When the cat’s away…

Posted on March 22, 2012 by jdtharp

When the cat’s away, your office will inevitably be overseen by a overly officious colleague intoxicated by their temporary power. They’re going to do things like try to change procedures that have been in place in your office for as long as you’ve been there and tell you to do things that are patently incorrect. To fill the white space in their day, this individual will flit to whatever meetings they can find and generally try to make a nuisance of themselves on what should be a nice quiet day for getting caught up on those things you never seem to get to when the boss is around. It’s like turning over the office to that annoying kid you remember from elementary school that always had their hand up, always knew the answer, and always volunteered to make copies or keep the list of “bad” students when the teacher had to step out of the room. Since it only lasts for a day or two, you’re basically in Purgatory… assuming that Purgatory is run by a mentally deficient thirteen year old, since that’s basically the level of leadership you’ll be getting.

My advice in this situation? Smile and nod whenever possible. Avoid eye contact and if necessary feign digestive distress to minimize the amount of time you must spend in conversation with your tormenter. Absolutely nothing good with come from your engaging this pseudo-leader. At best, you’ll end up having to explain to your actual boss why you called this individual as useless as tits on a bull in front of several of your other colleagues. At worst, your boss may realize the error of his ways and leave you in charge next time he’s going to be away, which makes the cure far worse than the actual disease.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Hot sweaty death by PowerPoint…

Posted on March 19, 2012 by jdtharp

I’ve never really understood the need of management to convey information by jamming as many people as possible into a room and then throwing PowerPoint charts at them until they want to gouge out their own eyes. These events are even more near and dear to my heart when the information could have been just as easily sent to me by email so I could read it at a convenient time rather than rejiggering my calendar to free up three hours in the middle of the week – a task I accomplished by cancelling my one actual productive meeting this week.

As a rule, 120 slides constitute just a few too many in any presentation. That’s doubly true when 31 of those slides fall into the “org chart/wire diagram” category. 1) Nobody in the room can read the eight point font used to squeeze that graphic onto the slide and 2) After ten or twelve wire diagrams, they all look exactly the same. That’s just an observation from a guy sitting in the back rows, so take it for what it’s worth.

When I’m proclaimed King of the Bureaucrats, my first edict from on high will be a proclamation that no briefing will use more than five slides. Ever. If you can’t distill the essence of what you’re trying to convey into five or fewer slides or (gasp) talk about your idea without the visual aids, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll think you don’t know what you’re talking about and will be sorely tempted to send you to sleep with the fishes. Since I’m somewhere just above the janitorial staff on one of those 31 org charts we saw, I suppose everyone is safe for the time being.

But you’ve all been warned. Oh yes, you’ve all been warned.

Time keeps on slippin’…

Posted on March 15, 2012 by jdtharp

I got to spend an entire day this week in class. You can imagine my unrestrained joy at being given this “opportunity.” Still, there’s an old saying that goes something like “Early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.” Of course sometimes life happens and even the most obsessive of us can arrive a few minutes late to our destination. On any given day when how long it takes you to get back from lunch doesn’t really matter to anyone, extending your meal a bit doesn’t hurt at all. Since this was one of those moments that we were all in it together and nothing was going to happen until all the butts were back in all the seats, what possessed one car full of you to decide it was a good day to take a two hour lunch? I mean, I don’t like this class any better than you do, but somehow I managed to wander back it at something approximating on time, even if that was mostly driven by the desire to get things over with as soon as possible. You tools, on the other hand, seemed dead set on dragging a long day out even further.

I thought the lip smacking and crinkling of paper wrappers when you got back was an exceptionally well planned touch, by the way. I mean how on earth could you have spent two hours out wandering around and not managed to spend at least some of that time jamming half a sandwich into the filthy stinking sewer that you call a mouth? Your incompetence, lack of interest in anything other than yourself, and dare I say apathy, has reset the bar for the rest of us. Look, I may be an apathetic fuck, but I somehow manage not to let my own proclivities bleed over and cause problems for other people. All I’d ask is for the same courtesy of not screwing the rest of us because you’re having a bad day or can’t be bothered to do two things simultaneously.

The crowning irony of our little drama today was that we were all part of a new mandatory-for-the-universe class on improving professional conduct in the workplace. Maybe this was part of the class – A living example of how not to do things.

Endless days…

Posted on March 12, 2012 by jdtharp

Some days are busy and you spend them haplessly dashing between floors and buildings just to make sure you’re not late for the next round of meetings. Other days have the distinct feeling that you’re working in a funeral home and that someone will yell at you if you make a noise louder than scratching pen against paper. The thing that these two distinctly different types of day have in common: They both suck. And strangely enough they both suck for more or less the same reason.

On one hand, meetings blur together leaving you in a hopeless, glaze-eyed torpor incapable of doing much more than maintaining respiration. On the other, the day crawls by at something approximating the average groundspeed of road kill. In both cases, the result is suck. Suck and days that drag impossibly slowly. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but I’m fairly certain I’ve actually watched clocks run backwards under both sets of circumstances.

No one knows that work is just another dirty four letter word better than I do, but really, all I’m looking for is a couple of days a week that don’t feel like they’re running in slow motion. That’s probably more than I can realistically hope to see any time soon. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my cube adjusting the time circuits.

The eternal meeting…

Posted on March 8, 2012 by jdtharp

We have the same meeting every two weeks. I don’t mean just a regularly occurring staff meeting or anything, but rather a meeting where we all get together and discuss the exact same issue, come to the exact same conclusions, and then part company knowing full well that we’re going to do it again in 14 days just like clockwork. Nobody, myself included, has the intestinal fortitude to recommend that we stop having this meeting so it seems possible that it will continue on indefinitely into the future, just as it has been held for as long as any of the current participants can remember.

As far as I can tell, meetings are the great enemy of government work – probably work in any large organization. I’m not saying if we cancelled this meeting that my productivity would suddenly jump by 200%, but it would free up an hour or two every week to do something, anything that might be even marginally productive. After all, when what you’re currently doing is complete dead time, even a fractional improvement in how you spend your day is a huge improvement in productivity. That’s not even counting the morale bump that would come from permanently cancelling time sucks like this one. Of course the likelihood of any of that coming to pass is somewhere between slim and none, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to go to.

The first twelve minutes…

Posted on March 5, 2012 by jdtharp

It’s Monday. I’ve been at my desk for about 12 minutes this morning. And someone just wandered by to ask if I had read the 15 separate issue papers that arrived over the weekend. Of course I’ve read them. Somewhere between finding the coffee pot, hanging up my coat, and waiting seven minutes for my computer to boot up. I know that some people spend the weekend thinking about these things and rush breathlessly into the office on Monday to get in there and “make a difference.” I, on the other hand, am a bit like an old car. I need time in the morning to warm up before jumping into anything requiring a lot of horsepower or fine motor skills.

Even on my best day, the answer to “what have I done in my first 12 minutes in the office” is pretty universally “not much.” Check back in an hour – or 45 minutes if you’re really in a hurry – and there’s a fair chance I’ll have had time to get caffeinated and come up with whatever you need. Believe me when I say that standing there looking at me haplessly like a mammoth stuck in the tar pits isn’t going to help your cause. It’s pretty much just going to annoy me more than usual and slow down the whole process.

What are we doing here?

Posted on February 27, 2012 by jdtharp

Once every few months I catch a wild hare and start obsessively backing up everything on my work computer. At last count, I’m working on saving 2GB of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents for posterity. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood if 1500 individual files generated over the last eight months. By most standards it’s not a particularly obscene amount of storage or an abnormally large number of files. As I’m sitting here watching the “% complete” bar click higher, I’m struck with the fact that although I’m relentlessly backing this stuff up, keeping a copy for myself, and sending a copy into deep storage, I’m probably the only person on the planet who will ever actually see any of this stuff again. In a post-atomic or -biological apocalypse world, it seems unlikely that any of the survivors are going to be particularly interested in whatever brilliant PowerPoint slides I’ve managed to come up with.

All of that begs the question, what the hell are we really doing here? I think we all have some conception that we’re “adding value” somehow by performing whatever task has been set for us. We like to think that what we’re doing is good and important work; that someone, somewhere will be better off because we sat behind our monitors and smashed our fingers repeatedly against the keyboard. Since I don’t have a little laminated card telling me where to go and what to do when the warheads start landing, I think it’s safe to assume that whatever I’m doing isn’t all that critical to the preservation of civilization as we know it. Apparently I’m not a national treasure. That realization stings a little.

Look, I’m not saying I want to give up the pay and bennies and head off into the woods to start a commune or anything. I don’t think the situation is all that hopeless. Still, it’s a smack in the head about priorities and deciding what’s important and what doesn’t mean a damned thing. In the course of a career and a life, I’ve made some good decisions and some bad ones. If this serves as nothing more than a gentle smack in the back of the head reminding me to make better decisions in the future, well, then the day has been more productive than most.

Not quite…

Posted on February 16, 2012 by jdtharp

There’s a difference between feeling sick and feeling too sick to show up at the office. Sometimes that difference can be measured by the width of a razor blade. One thing that’s been pretty consistent in my career, though, has been my willingness to use sick days when I’ve needed them. Those tend to be days when getting out of bed or off the couch is just more effort than I can muster. Just below those days on my severity scale are days when I feel like a big steamy pile of poo, but show up in the office anyway. The problem with days like that is even before your computer boots up you know the day isn’t going to be productive. You’re going to end up pissing away most of your time alternately halfway reading articles online, coughing up a lung, and staring longingly at the clock wishing it were already time to go home. The only thing that’s really different between these type of “sick” days is the geographic location where you waste the day.

The only possible upside of being sick and in the office all at the same time is that your colleagues are likely to beat a hasty retreat when they catch a good look at the vast array of cold medicine, tissues, and homeopathic remedies piled up on your desk. If nothing else, it might buy you a little time away from them without needing to dip into your sick time stockpile. Then again, the ones who are oblivious to everything else are just as oblivious to your dripping nose and itching eyes. Personally I always try to make it a point to cough and sneeze in their general direction. At best, they’ll end up getting whatever you’re down with and at worst, I feel like I’m exacting at least some minor retribution for their failure to pay attention.

The bad touch…

Posted on February 9, 2012 by jdtharp

In the last 40 hours of work, slightly more than four of those hours have been dedicated to reeducating us on constitutes appropriate versus inappropriate comments, innuendo, and/or touching. That’s more than one tenth of the last work week focused on this stuff. In my years working for this Big Government Agency, I haven’t yet run across anyone who actually thinks sexual harassment is a good idea, so I’m forced to wonder if this latest round of training is maybe a little off the mark. I mean did anyone wake up this morning thinking that they were going to come to the office and start talking about the rack size of dime piece piece sitting next to them? Even if they’re thinking it, most people have a sufficient instinct for self preservation to know that they shouldn’t say it out loud… or at least within earshot.

Look, I’m not naïve enough to think that it doesn’t happen, but I don’t think the key to solving the problem lies in more training. The response to every leadership issue for the last decade has been “obviously that happened because we’re not doing enough training.” But seriously, how much training do we need to make the point that rape, pillage, and plunder are not acceptable workplace activities? The thing is, plenty of people get the training and just don’t care. Telling people that X, Y, and Z are bad doesn’t change the way they feel even if it manages to change the way they act when they think people are watching.

From my ant’s eye view of the bureaucracy, a spike in harassment complaints isn’t a failure of training. It’s a failure of management and dare I say leadership. When management doesn’t respond to a validated complaint with swift and furious action, it establishes a climate of permissiveness and that climate says far more about how the organization feels about “inappropriate” actions than a ream of policy memos and endless hours of training. If leadership were serious about it being an issue, heads would roll every time they find out something happened, but it’s obvious to even a working schmo like me that if they keep doing what they’re doing, they’ll keep getting what they got.

Proper punctuation prevents poor performance…

Posted on February 6, 2012 by jdtharp

Some things we do are important and can have a real impact on real people scattered around the world. Those are the kinds of things you don’t mind spending hours working to perfect. Ensuring that there are the correct number of spaces following the various kinds of punctuation doesn’t generally fall into that category. Sure, formatting and general “prettiness” of a document are important insofar as you want it to be put together enough that people take your product seriously, but somehow I don’t think it’s important enough that we need to spend 20 or 30 man-hours making sure that everything in a 75 page document that no one outside these four walls will ever lay eyes on is “just so.” Then again, I have been wrong, or perhaps only misguided, before.

Look, I’m all for providing the best product possible, but I’m also a believer in the law of diminishing returns. There comes a point where it just isn’t cost effective to keep tweaking something around the margins. We all have personal pet peeves and certain ways we like to do things, but we’ve now officially letting perfection stand in the way of good enough to its illogical extreme. But hey, I’m not the guy signing the checks or deciding who works on what and for how long, so as long as the direct deposit doesn’t start bouncing, I’ll sit here plugging away at whatever someone tells me is the day’s priority. Today, like yesterday, it seems that that priority is word spacing and paragraph alignment. Don’t ask me why that is, but I’ll keep plugging away at it until someone tells me to shuffle on to something else.

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