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.
Tag Archives: office
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
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?
1. The good idea fairy. The GIF is a pernicious feature of life in the bureaucracy. Its mission is to take projects or programs that are perfectly fine, even serviceable, and sprinkle them at the last possible minute with pixie dust and render them stupid, painful to execute, or optimally both. Having great ideas is fine, but when your idea of the week generates a minimum 80-hour per year manpower requirement when you’ve just lost one of three employees, it might not be a particularly good time to launch this new crusade. But hey, if the powers that be want me to spend my time following grown ass adults making sure they’ve cleaned up after themselves, I’ll do it all day long… but they shouldn’t be surprised when a whole laundry list of other “very important activities” just doesn’t get touched.
2. Data mining. My insurance company partnered with a company doing “free” A1C testing at home. Fine. I’ll share a bit of medical privacy for a free test. But dudes you’ve got to make it easy. I walk into the doctor’s office every six months (or more often lately), they jab my finger and my A1C number appears in my online patient portal before the doctor has even walked into the exam room. By contrast you gave me two columns of instructions that included “let the sample air dry for 3 hours before packaging” and then “it must be shipped the same day.” Either make it easy to go along with your data gathering scheme or bugger directly off.
3. Breakfast on office days. On days I’m stuck going into the office, I used to just swing through McDonald’s and grab an egg McMuffin. It was the definition of quick, easy, and simple. Now I’m making breakfast at home. It’s not that I don’t make a tasty breakfast so much as the process is a massive time suck. Instead of scarfing down my egg sandwich at my desk or in the car, I’ve got a full meal to prep and clean up before I’ve even left the house for the day. It’s reduced my morning reading time on office days to practically nothing. That makes it a pain in the ass with very little ROI besides a vague “healthiness” that doesn’t do much to improve my general mood in the mornings.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
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.
(Home) Office space…
With the new and improved telework agreement now in place, I’ve arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that my home office needs to be upgraded in several ways.
My set up isn’t particularly unusual. On the personal side, I’ve got a soon to be six year old 27-inch iMac that’s still an absolute workhorse and probably 5x more powerful than anything I actually need. It’s a great machine, even if it does occupy a significant amount of desktop real estate. For work, I’m toting around a Dell Latitude with a 16-inch screen. From it, hang an absurd number of wires and dongles – USB hub, mouse, Wi-Fi antenna, headset, and camera (rarely).
Most of the time, the laptop is perfectly serviceable for anything I need to do day-to-day. There are times, though, particularly when working in Excel or PowerPoint or dealing with multiple documents at the same time, where having a larger screen would be helpful.
I’m sure there are ways to rig my laptop to use my iMac as a monitor, but that violates my first rule of working from home – my personal computer and my work computer must never, ever meet. They can sit on the same desk, but I want them to share absolutely nothing from one system to the other. Those are two streams I never want to cross.
That’s going to mean there’s a lot of “unnecessary” duplication with two full set ups occupying my desk. I can live with that, but want it to be done in an elegant a way as possible. Figuring out what that looks like is where I am now.
It certainly means buying a more robust hub/docking station and probably a new monitor – ideally one that with a build in camera and mic that will let me dispense with headset and camera. On those days when I can’t avoid the schlep over to the office, I’d like to unplug the laptop from one cable and walk away. Currently, I have cables running everywhere and it’s just unsightly and an uninspiring way to work. It was less of a problem in the height of COVID, when the laptop mostly stayed put and in the immediate post-COVID environment when I was in the office more than home. Now, it needs to be functional and look reasonably attractive.
After the technical hurdles are surmounted, I know I’ll need new lighting. The current lamp is fine, but adding a second monitor means I’ll need the space it’s occupying. In a perfect world, I’d like to find a slightly larger desk to hold it all. Being that my current “desk” is a kitchen table I liberated long ago from a dusty shed and pressed into service, I like my chances of being able to find a suitable upgrade. In fact, I’d be absolutely willing to just buy another table, but slightly longer, as this one has worked surprisingly well for the last 8 or 9 years.
When all this might happen, remains firmly in the “to be determined” column on the calendar, but I expect to see some of it sooner rather than later.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
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.
Something nice…
If you’re like me, you grew up being told, repeatedly and often, that it’s best not to say anything at all if you can’t say something nice.
Sure, it’s probably good advice to help prevent the activation of your career dissipation light, but mostly it just prevents you from saying true things that others might find unpleasant… such as “That’s got to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard in the last 12 years,” or “If it’s not a priority for the bosses, why are we spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about it?”
Sadly, I don’t have a single nice thing to say, so I’ll just sit here quietly and try to keep my eyes from rolling all the way to the back of my skull.
Rehearsal week…
If it’s possible, rehearsal week can be more awful than the actual production. It’s the week when everyone realizes they haven’t been paying enough attention as the big muscle movements take place during the planning process. They find, to their surprise, that all the major decisions have already been taken.
Rehearsals are for refining the concept – not for building something new from whole cloth. I’ll spend a large portion of this week digging in my heels, denying what would have been simple requests a month ago, and generally being an obstinate asshole. Sure, there are some who could, by applying enough pressure among the right people, force me to shift… but very few are going to be willing to exert that kind of effort.
One of the most important lessons of how to be a successful bureaucrat is learning how to say no. Sometimes you have to say it with honey dipped words. Other times you have to say it with claws out. Still, you have to learn to say it to friend and foe alike – and you have to learn how to make it stick.
This will be my annual week of saying no to almost everyone. It won’t win me any new friends, but I’ll drag this rank, festering boondoggle across the finish line. Once that’s done, no one much cares how often you had to tell then no.
Just in case…
I realized today, and not for the first time, what the hardest part of my job really is. It’s not, as you may think, that it involves holding a large number of often conflicting ideas in my head simultaneously. It’s not that basic day to day operations can be derailed at the whim of any number of layers of management and supervision. It’s not even that the good idea fairy seems to take great joy in shitting all over my head at every opportunity.
Truly the hardest part of this job is that the bathroom is on the wrong side of the secure door – which means any time you have to take a crap, you can’t doom scroll Twitter, swipe through Tinder, or ponder your Facebook friends list. In a world where newspapers aren’t a thing anymore, it as often as not means you’re stuck looking at four blank walls until boredom sets in. That’s no way to expect a civilized person to take a comfort break.
I usually explain the pile of magazines on my desk by noting how unreliable the network is and wanting something close at hand to while away the time while we don’t have connectivity. But you and I both know why I make sure my magazine stash is really always topped off… just in case.
Two week warning…
We’re two weeks out. It’s the time of year when I should be approaching caffeine poisoning or have my blood pressure trending towards stroke territory. And yet as I sit here, I’m feeling mostly swaddled in a calm indifference.
By the time this week ends, I’ll have done 80% of everything that’s doable within my span of control to attempt pulling this circus off without too many problems. By the time next week ends, I’ll have spooled out 90% of my effort. The final 10% will burn off across three days from the 25th through the 27th. Very little of what happens during those three days will have anything at all to do with me.
By that point, I’ve given you the stage, gotten people ticketed, fought with dozens of people about getting their presentations delivered in something like a timely manner, and attended to all manner of details both petty and large. What I can’t do, though, is make everyone happy. Attendees will be mad that they’re not getting coffee and cookies, briefers will be mad that we don’t have the mic they really like, senior leaders of every stripe will be visited by the good idea fairy a few hours before show time and want to change everything.
But next week, this ponderous beast begins taking on a life of its own. As the clock runs down, the series of events begins that we’re all individually unable to stop. By then the best we can do is attempt to nudge events back towards the right path and let them flow through to their illogical end.
At this point, stepping out one more time to the edge of the precipice, all I know for certain is that in two weeks the circus will be in town. Some of it will go well. Some of it will not. And then it will be over. After that we’ll all spend six months forgetting that we have to do it all again for 2024.
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