Long-term storage…

Posted on September 15, 2011 by jdtharp

The risk in throwing things away is that you’ll wake up one morning and realize you just tossed out something you now need. In the vast majority of cases, this moment never happens and we go on with our lives with a little less crap laying around junking the place up. Some people have a harder time than others letting things go… or even just accepting that even though it’s something they very clearly remember doing that was important once upon a time, no one is ever going to need it again.

I can’t stress with enough conviction that we will never, under any conceivable circumstance, need to retrieve the office document archive from 1985. After 26 years, it’s probably safe to assume that those days when you were the young buck are well astern and you should probably just let them go instead of insisting that we hold them in our very small storage room “indefinitely.” Those boxes are more likely to fall over on some poor unsuspecting intern and kill them than they are to contain anything that anyone in the office might actually find useful.

I hate to have to be the one to bring this up, but you’re already the person in the office who keeps too many plants and too much trade show swag in your area. I’d consider it a massive personal favor if we could try to avoid you ending up on the pilot episode of Hoarders: Cubicle Farm Edition. So please, dear colleague, let it go.

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.

How you know it’s been a good meeting…

Posted on September 5, 2011 by jdtharp

Bureaucrats, as a group, are big fans of meetings. When we’re not sitting in them, we’re preparing for them, discussing how they went, or pondering what other topics are important enough to warrant having their own meetings. If you plan your day just so, you can step from meeting to meeting and never once have to risk accomplishing anything that might accidentally be considered a productive use of time. Pretty much the only guaranteed think to come out of a meeting is that there will be more work on your desk once it’s over than there was before it started.

If you step back and honestly asses your own experience, when was the last time you walked out of a meeting feeling good about how much you’d accomplished? Alternatively, how often do you walk out of a meeting feeling like you had just spent two hours of your life that you were never going to get back? Personally I can’t remember the last meeting I was in where the salient points couldn’t have been dropped into an email and circulated to those with a need to keep track of such things. More often, the whole thing could have been avoided if two people passing in the hallway could have had an “oh, by the way” moment and restricted the exchange only to the people who actually care about a specific topic or issue rather than subjecting the entire office to an afternoon of torment.

If you’re a proponent of meetings, do you know when you’ve just had a good one? I do. It’s when the senior person in the room stands up at the end and asks if anyone has a clue why we just sat through that and then walks off shaking his head.

Yes, I’m new here…

Posted on August 25, 2011 by jdtharp

Look lady, I get it. I’m new and that’s probably as much of a pain in the ass for you as it is for me. Sorry that I haven’t been here for 38 1/2 years, but there are things that you know that I need to know. I’m going to occasionally ask you a question about who to talk to or what something does. What I’m going to need you to do is not answer every question by rolling your eyes and making a giant production out of bringing me up to speed.

You see, some day, you are going to drop dead and someone, most likely me, is going to have to figure out what you have been up to and it’s going to be easier to do that if you’re just up front with me from the outset. Otherwise, once you’re gone I’ll have to go through your files, not find what I’m looking for, and then make my bones by telling everyone how jacked up all your stuff is. So, you see, cooperating with me now really saves us both a lot of trouble.

Oh, and one more thing… There’s a pretty good chance that I’m not going to do things the exact same way you do them. Different is ok as long as we get to the same answer. Despite your best efforts to convince me that things only work when your desk is piled high with paper copies of everything you’re working on or have worked on in the past six months, I’m ok keeping my desk clear and my files electronic. I promise when I need a hardcopy of something I’ll be able to find a printer all by myself.

Networking… or not…

Posted on August 22, 2011 by jdtharp

The network is my single point of failure. When it goes down, basically I become an astronomically well paid paperweight. Sure, there is a way to do everything I do manually, but because I wasn’t raised in the horse and buggy era, I don’t know what that way is because it was never covered in training and I’m certainly not old enough to have ever had to do it that way myself. And since everyone around me is in the same boat when it happens, after the initial bout of consternation and annoyance, the whole place takes on a bit of a snow day atmosphere. Which is great… for a while.

As fun as officially sanctioned down time is, it does highlight an issue that I don’t think any of us have spent enough time thinking about: What, exactly, is an army of technology workers supposed to do in the event of something more than a temporary outage? If we can’t email, can’t access the cloud, and can’t call out over VOIP, we’re pretty much just a bunch of people hanging out. What if it lasts for a day? Or a week? What if a network outage became the new normal?

Ninety nine percent up time sounds great until you realize that means you’ll be down for at least 3 and a half days every year. That’s annoying if you’re a dedicated gamer. It’s potentially catastrophic if you’re managing the world’s financial markets, running a war, or trying to manage the nation’s air traffic. Our reliance on computers and networks isn’t going to decrease in the future, so if we’re going to be so dependent on the network, redundancy and failover should be the standard. If the powers that be can’t manage that, they should at least spring for a cell booster for the building so we can play Angry Birds while we’re just sitting around.

Nervous condition…

Posted on August 10, 2011 by jdtharp

I’ve slowly come to identify a condition in one of my new colleagues. Apparently when working on short timelines or under stress, this individual’s default setting is “talk, nonstop.” It doesn’t seem to make much difference that if one is on a demanding timeline usually that means we are all plugging away on our own similarly pressing issues. I’ve tried the usual “polite” responses of keeping my responses short, answering while continuing to peck away at the keyboard, not making eye contact, etc. Next we’ll be moving along to the less gentle “look, I’ve got a lot of work, let’s pick this up later” or the even more blatant listening to my iPod at my desk routine although that’s usually just me sitting at my desk with earbuds in not actually listening to anything. If that fails, it’s possible that I’ll have to bludgeon this person to death with a hole punch and hide the body in the “protected wetland” (aka swamp) behind the building.

I have no earthly idea what would give someone the impression that I’m a good listener and even less of an idea why they think anyone at all would care about the inane prattle that dribbles out of their filthy sewers. Let’s be honest, I’m here to do a job and get paid. If I want to talk about something that’s not work, I’ll call one of my actual friends. While I’m here, all I need you to do is STFU and let me do a day’s work, ok?

Awesome.

Potty talk…

Posted on August 8, 2011 by jdtharp

Depending on where you work, there are many things that must be handled in a “right now” time-sensitive manner. Without question, sometimes minutes or seconds count. In fairness, though, 99.997% of the time, what we’re doing doesn’t fall into that category. We’re not defusing bombs and we’re not performing heart surgery. We’re writing reports and creating PowerPoint presentations.

Occasionally, because of pressure being exerted from echelons above reality or our own inflated sense of importance, we’ll mistake our report writing and PowerPoint building for an actual life or death situation. I’m going to go on the record here and say that no matter how important you think the issue is, there’s nothing we’re doing on a day-to-day basis that can’t wait until we step away from the urinal.

The Big D…

Posted on August 3, 2011 by jdtharp

Attention Colleagues:

Open bay cubicles are not the appropriate venue to discuss the ongoing drama of your divorce proceedings, the backbiting antagonism of your ex-husband, or details of the child support decree that you’ve decided to fight. As interested as the person you’re talking to might find this tragic tale of woe, the other 12 people sitting in the room aren’t nearly as interested. Well, technically, I suppose they are, but mostly because it’s grist for the lunchtime gossip mill.

I wouldn’t go so far as suggest that there is a firewall between your professional and personal life, but perhaps it would be wise to install some kind of filter on what you decide the entire office needs to know. Really, it’s as much for your own good as it is for ours.
Thanks for your kind attention in this matter.

Very respectfully yours,

Jeff

Listening in…

Posted on July 27, 2011 by jdtharp

One of the many downsides of life in the cube farm is that it’s impossible not to listen in on conversations at least occasionally. As hard as you try to avoid it, you’re going to pick up way more than you have any interest in knowing about the people you’re sitting in close proximity to for eight hours a day. You’ll come to know everything from health and personal life to bathroom habits and carryout preferences (my personal favorite is when they’re trying to have a quiet argument with their spouse over the phone). Being a bit of a tech head, I always seem to notice when someone brings up the topic.

This morning, I overheard someone ranting quietly about people sending him text messages, as in “I’m 47 years old. People got no business sending me text messages. If they want to talk to me, they need to pick up the phone.” Why hello there 1954, it’s nice to meet you. This kind of attitude is troubling in someone who has access to every modern communication technology, up to and including A/V via satellite. If he’s this resistant to something as basic as a text message, what are the chances he’s going to be open to anything that really changes the way he gets his job done?

This post has served as nothing more than a reminder that flexibility is important in life. It’s no less important as a professional. If text messaging is enough to stress this guy out, I hope I’m not around when a real stressor comes along. I’m pretty sure scrubbing blood out of upholstery is outside the scope of my job description.

Under Construction…

Posted on July 20, 2011 by jdtharp

We are quite literally “under” construction. The office suite the floor above us is, as far as I can tell, undergoing some type of renovation that requires the repeated dropping of bowling balls onto the bare concrete slab. This activity has the unpleasant side effect of making it sound like the entire second floor could become the first floor at any moment. It’s not bad, as long as you don’t find loud, hollow thumping and continual rending of metal distracting or annoying in any way. Other than that, it’s practically unnoticeable.

I’m probably an idealist, but I’ve always thought this kind of work would be best done outside of “core business hours.” You know, when the vast majority of employees are not making their limited effort at being productive for the day. It’s sort of the same way I look at day-time janitorial service. Sure, having my cube vacuumed is nice and all, but it’s awfully distracting when I’m sitting in it making a phone call or actually trying to get something done. In television shows, the cleaning crews always come at night. Maybe that happens in the executive suite, but for the drones, everyone seems bent on showing up at the most inopportune time.

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