Tag Archives: office

Draft…

Posted on by

In my line of work, the written word is pretty much our stock-in-trade. Now there are always going to be good writers and bad writers, but all I really expect from anyone is the ability to be an average writer. It’s technical documentation and policy, I don’t need James Michener or Stephen King here. 100 times out of 100, what I’m looking for is a solid draft of whatever document I asked requested. What I don’t need is someone asking every 30 seconds if this or that sentence structure was better or if “and” was preferable to “or”. You’re asking these things without giving me context… and that makes the questions seem random and chaotic rather than just annoying.

I’m trying to go easy because I fully understand that it takes a bit of time to really get how things are supposed to flow. That’s fine. But when I ask for a draft, that’s really all I need. I’ll make the editorial decisions and rearrange sentence structure on the fly. That’s why they pay me the not-as-big-bucks as I’d make in the private sector.

 

Editorial Note: This is the first in a series of previously unpublished blog’s appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Cubicle stalker…

Posted on by

I came back from lunch to find one of the more emotionally needy members of the team standing in my cube. You know the ones; they need special reassurance that they’re doing the things right… every time they do anything… regardless of how basic the task. Yeah. That guy. I’m sure you’ve met him.

According to sources in a position to know, he had been standing there for 15 minutes. Standing in my cube, while I was at lunch, for at least 15 minutes. Just standing there. And waiting. Standing there waiting to tell me that he had uploaded some documents to our network drive.

In the future, it would be completely appropriate under these circumstances to send me an email. Leave me a note. A voicemail I’ll even get eventually. Though really, you can feel free to upload files to the network to your heart’s content without my direct supervision. That’s probably another issue altogether, really.

I can’t fathom why, in the name of all things good and holy, it might have seemed like a good idea to spend 15 minutes standing in my cube waiting for me to come back from lunch. Were you expecting a treat of some sort? Up until today, that was the only 55 square feet of real estate in the entire building where I feel even a modicum of sanity. You’ve taken that from me now. The sanctity of my cube has been violated.

I can’t tell you how much I don’t need a cubicle stalker in my life.

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

Perspective…

Posted on by

There’s nothing like a retirement party to put a career in perspective. We all like to think of our working lives as being productive and valuable and perhaps that maybe after 30 years of work, we’ve left our mark. Most of us, of course, would be wrong in thinking that. Sure, there are exceptions – Hyman Rickover is the father of the nuclear submarine force; Henry Bessemer made steel economical; Watson and Crick identified the double helix structure of DNA – but for the average schmo sitting in a cubicle there aren’t going to be entries in even the most obscure history book – unless you create your own entry in Wikipedia.

I attended a retirement luncheon – a function that no one ever really wants to go to, but that guarantees a long lunch without anyone getting on your case – and had the dismaying realization that even the people working next to you don’t really have a clue what you do on a day to day basis. The highlight of the “ceremonial” portion of the event was the soon-to-be-departed employee’s supervisor saying a few kind words. One would hope to hear how they made the workplace better, or contributed to the war effort, or saved homeless kittens in their spare time.

What this particular career boiled down to was this: A supervisory musing about how he’d “always remember the great report you wrote about the problems in Peoria.”

Wow. That’s perspective.

For most of us, that’s how a career is going to end. Think on that next time you’re working late on an “important” project or skipping vacation days to make sure a project is finished on time. In 20 or 30 years when your middle of the road colleagues are sitting around a table at a middle of the road restaurant bidding you farewell it’s likely all you’ve done is written a great report about Peoria.

Live your life accordingly.

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

All news, all the time…

Posted on by

So I’ll ask you a question. If a newsletter is published and only the Uberboss reads it, is it actually a publication? That question is, sadly, not rhetorical. Every quarter, our staff spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 man-hours planning, organizing, editing, and publishing the “official” organizational newsletter. Actually, we spend more time than that because we usually end up writing most of the articles ourselves because our “call for contributions” generally goes unanswered… and when someone does answer the call, we generally spend even more time rewriting their bit because it seems possible that English is their third language. Or possibly their fourth. That, however, is a separate rant.

Our usual circulation is about 20 print copies plus an electronic version posted on the organization’s intranet site. Last quarter, the electronic copy was accessed something like 37 times. We have several hundred employees. You can do the math on how well this product is being received. Since the majority of our employees work away from the home office, it doesn’t even have the virtue of being used as birdcage liner for most of them.

The workflow for this product is something like this:

• Complete final draft
• Perform editorial review
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Rewrite or change layout at request of Uberboss
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Have “editorial board” meeting with Uberboss
• Rewrite or change layout
• Submit to Uberboss for approval
• Wait until Uberboss is out of office
• Publish
• Ignore for 2 months
• Repeat

Given the hours required and the pay rate of those involved, the cost to publish breaks down to something like $12,000 per quarter… or $210.52 per view.
Putting up numbers like that, it’s hard to believe that Uncle Sam is ever short on funds.

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

Mr. Clean…

Posted on by

I think it’s great that we have a contractor that handles the building’s janitorial services – cleaning restrooms, emptying trash, buffing the hallways. But I don’t understand why all of those things need to happen during normal business hours. Ever tried having a phone conversation when 2 industrial strength vacuum cleaners were running in your 40×40 foot section of cubicle farm? I don’t recommend it.

And while I’m on the topic of office cleanliness I’d happily trade one round of vacuuming a week for the occasional pass of a swiffer over the top of the cubicle walls. As a small test, I’ve had my name written in the dust on top of a file cabinet since Christmas. Seriously. I occasionally have to go back and go over it again it so the new dust doesn’t fill it in. I understand that it’s an office and not an operating room, but some attention to the little things would go a long way.

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

Outlook…

Posted on by

I’ve been operating on the apparently misguided assumption that Microsoft Outlook was the standard issue email client for federal offices everywhere since the dawn of time… or at least the last 15 years, whichever came first. At least that was my assumption until I overheard this conversation this morning…

Supervisor: Your inbox filled up over the weekend. Make sure you clean it out and move large files to your archive folders so they’re not taking up space on the email server.

Employee: It’s not my fault my inbox fills up. If people didn’t wait till the last minute to send stuff in, there wouldn’t be a problem.

Supervisor: But if you move those big files out of your inbox *pointing at the screen* we can solve the problem.

Employee: But I need those files.

Supervisor: I know, but they’ll be saved in your personal files so you can still get to them.

Employee: Well, I asked to go to that Outlook class but didn’t get in. This isn’t like the old Outlook so I need training and it’s hard to get into those classes. They’re always full. I don’t know why people can’t just spread out when they send stuff in…

Sigh.

Is Outlook really so hard to use that 60 people a month are signed up for training on how to schedule meetings and set up personal folders? I’ve been using Outlook since I got my first “real” job in the summer of 2000… Not like this is exactly a new piece of software we’re dealing with here. Sure, it’s been updated a touch now and then, but it’s still the same old Outlook that it has always been.

I guess the real question in my mind isn’t so much why that many people are signed up for training as it is how someone gets to be a 40-something year old career bureaucrat without knowing how to use email?

 

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of previously de-published blogs appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Respect the rank, not the person…

Posted on by

We’re the government and no self respecting government agency goes more than a day or two without having a meeting. Mostly, given our slightly inconvenient location just outside of BFE, we keep our meetings to ourselves. Sadly, though, there are times when someone vaguely approaching the definition of a VIP shows up. Such an arrival, of course, requires a meeting befitting the distinguished status of the guest. That means the development of many, many wonderful charts… because the more charts presented for your consideration, the more important you are in the hierarchy. And then there’s the hardcopy – because a VIP apparently can’t be troubled to remember something from one minute to the next without having a fist full of paper slides in front of him. Reading the ones projected across the room onto a 8×10 foot screen would certainly be below his esteemed level of dignity.

With enough notice, it’s generally possible to make anything happen. Deciding at 8:30 that you want to change half the slides for a meeting starting in half an hour, sure, that’s manageable. But for God’s sake don’t come back ten minutes later and tell everyone they’re late to the meeting… that isn’t supposed to start for another twenty minutes. And then pace the aisle sighing and making comments under your breath about being unprepared. When the only thing keeping someone from beating you to death with a keyboard is an ingrained sense of respect for rank and a desire not to go to jail, it seems best not to antagonize that many of your underlings all at one time.

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.

My generation…

Posted on by

One of the most shocking moments of my early career was realizing the level of discomfort most of my fellow employees felt when dealing with issues of technology. On the outside, I made the (unfortunate) assumption that government was full of code breakers, supercomputers sending men to the moon, and software that could track anyone, anywhere. I suppose those tasty bits of tech may exist somewhere, but the most advanced piece of hardware that anyone in my agency has is their Blackberry (already two or three generations out of date). It’s fair to say I was shocked and appalled at the number of people in government who just don’t get the role technology is going to play over the coming decades.

We’re in the leading edge of that future now. Utilities like Facebook and Twitter may have a toy-like simplicity – I’ve heard my own leaders dismiss them as “for the kids” and nothing more than a drain on productivity – but as more traffic is driven to the web, as electronic communication in its many forms continues its rise, the fact is that this is going to largely be the way people communicate in the future. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you received an actual letter from someone under 40?

The age of instant communication and access to the sum total of all human knowledge is going to level the bureaucracy, whether the bureaucracy accepts it or not. It’s happening already – those with a little bit of savvy are using basic tools like Dropbox, Google Chat, or SharePoint to circumvent the cumbersome “authorized” communications channels that stovepipe information to “collaborate in a matrixed environment.” Instead of sending a request for information up the chain-of-command and waiting for the answer to come back down from on high, we’re reaching out directly to the person with the information we need. That person may sit a few desks away or not even be on the same continent. The beauty of the age is that location doesn’t matter. The future is going to look like the cloud, not like a hierarchical org chart.

There’s more information stored electronically than we could ever hope to archive in the biggest file room. Electrons and knowing how to use them are what’s going to be left when we as an organization realize that the old forms are no longer viable. Information has always been power. Managing and controlling the flow of electronic information is going to be the “institutional knowledge” of our time. I don’t think command-and-control model of management will ever go away, this is government after all, but we few, we happy few who know how to make the electrons hum are going to be the voices of power behind that throne… if only because the king doesn’t know how to turn on his computer.

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.

Reading is Fundamental…

Posted on by

In theory, I work with responsible adults who have the ability to both read and understand the English language. The majority have an undergraduate degree and many have at least one master’s degree. Therefore, you’d think it would be easy enough to follow a set of directions that said simply:

Review the attached documents and provide your written feedback via email to Mr. Random Bureaucrat at random.bureaucrat@bigagency.gov not later than 10:00 AM.

Of course, what actually happens is you get flooded with messages that say things like “I didn’t like the way things were formatted, so I changed the layout and increased the font because I can’t see so good. Oh, and I changed some of the numbers because I don’t think they were right.” Or someone wanders to your cube wanting you to take dictation about the 37.25 things they want to change. Or someone sends in their changes at 4:32 PM and is then offended when you don’t drop everything, immediately recall the data that had been sent up the chain of command at noon and make their “critical” changes.

Look jerkwater, we spent three months crunching the numbers you sent us. Don’t blame the analysis because you don’t like how things turned out. And definitely don’t blame the analyst when you want to send in “updated” data six hours after the absolute last deadline for changes has passed.

For the love of God and all things good, right, and holy, spare us all the embarrassment of how badly it must suck to be you and read the instructions next time.

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.

Brave new world…

Posted on by

In countless briefings, charts, and memos, my agency uses the standard “traffic light” metric to express whether a particular project was operating within tolerance. Green was good to go. Amber signals that there is a problem. Red, the most dreaded status, indicates that the project has come off the rails. The phrase “apathy is green” began as an offhand remark to a colleague that my level of disinterest had maxed out for the day. As my career progressed, that simple phrase came to identify more and more closely with how I feel every day pulling into the parking lot in the dark hours of the morning. My level apathy is most assuredly green – top of the scale. My cup-o-apathy runneth over, as it were.

I’ve been blogging for a long time now and I noticed that over time the posts came back to the issues I was dealing with at the office. I’d write out a diatribe only to realize that while posting it would be cathartic, I wasn’t quite willing to commit career suicide to get things off my chest. Many of those old posts got deleted before I ever finished writing them, a few of them got saved, and the ones that did get published were so cut down and vague that they bore little resemblance to the facts of the matter. Launching this new blog, removed from personal connections, gives me a fresh opportunity to approach these topics

In the tradition of Office Space and Dilbert, I intend to use this space as a forum to tell tales from the workplace. For those, like me, who dwell day to day in a cubicle, I can only assume that many of the people and situations I intend to describe will sound familiar to you. For the happy few who live beyond the cube farm, perhaps all I can offer is an insight into life as a cog in the great bureaucracy. Like any writer, I welcome your feedback, your criticism, and your participation.

I am a bureaucrat. These are my experiences. Thanks for reading along.

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.