Tag Archives: office

It’s going to be a doozy…

Posted on by

Hard as it is to admit, my inaugural foray into non-fiction was not met with thunderous applause. I can count on two hands and a foot how many copies of Retribution wandered off the shelves at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I’m not saying that with any kind of self pity, although I do think the world is missing out on a fun little short story. Notwithstanding the monumental lack of sales, I enjoyed working in fiction. It’s a refreshing change from the usual 5W’s style professional writing that is one of the many banes of the average cubicle dweller’s existence. Trust me, writing reports, emails, cost estimates, and justifications memoranda does not constitute a rich literary life.

That being said, I think I’ve settled in on my next topic… and it’s one that takes us all back to the future. My bread and butter has always been an apparently bottomless ability to bitch and complain about whatever topic was set in front of me. As often as not, that ability turned itself on peculiarities of working inside the world’s greatest bureaucracy. Time and circumstances have conspired to bring me back around to where it all started.

If Nobody Told Me, was an tribute to a youth lost in service to the machine, I’m starting to flesh out the vaguest idea of the next effort to be more of a deep dive into the mid-career oddities, realizations, and situations that make you really want to consider where it was that your professional life to such a harebrained turn. It’s safe to assume there is plenty to say about those issues and I think I have just the point of view to make them both hilarious and thought provoking.

I haven’t started writing yet. I’ve barely scraped together some notes, a few snippets of outline, and the most ephemeral of notions in my head of where I think this should go, but it feels like the right topic at the right time. It feels like the project that might well keep me on a halfway even keel in increasingly turbulent waters. I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know when I’ll have a draft. I don’t even have a fully formed central thesis. I do have an idea. As dangerous a spark as an idea can be, that’s all it takes to start. The rest will come later.

Stick around folks, I think this next trick is going to be a doozy.

Untied…

Posted on by

It occurred to me this morning that there’s probably a deep psychological reason I’m so adamantly opposed to wearing a tie. Sure, I could give you the usual song and dance about them being constrictive and uncomfortable or about them serving absolutely no purpose in the modern world, but deep down I don’t think that’s the reason at all… even though those are all perfectly valid issues with the standard necktie.

1288298661684133102The real problem with these damned decorative bits of fabric is that I never wear them on good days. I pull one off the rack for funerals, court appearance, work, and weddings – for good or ill, those aren’t what I consider the red letter days of my life. Those days are largely depressing and/or expensive hassles in which I’d probably rather not participate. In my near 40-year life, ties always come out for the pain-in-the-ass times.

The good times are marked with jeans, tee shirts, shorts, and muddy boots. They’re ratty clothes covered in dog hair and smelling of wood smoke or of diesel fumes and salt spray after a long day on the water. Never once on one of these good days did I sit back quietly and think to myself, “Wow, this day would have been so much better if I had on a tie!” On the other hand, nearly every time I’ve ever put on a tie, I know the day would have been better if I was somewhere else, wearing something different.

So there it is in a nutshell, my basic belief that ties aren’t just a pointless throwback noose we’re supposed to willingly put our necks into every morning. In fact, they’re basically nothing more than a visual cue that you’re about to experience a wasted day.

Thanks for stopping by tonight. This has been one of those occasional posts I make to give you a little insight into what’s churning around in my head while I’m standing quietly off to the side of the room observing the world around me.

Where you stand…

Posted on by

It’s Monday again and while they don’t seem so bad when you’re not shuffling off to work in the dark hours of the morning, it’s still the kind of thing that turns your mind to thoughts of the office. Inevitably, that means I’m thinking about meetings, because, in a “professional work environment” apparently meetings are just about the only thing people do.

It’s been my experience that on any given day there are more meetings than people available to go sit in them. That problem compounds because everyone inevitably thinks their meeting is the most important of the day and demand that the most senior person available attend them in order to reinforce the perception of importance. And you see, that’s where things start coming off the rails, because some meetings get stuck with guys like me showing up. When I show up unescorted by someone of senior grade, there’s a good chance your meeting isn’t nearly as important as you think it is.

It’s not that I’m in any way incapable of expressing official thoughts or ideas, it’s just that I have no standing to actually make or enforce decisions on behalf of my large bureaucratic organization. Those activities are reserved to pay grades far higher than mine (and I’m OK with that). The other thing that you really should be concerned about when I show up alone is that there’s always a chance that my filter will slip off and I might accidentally open my mouth and let my actual opinion fly out. While there’s always a price to pay for telling truth to power, I generally don’t think about that until the cat’s well out of its bag.

As it is, I’m amazed on a weekly basis how many times I’m left alone with an open mic and a naive optimism that I won’t say something stupid directly into the ear of someone at echelons higher than reality. Also, and I’ll give you this one for free, if the only time you can schedule your meeting is after lunch on a Friday, go ahead and kill your project because that’s a sure sign there isn’t a single person anywhere on the planet who actually cares about what you’re doing.

So, yeah, on this Monday morning, I’m reaching out to meeting organizers everywhere and giving them an opportunity to reevaluate their actions, how many gaggles they schedule, when they’re held, and where they stand in the grand scheme of things.

Buggy…

Posted on by

Employee morale is generally one of those “tough nut to crack” problems. The picnics and certificates that get one employee all warm and fuzzy will likely tend to add fuel to another’s fire of discontent. How to get at the core of the problem is very rarely a one-oriental-cockroach_187x116size-fits-all kind of thing.

With that being said, I think the one morale boosting solution we can all agree on is getting rid of the insect infestations that plague the place like we’re running the Egypt exhibit at Mosesland. The drain flies that have taken up residence in the bathrooms for the last few months are bad enough. This week’s addition of cockroaches en mass really falls into a category well beyond what a cubicle-dweller should be expected to deal with.

Clogmia_Albipunctata_or_moth_flyI know funds are tight right now, but the solution really shouldn’t be just throwing more sticky traps into the corner and hoping for the best. Given the number of creatures I counted on the floor in the hallway this morning, we’re well into the realm of needing massive chemical intervention. Or possibly purifying the entire complex by fire. I’m not particularly repulsed by bugs but even I’ve reached the point where I’m starting to feel creepy crawly for no good reason other than knowing they’re there hiding in the dark recesses waiting to skulk over everything when the lights go out.

I’m not sure there’s enough Clorox in the state to make me feel OK about this one. So yeah, making things a little less buggy around the office might not cure all our ills, but it would be one giant leap in the right direction.

Real independence…

Posted on by

Independence Day week is, in my opinion, second only to the week between Christmas and New Years in terms of how little actual productive work takes place inside Uncle’s vast machine. It’s true that not everyone takes the week (or four days) off, but for the most part the number of people on vacation approaches the point of critical mass where it becomes nearly impossible to get anything accomplished if it requires more than two people to be part of the decision-making or work flow. I’m sure there are plenty of old hands who might deny what I’m telling you, but experience tells me that this week is a dead zone for productivity. No matter how many memos you cram into the pipeline, if there’s no one there to read them on the other end, it’s just so many trees falling in the forest.

I’ve always felt like this week was the civilian equivalent to an operational pause – a breather before the long march through summer towards Labor Day and the close of the fiscal year. There are still plenty of people giving the illusion of getting something accomplished, but I suspect that if they were all honest at least half the emails they send are greeted with an out-of-office message. By early in the day Thursday, you’re going to find even the most dedicated of employees giving up the illusion and watching the clock with the rest of us poor dumb working stiffs.

That’s just part of the magic joy that is the trinity of three-day weekends in the summer. They feel different. They’re special. Maybe they hark back to being fourteen and having the whole summer stretched out in front of us like a never-ending weekend. Or maybe we just appreciate the reminder of the life we can look forward to in 20 year, 11 months, and 1 day… if we were so inclined to count the amount of time until we’re eligible for retirement.

Talk about celebrating a real independence day.

Bleed a little longer…

Posted on by

Two days into the week, it looks like it’s going to be another exercise in triage – in trying to figure out which high priority item is going to bleed to death if I don’t tend to it immediately and which I can put off to let bleed a little longer. It’s a hell of a way to try to get things done and nearly impossible if any of what you’re trying to accomplish requires deep thought and analysis. Thank God nothing I deal with ever needs any of that. You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes while I wrote that last bit.

Due in part to to what feels like the never ending variations on a hiring freeze, our preternatural ability to reorganize ourselves every six months, decisions (or lack thereof) made by high management, and people moving on to better opportunities, we’re at least three hands shy of where we should be. That doesn’t sound like a lot except it roughly translates to 1/4 of the total number of people who should be working in my office. Add into that mix the normal and customary sick days, vacation days, and alternative work schedule days off, it means as often as not we’re operating half staffed or less. Some days it’s much, much less.

Whether echelons higher than reality want to accept or admit it, it creates an environment where even if good work were encouraged, it would be nearly impossible to achieve. I won’t speak for anyone other than myself, but just now it feels like any day that doesn’t end in taking water over the transom was a good one. Running flat out just to avoid sliding backwards is a lot of things, but it’s not a recipe for encouraging or enabling anyone to do their best work. It’s a recipe for struggling to stave off disaster just enough to get through the day. When that’s what passes for a win, we’re all in trouble.

For Official Use Only…

Posted on by

131186317From time to time I like to offer up helpful tips about life in the modern American workplace. I consider it kind of a public service. Hopefully it’s just one of the many topics here that people find useful or at least vaguely entertaining.

Tonight’s tip goes out to all those office drones who are walking around with a “For Official Use Only” credit card in their wallet. For most of us, you can count on one hand the number of times in a year (or in a career) when you’ll actually need to use that card. What you might not notice is how much that FOUO BigBank Mastercard looks nearly identical to the personal BigBank Mastercard that you’ve also been carrying around for years.

In fact, until you get an email from your boss wondering why there’s a $500 deposit charged on your official credit card, you probably won’t even notice that you’ve slipped the wrong one in your wallet and used it to book the hotel for your upcoming vacation. In case there’s any confusion, even I can’t manage to spin that one into the “official business” category.

I’m sure I’ll spend a big hunk of the next few days trying to get that straightened out and back onto my own card where I thought it was all along. Just when I think I’ve done every stupid thing a career bureaucrat can do, I run out and set the bar just a little bit higher for myself.

The more you know…

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Using your outdoor voice. There’s a time and a place for the outdoor voice. When you’re sitting at your desk, in an office, with 8 other people in earshot is not the time to decide to communicate with one another by having a 20 minute conversation from one side of the room to the others. Life in cubicle hell is bad enough without trying to block out three simultaneous cross-room conversations. I realize it’s terribly inconvenient, but maybe get up, walk the dozen or so steps, and have your chat face to face instead of favoring us all with every detail at 103 decibels. As a rule, your colleagues shouldn’t be able to hear your conversation when they’ve got their ear buds turned up to ten with Van Halen’s classic guitar riffs beaming directly into their brain.

2. Illegal immigration. I’m all for having some kind of sensible immigration reform in this country. However, while Congress flails around with that issue, I’m more interested in seeing if we can stem the flow of people illegally crossing the border from Mexico into the US. Call me crazy, but I think the first step to reforming the immigration process in this country is to make it a hell of a lot harder to just wander across the border and a hell of a lot easier to send people back from whence they came if they do show up here illegally. I have no earthly idea why we’ve collectively decided that enforcing the laws on the books falls into the too hard to do category, but until we figure out a way to actually enforce the laws on the books, I have no idea why we’d bother passing any new ones that are just as likely to be ignored.

3. Iraq. The allies poured out a decade of blood and treasure to liberate, defend, equip, train, and support a government that looks like it will collapse at any moment. I dearly wish I could wake up in the morning to find a Patton or a MacArthur or a LeMay had risen from the dead to take command of CENTCOM. Instead, I fear I’ll wake up in the morning to find the mission failed while we were all busy wringing our hands.

Suiting up…

Posted on by

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I wore a suit to work today for what was possibly the first time in nearly four years. Given my regular “uniform” of solid colored polo shirts, khaki pants, and Doc Martens, apparently the appearance of a suit was a sufficiently big deal as to require the taking of photographs as documentary evidence. Had I known it was going to be a thing, I would have found something in a nice plaid or maybe a classic of the leisure variety. Alas, I’ve missed that opportunity.

As a dweller in cubicles, the idea that I should wear something that seems designed to be as uncomfortable as possible while spending eight hours in my little 6×6 slice of the world just strikes me as patently ridiculous. I’m not sure where anyone would have ever gotten the idea that wearing a tie will result in generating more fantastic PowerPoint slides. If I do say so myself, my slides are already pretty freaking fantastic. I’ve got this funny way of being more concerned with the end results than I am with how someone looks while getting there. Usually that leaves me a bit out of step with generally accepted practice. Trust me, I’ve gotten use to being out of step. It’s a role that feels like it suits me – no pun intended.

I don’t want anyone to think this represents the beginning of a great change in my personal dress code. I’d show up every day wearing ratty jeans and beat up boots if I didn’t think it would cause the worst crisis to face the government since the beginning of the Great Recession. As long as we can keep the suit wearing to once every thousand days or so, I think it’s a compromise we can all live with.

Should have known…

Posted on by

I should have known what kind of day it was going to be when I woke up 20 minutes before the 5AM alarm – too early to be awake, even by my standards, but not nearly enough time to make going back to sleep a worthwhile endeavor. I should have known then that it was a sign to pick up the phone, make a call, and burn off a sick day. But instead I pressed on with the morning routine.

The day fired one last warning shot across my bow when I got to the office and was met with a message that someone had sent me what they thought was a very important email and they needed to talk to me about its contents immediately (or when they got in at 8:30, whichever came first). Of course the problem there was they might have sent the email, but as we all know communication only happens when information is transferred between the sender and the receiver. Whatever it was their very important email said, it had been lost in transition from their mailbox to mine. As a rule I try not to comment on documents I haven’t had a chance to read, so the 8:30 phone call was, shall we say, a bit brief. I really, really should have pulled the plug at that point and called it a day.

Instead, in the middle of trying to prepare for a meeting (with the person whose email finally showed up around 9:00), I was then shanghaied into seat filler duty for 75 minutes. That led into a 30 minute pause before the next hour long meeting, which led to 20 minutes of frantic post-meeting emailing, which begat the next 75 minute long meeting. By now it’s 2:30 and that’s when I finally sat down to shove a sandwich and a few handfuls of crackers into my face today. That may be perfectly reasonable for some people, but tends to be a little late when your official day started at 7:30 and you’re legally obligated to leave the premises at 4:00.

I at least got to leave on time this afternoon. As I understand it “on time” was just a few minutes ahead of the last violent shitstorm of the day. I missed getting covered in that one by the skin of my teeth. Unfortunately, now I know what’s sitting there waiting for me when I wander in tomorrow. I was definitely a happier human being before I knew what to expect, but I’ve been at this game long enough that I should have known better than to have any expectations at all.

Expectations. That’s where the day really started skidding off the rails. Yeah, I really should have known better.