a year ago.

2. Last week included new computer day at work. This week has involved a pretty extensive amount of trying to figure out how my own personal workflows will function in a Windows 11 environment. After two days of hunting and hoping and yelling at this computer, I’m absolutely not loving it. In fact nothing is currently working as seamlessly with this new system as it did with the old one. I’m not saying new tech is necessarily bad, just that when the powers at echelons higher than reality decide it’s time to roll it out, they very rarely consider much beyond “ohhh, new and shiny.” I’m sure this will all be functional at some point in the future, but currently it’s causing no end to aggravation. Truly it’s a death by a thousand cuts.

3. Breakfast. This morning breakfast was a “lower carb” everything bagel and precisely two tablespoons of reduced fat cream cheese. Breakfast used to be a proper bagel, slathered on regular cream cheese, a couple of eggs, cheese, and maybe a bowl of cereal. Sure, that’s the diet that has probably killed me, but for starting the day satiated and relatively happy. Look, I know I can’t go back to eating that way, but it doesn’t mean I’m ever going to be fully satisfied with this “reasonably healthful” approach to food.

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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Cat food. For two small mammals who used to live rough outdoors, my cats seem to have an overdeveloped sense of pickiness when it comes to food. I’m trying to get them off their wet kitten food onto wet adult food and it’s…. not going well. The number of “premium” brands and flavors I’ve purchased only to find them rejected is, honestly, embarrassing. I’ll be handing the scores of castoff cans to the local shelter in due time, but it’s still money and effort I’d have rather not spent. I’ve been at this for a month now and haven’t found a single thing they’ll touch.The more expensive the food or better quality the ingredients, the less interested they get. They can’t stay on Pro Plan salmon flavored kitten food forever. Probably. I wonder if they still like the Friskies blend they were getting at the shelter.

Vegetables. Look, I like vegetables. I just don’t like them in the quantity you need to eat them to make them calorically significant. A nice dinner plate has no business being five or six ounces of meat and then 37 metric tons of green beans, asparagus, and squash. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t. And then doing it all without any decent sauces is just adding insult to injury. I’ll do it, but there’s not a power on earth or in heaven that can make me like it.

Warm body duty. This week, the prevailing schedule found me schlepping over to the office one day so that I could remain in compliance with the guidance that “everyone must show up in the office one day each work week.” Whatever. It’s a radical improvement over being there three times each week, but still, it can’t help but feel a little bit contrived when you spend the day doing absolutely nothing that you couldn’t have done at least equally as well from home. I don’t think I’ll ever entirely understand the managerial obsession for having someone performing duty as the designated warm body, at a specific desk, in a specific room. I’ll dance to the tune they call, because they paid for the band, but you’ll never convince me that “just because” is a good reason to do one thing over the alternative.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Management. I spent the better part of a year beating on AFGE 1904 when they were standing between me and a perfectly acceptable new telework agreement. Don’t think for a minute that I won’t give management the same treatment now that they’re the ones dragging their feet. The new policy was signed and went into force on August 4th. We waited while management called a huddle on the 8th and then dropped our updated packets that afternoon… to be told to wait, hold up, management still has some details to work out. Here we are two weeks later with no word on when or if our little office might decide to comply with the approved organization-wide policy… or any explanation for what’s actually holding up the works this time. Management had almost a year of knowing 95% of what was going to be in this new and improved policy, but from where I’m sitting, it appears to have taken them entirely by surprise and without any plan for how it might work when they were told to execute. File that under disappointing, but not in any way surprising. Until they get around to doing the right thing, I’ll continue to take this and every other opportunity to poke the bear.

2. Rice cooker. I’ve been a long time fan of what is commonly called whole grain – white rice, brown rice, barley, oats. It features on the menu a fair number of times a month – even if only to serve as a bed to sop up whatever sauce comes along with the meal. It’s become more prevalent recently… and I finally gave in and purchased a dedicated rice cooker after many years of grousing that a stand alone machine for rice was just an appliance on the kitchen counter that I didn’t need because doing things on the stove top was perfectly fine. It turns out I was absolutely wrong. That stupid rice cooker is a game changer. I’m both annoyed that I was wrong and that it took me literal years to find that out.

3. Failure to read and comprehend. For the last five or so years, whenever I have been in the office, one of my “key duties” has been to push the button to open the door into our office area. To date, I’ve pushed the button approximately 770 times. The damned bell that rings when someone wants into the area is the kind of obnoxious that you end up occasionally hearing it in your sleep. The good news is that (sometimes) procedures change. For instance, we’re no longer supposed to push the button when people want into the room. Now there’s a much more convoluted procedure they need to go through that doesn’t involve a bell in any way. We sent out a memo… and even put up a large sign, neither of which anyone seems to have read, because now we just have a vestibule full of people grousing about not being allowed inside. Expecting anyone to read and follow directions is probably a bridge too far, so I expect we’ll be back to being glorified doormen before long at all. Whatever. It would just be nice, though, if people occasionally did a little reading for comprehension.

Editorial Note: We were, in fact, back to being glorified doormen less than 24 hours after I wrote up this week’s third annoyance. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Donald Trump. Do I honestly even need to add any additional commentary here? The man is a sociopathic threat to the republic. And even if he weren’t, putting forward the argument that West Virginia is the proper venue for his impending trial for attempting to overthrow the government because the jury there would be more “politically unbiased” and demographically balanced and “more diverse” borders on laughable. Or it would if he and his legal team weren’t serious. I have a huge soft spot for West Virginia. I grew up within spitting distance of the south bank of the Potomac, but it’s hard to imagine a more thinly veiled argument for moving his trial. The crimes Mr. Trump is accused of took place in DC and there his trial should stay. Let his lawyers challenge jurors “for cause” rather than shamelessly hoping to find a more politically favorable group of twelve.

Low salt. Before the cardiologist got a chance to yell at me, I’d already started casting out salt. Salad dressings, sauces, just about every recipe I’ve mastered over 20 years, even my beloved giant burrito should be on the forbidden list. So far nothing tastes good. There’s a limit to how much bland stir fry one should be expected to endure. Food should be a joy. Now it’s more something to jam into my face as quickly as possible in hopes I don’t taste much of it. No, it’s not the end of the world and yes, I’ll probably eventually strike on some recipes that aren’t awful, but I’m feeling just a little bit sorry for myself and that might just be the most annoying thing possible.

Management. With the new telework policy signed, management is having entirely predictable trouble with figuring out how to implement this thing they’ve known was coming for almost a year. I’ll illustrate. The policy was published by the executive office on Friday. Wait, wait. Don’t do anything until the directorate has a meeting about it on Tuesday. Fine, you might think. Sit through the Tuesday meeting, get the guidance in person and then send your package in for what should theoretically be simple review and approval as long as you crossed through all the appropriate wickets. No. Now we’re on pause waiting for additional guidance and determinations to be made at the “branch” level, because there’s “more information” to put out and analysis needed.  Maybe more info and analysis is the sort of thing that should have had some academic rigor applied before the thing hit the street instead of piecemealing it out after the fact. Just get on with it. Continuing to bottle this up isn’t winning management any new friends. And their old ones are getting awfully skeptical. If you had almost a year of knowing 90% of what was coming and then seem to be confused and befuddled when it finally lands on your desk, shame on you.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The end of a long-running gag. Forty-four weeks after the new telework policy for supervisors (that was also supposed to be the new telework policy for employees) was published, my employer and AFGE Local 1904 were finally forced into terms by the Federal Service Impasses Panel. In their Solomonic judgement, the best solution was to split the baby. Rest assured I’ll cover that in more detail in a separate post. That said, the inability of the union and my employer to find their ass with two hands and a flashlight has featured in the lead off position of What Annoys Jeff this Week for the last 40 weeks. While I am pleased that a separate government entity has finally forced them to come to terms, I’m just a little bit sad that it’s a regular and recurring crutch I won’t have to lean on week after week. As I have yet to learn how my employer will choose to actually implement this newly imposed policy, though, I can’t help but believe we haven’t seen the last of telework being a prominent topic on Thursdays. 

2. Bad chicken. It’s not unusual for me to load up the crockpot on a telework day and cook up a dish I can eat multiple meals from over the course of the week. What’s helpful in doing that, though, is when the chicken I’m about to use isn’t something that should have been taken off the shelves a week before I bought it. Look, I absolutely blame the retailer here. There’s absolutely no reason poultry should be anywhere near a consumer a full week after its sell by date. That’s just absolutely shitty staff work. It would be easy to think about taking this rancid mess over to the customer service desk, but ultimately, I’m the one who picked it up, looked it over, and mistook the “9” for a 19. In the spirit of personal responsibility, I’m going to proverbially eat the $11 loss and heave the chicken parts over the fence in hopes some of the local wildlife won’t gag from it the way I did when I opened the package.

3. New meds. As part of the initial treatment for my suspected tachycardia, the doctors prescribed a new pill. I know there are a lot of people who object to being on medication of any kind, but I’m a big believer in better living through chemistry. If my issues can be mitigated with a pill, just tell me when to take it. To some degree that’s what they’ve done. One of the inconvenient side effects, though, is that in addition to driving my pulse down, it’s also got me feeling like my brain is operating at about 70% of normal speed. I’m still perfectly competent and can do everything I could do previously, but thinking it through takes a little longer. Even if we assume for the moment that this little white pill is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, I’m absolutely not a fan. Fortunately, I’m told it’s one of those side effects that should wear off once my body is fully accustomed to its new chemical make up. After a month, I’m still finding that some days are better than others, so file it firmly under “we’ll see.” 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 39 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. 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 39 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. Seeking approval. I needed approval on a concept package back on June 7th. That wasn’t my date, randomly pulled from the ether. That was the date echelons higher than reality said they needed it. Being a good staff officer, I did some backwards planning and placed the full package into our fancy automated senior leader review process on the 17th of May. That left 21 days – a full 3 weeks for them to review, object, make changes, or request substitutions. Not surprisingly, three weeks came and went with only radio silence. Two more weeks passed. Now we’re in Day 36 of review and two weeks past the deadline and finally word has trickled down that upon careful review, they want wholesale changes that bare little to no resemblance to what was sent in for perusal. Fine. I’m going to look like a dipshit when I send this along to the people who were expecting it way back in early June. This is the kind of thing that should be dead easy simple, but somehow every year turns into its very own fiasco. I don’t know why I expected this year’s effort to drag things across the finish line to be any different. 

3. Mail order pharmacy. I’ve been getting my meds through mail-order for years. Mostly it works reasonably well. My most recent refill order did not. The website said no, sorry, it can’t be done and referred me over to the 800 “customer service” phone number. I gamely called customer service, to be notified by the automated system that my request had been received and was processing. So now I have one automated system saying a refill is too hard to do and one saying that everything is good to go. It’s hard not to appreciate that level of consistency. The actual human person I was able to talk to after repeatedly screaming “representative” at the phone assured me that they order had been processed and would be in the outgoing mail by the end of the day. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

A message from the union…

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Well, well, well. At long last, the workforce received an email today from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 1904. Therein they officially provided notification that they had arrived at an impasse with management and the future of telework is in the hands of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (FSIP).

The actual point of this email was asking us to respond to a survey covering our thoughts on telework. Wait. What? I’m not a fancy, big city union official, but getting a sense of the workforce’s opinion feels like something you might have wanted to gauge before you decided to hold the new policy hostage for a year. The sticking point, it turns out, is management’s position of wanting personnel on site two days a week versus the union’s position of only wanting two days per pay period (i.e., one day per week). See, the thing is, either one of these proposals is miles better than the agreement we’re currently working under which requires us to be on site three days a week.

The fact that this survey is being launched almost a year after opening negotiations tells me pretty much everything I need to know about how they’re doing business over there at Local 1904. It’s now been 36 weeks since the updated supervisory telework policy went into effect. I’ve read it cover to cover and can’t for the life of me find anything in there that is so objectionable that it should hold up negotiation for a year. It’s a perfectly serviceable policy that significantly increases telework opportunities over and above the policy that’s now in place for non-supervisors. Frankly as an employee I’m embarrassed that this has somehow become an issue that rises to the level of needing to engage with the Federal Services Impasse Panel.

I’ll never understand whatever “logic” is behind the elected leaders operating Local 1904 deciding to let a good agreement now stand in the way of the perceived perfect agreement at some unknown point in the future. I don’t know any of them personally, so I can’t say they’re ragingly incompetent… but after seeing in black and white why we are where we are, you’ve got a lot of ground to cover to convince me they’re not.