Tag Archives: office

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Headsets. Due to some obscure security regulations that are probably being misinterpreted anyway, one of the most dysfunctional parts of spending my day in cubicle hell is being tethered to my computer with some kind of low-budget call center headset that only covers one ear and features a snazzy swing down boom mic. It’s exactly the kind of thing I wore for the three days I was a telemarketer in 1999. It’s bad enough with the fluorescent lighting and no windows, but being required to listen to your music or podcasts in one ear and the random conversations, phone calls, and background office noise of all your colleagues in the other really just adds insult to injury.

2. Meetings. The rise of Teams and other “collaboration tools” during the Great Plague era has made it entirely too easy for people to call a meeting when, in fact, no meeting needs to take place. Instead of a three- or four-line email, though, what we end up with is a calendar populated with 30 minute blocks of mostly wasted time. I earnestly implore you, if you are considering sending out a meeting request, to stop and really consider whether a simple email would convey the same message without carving big chunks out of everyone’s day.

3. Options. Donald Trump is sitting through the first of what will likely be many criminal trials he faces as a cast out one term president. Joe Biden dodders his way through every TV appearance and barely gives the impression of being awake. In a spectacular “hold my beer” moment, Robert Kennedy Jr. enters the chat with a worm eating his brain. These are the major contenders in 2024 for the highest office under the United States Constitution. In this country of approaching 300 million people, these are the best we could find to serve as our elected leader. If this is honestly the best we can do, maybe we really should just call it a day, because the republic has already failed and we’re just going through the motions.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Morale building activities. Our office seems determined that it’s going to lick the morale problem by doubling down on potluck lunches and after-hours team building events. I invite you to piss directly off with that nonsense. If you want me to be part of a team activity, schedule that mess while you’re paying me for it. And damned well don’t expect me to cook (or inflict my colleagues cooking on me) in order to participate. Why the hell we can’t just take an hour or two, get out of the office, and patronize a local restaurant like normal people is completely beyond me. It’s all a hard pass for me. If that reinforces my rep as a non-joiner or problematic player of team ball, so be it.

2. Late night interruptions. The number of times each week I wake up at two in the morning to take a piss, spend an hour flopping around not sleeping, and then drifting off for an hour or so of absolutely ridiculous dreams before waking up to start the day bleary eyed and disgruntled is something of a too regular occurrence. It’s not every night, which would drive me batshit crazy, but it’s easily once every week or two and that makes it more than regular enough to be obnoxious. There’s a whole level of frustration knowing you can’t hold your water or fall back asleep on command the way you used to. Most other nights I still manage to sleep like a baby, but not knowing whether the night will be restful or ridiculous is just short of infuriating.

3. Protests. I’ve always looked slightly askance at protestors as a group. Clogging up sidewalks, roadways, or parks and making a spectacle / nuisance of yourself never seemed like a good way to make any kind of point. Once I started working in DC, I developed an even lower opinion of the average “protestor.” Inconveniencing me as I’m just trying to go about my daily activities is, I promise you, no way to ever convince me of the virtue of your cause. In any case, any time I see news of protestors getting all froggy – whether it’s on city streets or on college campuses – I just get preemptively annoyed and assume they’re chanting and occupying whatever for some cause I’ll inevitably think is foolish. 

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.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Stalled. My quest for more weight loss has been stalled for almost two weeks. I haven’t made any changes from what has worked consistently for the last nine months, but I’ve spent the last 14 days losing and gaining the same pound and a half. I’m trying to be a good sport and going after the 200-pound goal the docs seem to want me to hit… But I’m already sitting at an 1800 calorie a day hard limit and frankly I like eating too much to go restricting that much further. I should also note that I’m prepared to garrote the first person who chimes in and says “you just need to exercise more.” Bugger directly off.

2. New computer day. Wednesday was new computer day at the office. Under most circumstances I’d say that was great. Except the new computer they’ve decided on is a desktop that will live permanently at the office while we take out laptops to live permanently at home. Instead of two work computers it means I now am signed for three separate pieces of equipment. It also means that in order to work between home and the office, I’ll be relying on “the cloud” properly being able to host two decades worth of work product instead of it living on my local drive and simply being backed up to the cloud. I’m not a fan of this for a lot of reasons. Color me curious to see what the response is going to be when our elderly laptops start dying off and someone has to be on the hook for machines that live at home being out of sight and out of mind.

3. Some weeks are busier than others. This one has felt like every time I knock something off my list of things to do, two or three more rise up to take its place. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it has certainly been obnoxious as this trend managed to cross all lines between work and home. It’s the first April in a very long time that hasn’t been entirely consumed by working as an advanced party and event planner. It seems that finally having chucked that one large thing over the side, maybe it’s just a natural effect that 57 small things have come along to eat up that white space on my calendar. 

And we’re back…

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After Christmas I took a little break. I was feeling legitimately good for the first time in months, there was a lot going on. Honestly, I just didn’t have the normal burning desire to sit down and get anything off my chest.

Today, however, I spent my first day back at work working in the actual office. Rest assured after eight hours as a standard office drone, I’m cured of not having anything to say. I won’t say it’s a great routine, but it is a routine and I appreciate it for that if nothing else.

Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve all been led to believe that the purpose of vacation is to enjoy some downtime and come back rejuvenated. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, as I don’t think I’ve ever come back from a vacation re-energized and excited to be back to work. At this stage it’s safe to say that’s just not who I’m ever going to be as a person.

But back I am. Because the animals are expensive and I’d well and truly suck at living under a bridge or sleeping on the nearest park bench. There are, if nothing else, standards to be maintained.

I won’t say the day was entirely unproductive, though. I did spend an unreasonable amount of time today plugging in all the federal holidays for 2024 into Outlook and starting to plot how to maximize my days off for this new year. So I’ve got that going for me.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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In the best spirit of the Christmas season, I feel like I should throw out something that doesn’t annoy me this week first. That’s the fact that today marks the Winter solstice for 2023. We’ll now begin seeing incrementally more daylight each day. If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.

However, it wouldn’t be Thursday if there weren’t at least a few items to call out as annoyances for the week. As my ultra-long Christmas weekend is now underway, though, I’ve shaved it down to two instead of the normal three and present them to you in no particular order.

1. Calculations. I usually do a reasonably good job at calculating how much leave I have to “use or lose” at the end of the calendar year. I base all of my other leave planning around needing 64 hours to cover the week of Christmas and the week of New Year. The fancy pants automated leave tracker, though, is telling me I’ve unexpectedly miscalculated by approximately 10 and one half hours. If it’s right, it means I could be leaving more than a day’s vacation on the table. If I’m right, it means my use or lose balance for next year will be 10+ hours short. I think I’m right… but not with enough conviction to take a risk of losing vacation time. So I guess my vacation is starting mid-afternoon Thursday instead of at close of business Friday. That part isn’t actually annoying, but having such a large variance in my normally precise end-of-year calculation is, at a minimum, perplexing.

2. One more thing. I’ll never understand the mad rush of some people at this time of year to get just one more thing done before turning out the lights for the year. As I’m plodding through the week, I couldn’t help but notice that there are at least seven separate actions sitting in our tracking database with deadlines between Christmas and New Years. Someone at echelons higher than reality actually looked at those things and thought, “Yup, we absolutely have to have an answer on these absolute nothings before the dawn of 2024.” That’s just the stuff that people have bothered putting in the “official” tracker. The week will be replete with unofficial asks as well. Look, if it’s something involving a hazard to life and property, sure, the holidays are just another few days of the year… but if it’s just standard requests for information, maybe stow it for a week or two until someone might actually give a shit. Otherwise you’ll get what you get… and I promise you it won’t be much.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Plumbing. My well’s pressure tank has had a slow drip for 18 months now. It’s one of those projects that I knew needed to be taken care of, but there was always something more pressing. Every couple of weeks I’d go down and empty the coffee can that was sufficient to contain the waters. A couple of times recently I found my coffee can full to running over after just a week. Since it’s the kind of thing that feels like it would inevitably let go during Christmas and facilitate a real crisis, I finally called out my usual plumbing outfit to make the fix – the ones who are good and fast, but absolutely not cheap. The thing about home ownership that no one tells you is that it feels like 90% spending money on stuff that’s entirely essential, but in no way is a joy to purchase. Anyway, I’ve got a brand new obscenely expensive pressure tank and associated couplings installed now so I guess that’s my Christmas present to myself.

2. Slack time. It’s not that I hate having slack time. Not really. Slack time through the week is very welcome, mostly. On telework days, there’s always more than enough alternatives to keep my attention until the next Thing To Do shows up in my inbox. When it falls on an “in office” day, though, it does make the time stuck in fluorescent hell drag on indefinitely. I suppose slack is just an occupational hazard this time of year… and with only two office days between now and the end of the year, the annual hazard will fix itself before long. Until then, I suppose the trick remains to look busy enough to avoid falling victim to anyone walking around with end-of-the-calendar-year good ideas.

3. Slowly unwinding. I know I should be happy it seems to be working, but I’m absolutely tired of the pace at which the anxiety causing metformin is slowly working its way out of my system. Six full days from my last dose and I continue to feel slightly less prone to panic as each of those days slips past. That’s not to say that there aren’t still a few bad minutes and hours in the mix. Still, we seem to have crossed some kind of threshold where there’s more good than bad… and that hasn’t been true in a number of weeks. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I’m just a bit put out that it wasn’t the instantaneous relief I really would have liked to receive.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Meds. One of the fun parts of being on the new blood pressure meds is that it puts most common decongestants on the embargoed list. If there was ever a motivation to get my weight down and off the prescription medication, it’s 100% so I can take a goddamned Sudafed and a shot of NyQuil instead of just raw dogging cold and flu season with hot beverages and an occasional spoonful of honey.

2. Covid. There’s been a time or two I’ve felt worse, but my week with Covid is definitely ranked. From the raging sore throat, to rivers of sinus drainage, to sleep no longer being a thing I do in any appreciable block of time, it’s just unpleasant. Add in the 36 hour saga of trying to get some antiviral meds and this third week of October is going in the books as a shit week of what has already been a shit year.

3. Protestant guilt. I’ve hoarded sick leave since the day I started working for our wealthy uncle. Last time I looked I’m sure I had something like 1800 or more hours of it on the books. So far this week I’ve taken 23 hours from that total. So why the good old fashioned Protestant guilt? Despite having more than enough in the bank, I know that my being out this week means there’s mostly been one guy doing what three of us were doing a month ago. I hate knowing he’s getting dicked over because I finally walked into the viral buzz saw. Admittedly, even if I were there I wouldn’t be capable of doing more than warming a seat while trying not to hack up my left lung. I hate that when I get my feet back under me there’s going to be a hellacious backlog of whatever came pouring into my mailbox this week. I feel badly about all of it… but I’m keeping in mind that sick leave is one of the more valuable components of my total compensation package and I’d feel even worse for not using it.

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.