Tag Archives: oath

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 28 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. So, we’re still grinding along 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 28 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. Reading. Hey, it’s fundamental! I don’t mean that people need to sit down and read 1000-page doorstops (though I suspect life would be altogether better if they did). There are very few things that agitate the living shit out of me more, especially this time of year, than people who have been given all the pertinent information – via email, or slides, or instant messenger – but who come back a day or a week later and ask the same goddamned question. Asked and answered, your honor. Read the SITREP. Read the briefing. Read the email. I promise the answers you seek are already in there. It has the added benefit of not swamping me in endless discussions of things that should already be common knowledge.

3. Leakers. The press likes to call them “leakers.” It’s polite. It’s inoffensive. By contrast, I prefer to think of them as weak-minded, cowardly treason dogs. Delivering up classified documents to the media or the internet or your very best friend in the world is an act of treason. Full stop. They took an oath, the same one I did, to “support and defend.” If there are issues, there are certainly avenues we can all avail ourselves of to bring them to light. In the last extreme, we are entitled to resign in protest and ring public alarm bells. What a leaker, a traitorous bastard, does, is substitute his or her wisdom for that of everyone else – taking it upon themselves to be the arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be in the public domain. In doing so they betray their nation and worse, they betray their oath. They’re worthy of nothing but our scorn and the deepest, darkest hole the US Bureau of Prisons or United States Disciplinary Barracks has to offer.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Breaking my word. I swore a strong oath many years ago when paywalls erupted across internet news sites. It would be a cold day in Hell before I started paying for something that was available for free. I could get along just fine with Drudge and Google News and the devil could have the rest. Of course it helped that the Washington Post, political rag though it may be, remained free to those punching in from a government IP address. After years of getting by, though, I’m going to admit here before God, the internet, and everyone that I’ve gone back on my word and conceded that based on my evolving news consumption habits a subscription was inevitable and probably past due. So, now that I’m an oathbreaker anyway, at least I’m free to enjoy the full Sunday edition of The Times of London without running into their ridiculous 2 article a week limit.  In retrospect £5.00 a month doesn’t feel completely usurious even if does still feel just a little bit wrong. And so my transition to a curmudgeonly old Englishman continues apace.

2. Logistics. It turns out one of the big logistics companies (I’m looking at you here UPS) is currently having a challenging time differentiating between 03 and 13 and delivering what seems to be half of what my neighbor is ordering for Christmas to my front door. I’m friendly enough with my neighbors that I make sure theirs ends up in the right place, but it feels like something the average person really shouldn’t need to do if they’re paying for shipping to their home versus paying to have something shipped vaguely into their neighborhood. The internet is full of apologists urging everyone to remember that this is a very busy time of year for shippers and that “hey, mistakes happen.” I’m sure they do, but the same one should rarely happen more than once.  Of course I’m a simple old subject matter expert in distribution logistics, supply, and transportation so what the hell could I possibly know on the subject anyway.

3. Things are worse now. The talking heads of the media and the man on the street both seem equally willing to jump into a discussion that “<insert any topic here> is worse now that its ever been before.” It may be true of an individual issue or two, but overall I just find that the sentiment shows an overall lack of academic rigor and a woeful knowledge of basic history. The Civil War, the Spanish Flu of 1918, pretty much the entire decade of the 1970s, an global total war from 1939-1945, and Members of Congress physically fighting each other on the House floor are all things that happened in the not particularly distant past. Today, what “things are worse now,” mostly seems to focus on the fact that someone may have said something mean to somebody else. In the great sweep of human history asserting now that we’re living now in the worst of all possible times makes you sound like an idiot.