Tag Archives: meetings

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Last minute. It’s safe to say that we all know my feelings about almost every meeting I’ve ever sat through. For those who don’t, I generally find them to be enormous time-sucks from which there is no hope of escape. They’re the black hole of the “professional work environment” and I’m all for canceling them as often as possible. All that I ask is that when they are cancelled, the meeting organizer should probably give a fellow enough notice so that he doesn’t walk halfway across the county to find himself turned away at the door. Giving sufficient notice of changed plans is just good form, really. Although I’m glad to have the unscheduled free time in the middle of my calendar and all, a few minutes’ notice would by me have been appreciated.

2. Contempt of Congress. The fact that the House of Representatives has the unmitigated audacity to hold anyone in Contempt of Congress for any reason whatsoever is simply stunning. Now I think Lois Lerner and the IRS were probably up to some dirty tricks – one doesn’t tend to invoke the 5th Amendment when there are no skeletons lurking about – but I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t consider Congress a particularly honest broker when it comes to issues of fact. The truth is, they’d probably have to level charges at most of the country if they wanted to root out everyone who currently holds Congress in contempt. God knows I find them the most contemptible band of thieves and charlatans currently not serving time in prison.

3. Tradition. The older I get, the worse “because it’s tradition” sounds as a justification for doing anything. I was always under the impression that most people become more traditional as they get older. I seem to be veering in the opposite direction. I’m never going to be a sandal-wearing hippy, but I do seem to take increasing amounts of joy from rousing rabble as often as possible. Maybe it’s just my inner cynic finding his voice and preparing for a long career as a grumpy old sonofabitch… but if you can’t give me a better reason to do something that “it’s tradition,” I’m afraid I’m probably going to invite you to bugger off at the first available opportunity.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The inconveniences of middle age. Knee problems. Back problems. Shoulder problems. Wrist problems. Mercifully they all come and go, but I know deep down they’re all there lurking under the surface and waiting for the perfect excuse to put in appearance. I’m really beginning to hate the mornings when I wake up with a sore “something” for no apparent reason. I can see an injury if I were out toting, lifting, or hauling, but an injury from just laying there for six hours? Yeah. That happens more often than I want to admit. It’s definitely a problem I didn’t have 20 years ago… and it makes me a little nervous about what it’s going to feel like 20 years from now.

2. Tharp’s Law. For me, a full work week consists of 40 hours on the job. Now generally, I’m at my most productive – that is, actually generating usable products and service – when I’m actually at my desk doing a little bit of what we like to call analysis. Reading, writing, distilling information from multiple sources into a consistent and coherent thread of an idea. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. When I’m not so productive is when the scale tips and I’m spending more than half my time preparing for, attending, or writing summaries of meetings. This week, it’s been well over half the available time. Therefore, the fundamental truth of Tharp’s Law is as follows: For every hour spent prepping for, attending, or summarizing a meeting, you’ve lost an hour of productive time that you’re never going to get back and in which actual work will never occur. It’s a simple 1:1 ratio and it’s constant as the speed of light (in a vacuum).

3. Third things. Sometimes there are no third things because the first two are exhausting and one of the two makes your wrist hurt.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Drivers who think they can, but really can’t. Look, I like speed. I have the tickets and warnings to prove it. Generally I feel as safe with my own driving at 85 as I do at 25. Sadly, I can’t say I have the same level of confidence in everyone else on the road… especially the wannabe rice racer who cut the turn just a little to wide this morning and earned himself some first hand experience in how understeering is every bit as bad as oversteering . He should probably be allowed to get some kind of refund from his driving instructor. On the other hand, I have now personally seen the look of abject horror someone in a Honda Civic gets on their face when they find themselves unexpectedly traveling in the wrong lane with a Tundra bearing down on them. Hopefully he didn’t spend too long in the ditch, because that’s where he was headed when I rounded the next turn and rolled on with my morning commute.

2. Breaking my own rules. I think we all know that I hate speakerphones in an open-bay office setting. It really serves no purpose other than ratcheting up the noise level in a room that already has the acoustics of a train station. I was forced into a position of breaking my own rules today by participating in part of a call using a speakerphone in a “wide open” room. I was mortified, but it happened so fast that I couldn’t stop it. I have no other excuses. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

3. Too much of a bad thing. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: I don’t think I’ve ever attended a meeting that I didn’t want to escape from within five minutes of it starting. Sadly, my opinion doesn’t seem to carry much weight when such decisions are made. Which is how you end up with so many meetings scheduled between now and the end of the month that the “September Meeting to Discuss Issue X” has to be moved into October. You might think that means the “October Meeting to Discuss Issue X” would get cancelled. You would be wrong, because what it really means is that we should just go ahead and have two “Meetings to Discuss Issue X” in October. So as soon as the ten pre-meeting meetings for the October “September Meeting” are finished, we get to immediately start on pre-meetings for the October “October Meeting.” Clearly common sense, logic, and reason have no place here.

Half and half…

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As part of the Magical Mystery Furlough of 2013, half the people stay home on Mondays and the other half stay home on Fridays. It’s one of those ideas that sound better in theory than it operates in practice. The logic was that inflicting the furlough on two separate days would mean that offices were open and “servicing the customer” during normal business hours. Like I said, it sounds fine in theory. I mean what customer doesn’t enjoy a good servicing, no?

What’s really happened, of course, is both Monday and Friday have become bureaucratic dead zones – the lights are on, there are a few people around, and we can officially say that Quadragonthe office is “open.” Just don’t try to get much done because odds are at least half of the people you need to talk to are scheduled out on the opposite Furlough Day. It’s hard to believe no one at echelons higher than reality saw that coming.

What we end up with is a functional work week that takes place only on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday because that’s the only time most people make it to the office nowadays. That’s not taking into account the people who are out in the normal course of using vacation days or sick time. Since no meetings were harmed in carrying out this furlough, anything that was usually scheduled on Monday or Friday now takes place on one of the other days too. That’s not even accounting for the meetings we now have to have to talk specifically about the impacts of sequestration and the furlough. Far be it for me to criticize, but let’s just say productive time is becoming an increasingly rare commodity.

The lights are on. We can say we’re still open five days a week. But what’s been lost in productivity is far greater than the sum of everyone’s collective 20% reduction of hours. Maybe this whole asinine exercise will save Uncle a penny or two on the dollar, but what he’s losing in the productivity, morale, dedication, and respect of his employees will cost him a shitload more than that in the long run.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Responsibility. As a grown ass adult, you have certain responsibilities. One of those is to be where you’re supposed to be, when you’re supposed to be there. That goes double if you’re going to try passing yourself off as a professional. Yep, sometimes that means you’re going to have to play hurt, or when you have other things on your mind. It’s the way of the world, so suck it up, Rolling Stone Bomberbuttercup. When you’re the only one impacted by your piss poor decision making skills, I say do what you want and God bless… but when your decision make someone else deal with the consequences, you’re pretty much just as asshat.

2. Rolling Stone. From the perspective of having any tact or class as an organization, Rolling Stone has basically let the world know for sure that they have none. Look, if they want to run a magazine with the Boston bomber on the cover, they’re perfectly within their rights. All I’d ask is that don’t hide behind the cover of being responsible journalists tackling a hard story head on. If they came out and admitted they put that douchenozzle on the cover because they thought they were going to sell a gagillion copies of it, I’d say thanks for the truth and God bless. They’d be right and it would collectively be our fault because we Americans will buy up those magazines by the bushel basket. The only reason that smug bastard is looking out at us from the newsstand is because we’ll eat it up and pay for the privilege. Rolling Stone knows that… and we live through another example of the citizens of this fine country not having the common sense God gave a goose.

3. Standing by to stand by. I think by now we all know how I feel about meetings in general. In a decade’s worth of work, I’ve attended less than a handful that left me feeling like they were time well spent. That’s situation normal in the bureaucracy. What really grinds my gears, though is the mentality that the average drone has nothing better to do than sit around and wait for the next meeting to start. Don’t schedule something at 11:00, then slip it to 11:30, then pass the word to wait and see, and to be prepared to stand by to stand by until further notice. In a world of 32 hour work weeks and 80% pay, the least we can expect is that the limited time we do have on the clock is respected and used productively. Or maybe that’s a bridge too far.

Saved this space (for no apparent reason)…

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We had a “surprise” town hall meeting at work today and I was saving this space for some sharp and scathing commentary on what I assumed would be breaking the official silence on sequestration, fiscal uncertainty, and the impending budget cuts to our little slice of paradise here at the top of the Bay. Instead we got the typical once a quarter, “you’re doing great work” speech and a few other pearls of wisdom. In the absence of crippling financial news, I find that I don’t really have anything to say.

Waiting to find out what the world will look like a month from now every time someone calls a meeting is a tough way to live… especially in a place that loves meetings as much as we do. So yeah, this space stayed blank for no apparent reason today… but there other shoe is out there somewhere. It’s lurking, and waiting. Waiting to fall out of the sky to pummel some poor dumb group of unsuspecting employees that had the misfortune of thinking that going to work for their Uncle seemed like a good idea at the time. Boy are they gonna be surprised.

I’m glad that for today at least it wasn’t me… but since every silver lining has a dark cloud around it, it’s pretty much left me with nothing interesting to say tonight.

No surprises…

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In the two and a half years that I’ve been writing here at WordPress, I’d hate to guess how many times I’ve “admitted” to being a creature of habit. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t at least once a month. Maybe that in itself has gotten to be a bit of a habit, but that’s not really the point. Because I’m a creature of habit, I like having a schedule. I like knowing that the alarm clock is going to ring at the same time every day, that lunch is going to happen at more or less the same time every morning, and that I’m going to walk out the door at more or less the same time every afternoon. When some unforeseen circumstance throws that schedule out of whack, I tend to get vicerally annoyed by it, even when it doesn’t show. I’m sure there’s some deep seated psychological reason for it, but I’ve never been curious enough to try figuring it out. Making sure things go according to plan always seemed like a better use of time to me.

Of course when you’re a simple cog in the machine, most of your schedule ends up really being decided by someone or something well beyond your own sphere of control. When that happens, there’s really not much more to to but grin and bear it no matter how much you’re seething in the inside. Not that I would ever seethe over some minor detail like that, of course. I’m a pretty simple guy to motivate. Keep me fed, watered, and on schedule and all is right with the world. Start dinking with any one of the three and I can get downright surly. I should be enjoying what’s left of this Sunday afternoon, but in the back of my mind I’m already vaguely annoyed by tomorrow’s schedule being shot to hell before I ever leave the house. Around 4:00 tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to need someone to remind me that snarky comments and senior staff rarely go well together. I should probably just consider myself lucky that this kind of blown schedule is a rarity… but I’ll leave that for the glass-half-full types. Putting things in perspective seems to make them feel better. Strangely enough, bitching about it online seems to have the same effect on me.

Endless days…

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Some days are busy and you spend them haplessly dashing between floors and buildings just to make sure you’re not late for the next round of meetings. Other days have the distinct feeling that you’re working in a funeral home and that someone will yell at you if you make a noise louder than scratching pen against paper. The thing that these two distinctly different types of day have in common: They both suck. And strangely enough they both suck for more or less the same reason.

On one hand, meetings blur together leaving you in a hopeless, glaze-eyed torpor incapable of doing much more than maintaining respiration. On the other, the day crawls by at something approximating the average groundspeed of road kill. In both cases, the result is suck. Suck and days that drag impossibly slowly. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but I’m fairly certain I’ve actually watched clocks run backwards under both sets of circumstances.

No one knows that work is just another dirty four letter word better than I do, but really, all I’m looking for is a couple of days a week that don’t feel like they’re running in slow motion. That’s probably more than I can realistically hope to see any time soon. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my cube adjusting the time circuits.

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.