Tag Archives: office

Day 1…

Posted on by

Today was my first telework day in over a decade. I learned (or maybe re-learned) a few things:

1. When no one comes by your desk to talk, even with distractions of social media, animals, and an enormous killer snow storm bearing down on you, you can cram more work into two hours than you often get done in eight hours at the cube farm.

2. For years I’ve been blaming my work-issued laptop for being an antiquated, slow piece of junk. As it turns out, the computer isn’t the problem. Even on my out-at-the-end-of-the-road Comcast network connection, the thing is a veritable speed demon. So starting today, I’ll officially be blaming the network people for allowing us to creep along like we’re still using dial-up.

3. When they blow stuff up on the north range, I can hear it at my house. I’m fairly sure I knew that already, but it’s still satisfying to have an answer to “what the hell is that thumping” when the dogs start barking for no obvious reason.

4. Daytime television really is awful. I left the TV in the kitchen tuned in to the local news as background noise… but lord, the filler the run between the 12:00 news and close of business at 5:00 is just well and truly bad.

5. Working in fuzzy slippers and sweats is nice, but I’m going to enjoy it a lot more when I can help keep the world safe for democracy from the comfort of the back porch.

On the virtue of low expectations…

Posted on by

I feel sure that somewhere in these pages I’ve told the story of a supervisor who worked in the same organization I did many years ago. One of her standard responses to things that were anything beyond easy to do was, “Well, don’t expect too much.” That was the better part of fifteen years ago, but I’m beginning to see the virtue of low expectations.

Today, for instance, a “hot” information requested landed on my desk around lunch time. That’s not unusual in and of itself. What gets problematic is when someone wants a complex issue distilled down and answers provided within 48 hours. As I tell anyone who will listen, I’m a facilitator, not a subject matter expert. My specialty is in putting people who need information together with the people who have the information. Doing that right takes time. It takes even more time when whatever answer they come up with needs to be approved back through four additional levels of the bureaucracy sometime within the next 36 hours.

Look, I’ll get you to the right answer. That’s what I do. It could just come sailing back through the ether with no problems. Stranger things have happened… but not often. I think the most important thing here is that you don’t expect too much. It’s the only sure way to avoid disappointment.
​

Breaching the firewall…

Posted on by

For most of the last five or six years I’ve worked to build up a firewall between home and office. They were the twin streams in my life that must never, every cross. Today, with a few strokes of the pen, I’ve started the process to un-make that bulwark and let the two halves scrape past one another a bit more closely. Actually, that’s not accurate. I’ve given work a written invitation to conduct a wholesale invasion of Fortress Jeff.

That sounds more dire than it probably is since all I’ve really done is start the wheels in motion to get approval for working from home one day a week. As much as I value the hard wall of separation between home and office, the hard math isn’t on my side. Once I ran the numbers, finding that tucking myself in to my home office once a week would save me almost 40 hours a year of commuting time it makes the thing a bit of a no brainer, really.

I did the whole working from home thing years ago and I’m well aware of its virtues, particularly when it comes time to really study an issue and give it the mental once over without Chatty Cathy in the next cube spending the whole day in your ear. Plus, although my colleagues are decent enough (mostly), chalking up at least one day of the week where two dogs, a cat, and a tortoise are my officemates sounds preferable in just about every way.

We’re going to take this idea out for a bit of test drive starting (probably) sometime this month… but I’m not making any promises. As much as I’d like to spend another day at home, letting the office creep into the sanctum sanctorum may be a bridge too far.

Plague carriers…

Posted on by

As the Great Plague swept through 17th century London, the mayor ordered households wherein there were plague sufferers marked with a red cross a foot long. It served as a warning to others that those inside were quarantined and exposure meant grave risk both to the individual who risked exposure as well as to the surrounding homes. It was a dramatic gesture and looks great on a movie screen, but of course it probably had next to no effect on reducing instances of plague in the City.

Sitting at my desk listening to the sputum-filled coughing of nearly everyone around me makes me wonder how long until the Public Health Command seals us in and splashes that foot long cross upon the outer door or tries to purify us with cleansing fire. I suppose we’re all plague carriers now, myself included. We’ve spent most of the last month passing this thing between us with no sign of it letting up.

It’s almost like there’s something inherently unhealthy about cramming 30 people into a 25×100 foot windowless box breathing recirculated air for eight hours a day.

Back in my swivel chair…

Posted on by

Today was not an unmitigated success. There were no meetings and, if I’m honest, that goes a long way towards making a day more tolerable if nothing else. Then there was the great cleaning of the inbox. Clearing out near 300 backlogged messages that had no hope of being answered felt like a win… until I then was left to ponder the hundred or so that remained and actually needed some kind of answer. I spent way more of the day plowing through those than I want to think about. The amount of time wasted on email would be spectacular if anyone ever bothered to add it all up. They won’t, of course, because no one really wants to know the answer for fear they may have to do something to make that number more reasonable.

So now I’m back to the office. They say great art comes from great pain. That could very well be true. I don’t know if “pain” is the right word here and I’m in no way vain enough to call what I’m doing art, but my best and most consistent writing almost always finds its source at the office. Sure, that could be because for five days out of every seven that’s where I spend more waking hours than anywhere else. I like to think, though, that it’s because the bureaucracy is a vast treasure trove of stories begging to be told. If I weren’t part of it, I’d have a hard time believing that anything so convoluted could even give the impression of functioning.

I’m not thrilled beyond all reasonableness to be back in my swivel chair, but for the sake of the blog it’s a good thing… and that’s as close to glass full as I’m going to be able to manage.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Lazy asshats. You asshats are competing for billions of dollars of contracts. Somehow, though, you can’t manage to take your water bottles with you when you leave the damned room. What on earth would make me think you were compatent to manage major program efforts when you can’t pull off the easy to do stuff. If it were up to me being a lazy asshat who’s too good to clear your own trash would disquality you from any future work.

2. Those who can’t “leave it at the office.” This week I’ve observed at close range dozens of people who stuck around to “talk shop” for well over an hour after the work day ended. Those people perplex me. I can’t imagine a circumstance where I wouldn’t have something better to do on the average afternoon than that. The last thing I want to talk about at the end of the day is what I just did for the last eight hours. All I want to do is slide down the tail of my brontosaurous and make best possible speed for home.

3. Critics. Unless I saw you sitting in six months of planning meetings and voicing your “good ideas” when we could have used them feel free to take you nitnoid criticisms and go fuck yourself.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

You could fill an entire sheet of paper with what annoys Jeff this week. I know this because I have just such a piece of paper in front of me while I’m typing this. Look at any three lines on that page and you’ll find three things that sent my blood pressure soaring into new and probably dangerous heights. The state of my cardio-vascular system, though, isn’t the point.

Instead of reading you the full list this week, I’ll offer commentary on just one – the one that is the most troubling, and pernicious. As Spiderman tells us, with great power comes great responsibility. That’s true enough, but what Spidey almost never talks directly about is how frequently people with that power abrogate their responsibility.

When that happens you have power making decisions based on optics rather than effectiveness… and once you have people more worried about how something looks in the photo op than how well it works in reality, you’ve lost any shred of credibility. Sure, you have the power to make those decisions. No one is going to stop you. They may not say anything, because everyone is terrified of telling truth to power, but they’ll judge you for it for the rest of your days. Sure, you can make people do stupid things, you can make them smile and take it, but you can never, ever make them like you or respect you as a human being.

The calm…

Posted on by

I had a moment today. It was a moment in the late afternoon when the phone wasn’t ringing, there weren’t two dozen emails demanding immediate action, and no one was parked at my deskside expecting a decision of any kind. It startled me. It startled me and the the reality set in that I was in the calm… that last moment of peace, the deep breath before the inevitable shitstorm crashes over your head, swamps all efforts to manage it, and defiles everything it touches with its unholy stench.

Yes friends, I had that moment of calm this afternoon and every finely honed sense developed during nearly half a lifetime as a professional bureaucrat is screaming out a warning of rough weather ahead. Truth be known, I could have done without the calm – without the chance to sit back for a minute and think on the myriad of ways the thousand moving parts of this circus can come undone between now and Monday.

Someone once said that “Jeff is happiest when he’s bitching loudest.” There’s probably some truth in that… although I’d settle for being a little less happy if there were reason to need to do a little less bitching.

Contrary to instinct…

Posted on by

Some people just naturally lean towards accommodation and giving people the benefit of the doubt. I’m not one of those people. If you fail to follow instructions or otherwise don’t get to do something because you couldn’t be bothered to get after it the first dozen times you were told what needed to be done and the date by which it needed to be accomplished, I tend to have no sympathy. The higher up on Olympus you sit or the more important you think you are are all factors that garner even less sympathy.

Alas, I’m told I have to play nice and contort myself into all manner of painful positions to be accommodating… at least to some people. The number of people who think the date when something is no longer available or the words “sold out” don’t apply to them is simply staggering. Collectively getting people past the idea that they are some kind of special case would, in my opinion, go a long way towards correcting the general asshattery with which anyone with half a brain or a quart of common sense has to deal with on a daily basis.

On the week before…

Posted on by

Next week will be my personal version of hell, featuring 12 hour days, 750 of my new best friends all crammed into one room, and having all the responsibility to make it go right, none of the authority to make any actual decisions, and every bit of the blame if the wheels fall off for any reason. If I were in any way in control of my own destiny this would basically be the very last thing in which I would ever knowingly engage. Yet, party planning sticks with me from job to job like some kind of Gypsy curse.

If next week is hell, this week is a strong contender for that title. It’s the week in which everyone who has been ignoring the impending arrival of hell week has their “oh shit” moment and realizes if they don’t do something they’re going to look like utter twatwaffles in front of a live studio audience. When I was teaching this was the part of the year when I got to tell students that no, they really were going to fail because they didn’t bother to do any homework. I’m told, however, that letting these people fail, regardless of how deserving they may be of it, is “unprofessional.”

It all means that in many ways I’m spoon feeding adult humans a lot of information that was previously made available in slides, and memos, and email, and through various and sundry face to face conversations. I’m paying for the same ground five or six times a day in some cases… and paying for the same ground over and over and over again makes Jeff very, very surly.

Whatever else may be in doubt this week, you can rest assured that behind this serene exterior is a stroke or heart attack just waiting for the right moment to strike me down.