Tag Archives: meeting

Should have known…

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I should have known what kind of day it was going to be when I woke up 20 minutes before the 5AM alarm – too early to be awake, even by my standards, but not nearly enough time to make going back to sleep a worthwhile endeavor. I should have known then that it was a sign to pick up the phone, make a call, and burn off a sick day. But instead I pressed on with the morning routine.

The day fired one last warning shot across my bow when I got to the office and was met with a message that someone had sent me what they thought was a very important email and they needed to talk to me about its contents immediately (or when they got in at 8:30, whichever came first). Of course the problem there was they might have sent the email, but as we all know communication only happens when information is transferred between the sender and the receiver. Whatever it was their very important email said, it had been lost in transition from their mailbox to mine. As a rule I try not to comment on documents I haven’t had a chance to read, so the 8:30 phone call was, shall we say, a bit brief. I really, really should have pulled the plug at that point and called it a day.

Instead, in the middle of trying to prepare for a meeting (with the person whose email finally showed up around 9:00), I was then shanghaied into seat filler duty for 75 minutes. That led into a 30 minute pause before the next hour long meeting, which led to 20 minutes of frantic post-meeting emailing, which begat the next 75 minute long meeting. By now it’s 2:30 and that’s when I finally sat down to shove a sandwich and a few handfuls of crackers into my face today. That may be perfectly reasonable for some people, but tends to be a little late when your official day started at 7:30 and you’re legally obligated to leave the premises at 4:00.

I at least got to leave on time this afternoon. As I understand it “on time” was just a few minutes ahead of the last violent shitstorm of the day. I missed getting covered in that one by the skin of my teeth. Unfortunately, now I know what’s sitting there waiting for me when I wander in tomorrow. I was definitely a happier human being before I knew what to expect, but I’ve been at this game long enough that I should have known better than to have any expectations at all.

Expectations. That’s where the day really started skidding off the rails. Yeah, I really should have known better.

A conference by any other name…

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Given the “constrained fiscal environment” and fuss made over the excesses at any number of government sponsored conferences over the last four years, the very word “Conference” has been formally stricken from official usage. No matter what you’re doing, no matter how much it smells, looks, and acts like a conference you can never, ever call it that for fear of bringing down the wrath of the anointed – and even worse, the attention of the Washington Post.

Despite the official prohibition against staging (and largely against even attending) conferences, there sure are a hell of a lot of people fully engaged in planning for and attending workshops, councils, boards, reviews, forums, and very large group meetings. Under other circumstances, they’d be called conferences and no one would bat an eyelash, but great pains are taken to make sure they’re called anything but what they are.

Now, I’m just a cog in this great machine, but when I see our most senior leaders sitting before Congress begging for permission to cut pay and benefits while they’re still allowing grip and grin sessions and a hundred other boondoggles to happen with a nod and a wink, well, you can rack up mine as a vote of no confidence. There’s plenty of waste in this vast bureaucracy… and most of those on the inside would be happy to point it out if anyone were going to take a serious swing at eliminating it. But while we’re still in the business of wasting time and money on conferences by any other name, citing payroll as a major cost driver just doesn’t pass the common sense test.

Thank God we apparently never grade that test.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Banker’s Hours. Let me start off by saying I general like my credit union, except for one little thing. When they upgraded their website a few weeks ago they required everyone to create about a dozen “challenge” question/answer combinations for security purposes. Fine. Good. Whatever. The problem, of course, is that I apparently don’t have a clue what the answer to at least one of those questions is. And that’s the one I got on Sunday morning when I logged in to pay the week’s bills. Instead of asking me an alternate question from the list, the site promptly locks me out and tells me to call customer support. Which is also fine. Except there is no customer support at 7AM Sunday morning (or any other time on Sunday for that matter). I appreciate network security, but it would be nice if it weren’t so secure that I can’t get into my own account. Like the universe, it’s my fondest hope that they will find a way to seek balance.

2. Scheduling. I get that schedules are hectic. The higher you get on the food chain, the more hectic they are. If I can offer any bit of unsolicited advice, it’s that out of respect for the host of people gathered together awaiting your presence rescheduling a meeting thrice before settling in a final-ish time is just bad form. If your schedule is so jam packed with very important things to do, maybe you could go ahead and delegate to an underling or just put it in a concisely worded memo. When you make it impossible for anyone else to schedule something because of inevitable changes, where you could have looked knowing and decisive, you look like a tool. Don’t look like a tool.

3. Going overboard. I set a lot of posts about car seats, the armada of safety gear that today’s kids are expected to wear out in public, and generally how fragile small humans apparently have become in the second decade of the new millennium. In that spirit, I’d urge all of us to remember that we grew up in a simpler time. For me, riding in the open bed of a pickup truck was a rite of summer. I clocked more time behind the wheel on the back roads at age 13 than most kids do today by the time they’re eligible for the draft. None of us wore bike helmets, knee pads, or “safety gear” thicker than denim. It wasn’t uncommon for us to run unsupervised through the woods using pointy sticks as guns and rocks as grenades. I broke my arm three times and still have the scrapes and scars of childhood to mark the memories. I survived. So did we all… and in a world that surrounded it’s children in far less bubble wrap.

Space Available…

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When you go to the trouble of moving multiple thousands of people 150 miles down I-95 and spend a few billion dollars kitting them out with new buildings all around, one of the things I’d think you’d do is make sure to have more than two rooms available in which to hold a meeting. Now usually, I’d rail against the need for meetings at all, but given the nature of my employer, they’re simply a fact of life to be endured. Therefore, it doesn’t feel like a stretch expecting that there would at the very least be a room available somewhere (that doesn’t require a 15 minute drive, a cross-country hike, or requisitioning a boat) for those moments when you need to put more than five people in the same room. God forbid you need to do something crazy like connect to the internet or join a teleconference or video feed being piped in from another location. That’s all apparently several bridges too far.

Instead of being able to use one of two such rooms within steps of where I actually work, I got to spend the vast majority of the morning making desperate phone calls and begging other offices to free up space for us to use… out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than for actual compensation in any form. So here’s tonight’s helpful tip from your kindly Uncle Jeff: If you ever find yourself working for a big, bureaucratic organization and in the position of deciding how many fully-equipped meeting rooms you’re going to need, go ahead and take you initial estimate, multiple it by three, and then add at least two just as safety stock. That’ll get you close to the number of rooms you’re actually going to need… because God knows the fate of the free world depends largely on your ability to find an empty room on no notice for whatever wild-assed meeting someone wants to have on the spur of the moment.

And it’s only Tuesday. Sigh.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Strike 3. With the USPS fighting for it’s life, one of the simple issues they could work on is get things from Point A to Point B when they say they will. The last three items I ordered online that were shipped through USPS all encountered inexplicable delays. Maybe I’m just finicky, but when I pay for second day arrival, I generally expect to get my items two days after I ordered them. It doesn’t feel like that’s an unreasonable expectation. I know it’s a trifle, but logging in to a website a day or two after the “guaranteed arrival date” and still wondering where the hell my package is is just infuriating and just one of the many reasons I don’t use USPS when I have an option. On time and to standard; that’s the way to build a happy customer based. What USPS is doing is pretty much just telling me that they’ve given up.

2. Mission: Impossible. When the assigned mission is to give a 3 minute presentation about what you’re working on, that’s what you should do. Actually, you should wrap it up in two minutes, thirty seconds to allow a moment for questions, but that’s not the point. What you shouldn’t do is ramble all over the damned world while everyone’s eyes glaze over in benign indifference. Remember, it’s called a “brief” for a reason.

3. Dropped calls. Cell phones drop calls. Since they’re magically connecting to far away towers without the benefit of wires, I’ve learned to accept that limitation. When using a land line to connect to another land line, there’s just no justification for dropping the call not once, not twice, not thrice, but four effing times in the span of 35 minutes. After attempt four failed to take hold for more than three minutes, I officially lost interest in whatever was being said. If it appeared to anyone that I had thrown my hands in the air like I just don’t care, well, there’s a good reason it looked like that.

Time thief…

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just-say-no-400x288Meetings are an enormous time suck from which there appears to be no hope of escape if you want to consider yourself a professional. I know I wrote a whole chapter about it in my Guide for New Employees, but it’s one of those truths that just needs to be said more often and by more people. I have to think that a No Meetings campaign would find far more traction than the ill-fated “Just Say No” to drugs effort. I mean after all, there’s a subset of people out there who actually want drugs (and want to sell them), but I simply can’t fathom a world where someone rises from their bed in the early hours of the morning and lusts heartily after their first meeting of the day… and then getting their mid-day meeting fix, maybe taking a teleconference during lunch, and whiling away the late afternoon hours with just one more team huddle. Surely that’s madness and we must bind ourselves together to help eliminate this scourge before it saps our productivity and destroys the next generation of budding professionals.

The reverse butterfly effect…

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The butterfly effect is usually synopsized as something like “When a butterfly flaps its wings in Shanghai, a hurricane washes up in Miami.” I’m not a fancy big city mathematician, but it seems plausible that if you make one little change in a complex system, downstream events can be radically altered by that original small shift. It doesn’t take a great leap of logic to accept that it at least seems like a reasonable argument.

The fun thing is that sometimes the butterfly effect also works in reverse. Take for instance the meeting you have scheduled for Wednesday afternoon that suddenly gets cancelled. The butterfly flaps its wings and presto the entire day on Monday suddenly becomes gloriously meeting-free. If she just beats those gossamer wings a few more times, this week could be looking up.

Sure, I’m bending logic nearly to the breaking point to make that case, but it feels good. And since I’m a blogger and not a professional chaos theorizer, I’m going to go with it.

47 minutes…

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In college, the universal rule, recognized across the known world, was if the professor didn’t show up 15 minutes after the start of class, you were free to go. Sadly, the same is not true of “professional work environments.” As a professional, you’ll be expected to sit quietly and wait for whoever called the meeting regardless of how long after the scheduled start time they actually show up. One might be tempted to think that their time would be better spent in going back to their desk and getting some actual work done, but unfortunately one would be wrong.

I set my own personal best (worst?) record today in the grand game of sitting around waiting for someone to show up. The meeting started 47 minutes after it was originally scheduled. Which is bad enough. But then of course it lasted almost an hour longer than it should have. Read that again. I’m not saying it ran for an hour after it started. I’m saying it lasted the “original” hour it was scheduled (albeit starting 47 minutes late) and then kept on running for almost an additional hour. All told, I spent just shy of 3 hours on a meeting that was supposed to be done and over in less than one.

It’s days like today that test my increasingly limited powers of keeping my big mouth shut. I’ve been around long enough that most ridiculous things seem like perfectly reasonable courses of action, but there’s something about leaving dozens of people to cool their heels because one can’t get from Point A to Point B in a timely manner apparently pushed all my buttons at once.

On deciding not to be a blue falcon…

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One of the best things about working for Uncle is the cornucopia of new and interesting words that have entered my lexicon. That’s particularly apt this morning, when I’m looking out as far as the floodlights will let me and seeing wall to wall blue-falconsnow, wind blowing like a mother, and a temperature hovering at 16 degrees. It’s the operative definition of “not fit for man nor beast.”

Wisely, my employer opted to pull the trigger on a 4-hour delay. Under normal circumstances, for someone who maybe lived closer to the office, that would be a good thing. For me, with a 50+ mile round trip, going in for four hours in weather like this basically means I’ll spend more time commuting than I will actually at work. Logic would dictate that I just go ahead and take four hours of vacation time and call it a day. Of course logic has no place in government service, so it’s not that simple.

Punching out today would basically make me a blue falcon, leaving whoever was unfortunate enough to show up at their desk to cover a spectacularly useless meeting that I’m supposed to endure this afternoon. I already inflicted that fate on people while I was off for Christmas, but since it was scheduled in advance, it feels less falcon-ish somehow.

Once the sun comes up, I’ll get after the shoveling, cleaning off the truck, and give it the ol’ Frostburg try at getting to the office somewhere in the general vicinity of on time today. I’ve decided not to be a blue falcon. Because I clearly lack good decision-making skills.

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.