Tag Archives: planning

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. I don’t think I’m giving away any state secrets when I say that if you build a giant office complex at the end of a peninsula and then fill it with people, there are only going to be a limited number of ways people can get and their cars and drive away from that facility at the end of the day. When you close some of those already unlimited number of exits things get worse. When you additionally closed one of the few that is usually open just in time for peak traffic, well, you get thousands of people clogging every feeder road fighting to measure progress towards the gate in feet rather than inches. I get that shit happens, but when it does I feel like someone would have a plan to address it – like maybe opening up one of the long shuttered gates just for the day and just for outbound traffic. Being the considerer of worst case scenarios that I am, I’m abjectly horrified at the prospect of what a real honest to God emergency evacuation of this place would look like when just closing one single gate can leave traffic gridlocked for over an hour.

2. The death of a dream. With my 1.6 billion dollar dream now laying in ashes, divided to those with better luck in California, Tennessee, and Florida, I suppose it’s back to building wealth the old fashioned way – piling money regularly into a well-balanced, low-fee retirement vehicle. It’s not nearly as sexy or exciting as winning the Powerball, but it’s something… and statistically way more likely to pay out, though I think my newest ambition to retire early to a 17th century Scottish grousing estate may have to be shelved for the time being.

3. Extemporaneous speaking. Back when dinosaurs rules the earth and I was a student we were required to deliver “off the cuff” presentations. Being able to give a talk without the benefit of notes was something they assured us would be of the utmost importance in whatever fictitious versions of the “real world” they’d concocted in their heads. In the actual world I inhabit, extemporaneous remarks have almost never come into play. Instead of mastering the content there’s a constant stream of requests for notes, bullet points, or an entire script no matter how mundane the topic at hand. Maybe having that seamless, well-reasoned, and articulate messages is reassuring to other people around the table, but for the guy putting the words in your mouth it never rises above “vaguely unsettling.”

Your turd shoot ain’t gonna wipe itself…

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I wasn’t part of the conversation, mercifully, but it strikes me that people who should have better things to think about spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decide where they’re supposed to sit… or instructing their functionaries to spend time thinking about where they’re going to be sitting at some point in the future.

Rank, privilege, order of precedence, protocol, say what you will but from my observation nothing productive ever came from worrying too much about those things. I’ve met presidents, potentates, and captains of industry, but none of them have really overawed me. That’s probably because no matter how they rank among the great and the good, I know they still look ridiculous dropping a deuce or having an orgasm. It’s the human condition. Best not to forget that despite what ornamentation you might be wearing, your turd shooter ain’t gonna wipe itself.

Although some of the high and the mighty might even be nice enough people, but I’ve still never met one I like more than I like my dogs. I guess maybe there’s just too much Western Maryland left in me to care much about where I sit or who’s on my left or right. There are enough real, honest to God issues in the world that need dealing with. It seems that the least we might be able to agree on is that as long as there are enough chairs in the room, who’s sitting where really, truly, doesn’t make any difference.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Eye Exams. In the interest of accuracy, I should say it’s not really the exam that annoys me. It’s the fact that during the exam, the doctor dilates my eyes and then sends me out to the lobby to look at new frames. Have optometrists every really considered the irony of this? Is it, perhaps, their one big inside joke? I have to take my glasses off to try on new frames, so I already can’t see worth a tinker’s damn and then adding insult to injury your fancy drops have go and turn my vision from bad to worse. So anyway, I have new frames coming, but I really don’t have any idea how they look. As far as I could tell when I bought them, they were just dark smudges high center of my face. That’s a hell of a way to pick something you’re going to wear for a minimum of every one of the next 365 days.

2. Cancellations. I need to start keeping track of the number of hours I spend getting ready for things that end up being cancelled at the last minute. While I’m perfectly happy to not have to sit in a random one hour meeting, I’m never going to get back the three to five hours of prep time it takes to get ready for a meeting that’s cancelled. Worse yet, there’s every chance that same meeting will be rescheduled later in the week or the next and that means the prep time involved just doubled. Everyone is busy, but that doesn’t feel like it should be an excuse for piss poor planning.

3. Exercise. Take one look at me and you’ll know this body isn’t a temple, except maybe to Bacchus. With my back out of sorts most of the spring and a good part of the summer, there wasn’t much, if any exercise happening. Doing much more than sitting in a nice hard backed chair for more than 15 minutes at a clip left me pretty hobbled. Now, if only so I can get the doctor to stop scolding me, I’m back to spending time on the bike every night. Sure, I can stick my nose in a book and make it tolerable, but deep down I still think of it as a waste of 45 good minutes I could be using to blog, or work on the next short story, or any of the other things I try to cram into the few hours between getting home from work and collapsing at the end of the night. I envy you people out there who look forward in anticipation to your daily exercise. I don’t think I’ll ever get to a point where I see it as much more than another “must do” activity sucking time away from the things that I really want to spend my time doing.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Surprise meetings. Some things happen without any warning – earthquakes, tornados, someone punching you in the throat for being stupid – all things that could theoretically happen out of nowhere. What shouldn’t happen out of nowhere is calling someone out of the blue after sitting on the material they gave you a month ago to tell them they have four hours to make a shit ton of changes and present that information to the Grand High Host of the Everlasting Knowitall. If you’ve had something for a month and just getting around to telling someone you’re going to need it completely changed later that day, it’s not a “no notice event,” you’re just a douchebag.

2. Fast food strikes. I flipped burgers for $4.15 an hour. When I see on the news that the “me” of today think they deserve $15 an hour for doing that job, I mostly just roll my eyes. When I hear they’re going to take the day to picket their employer demanding $15 and hour and a union, well, I nearly fall down laughing. In the 5 years I was associated with the burger flipping segment of the economy, I never once contemplated the value of my efforts being worth anything close to $15 an hour. The idea of signing up for Burger Flippers and Fry Cooks Local #209 never even crossed my mind. Unless you’re looking at a management track or life in corporate, I’d not recommend considering McDonald’s or its ilk as a long term career opportunity. We should be incentivizing people to move up and out of minimum wage jobs as quickly as possible, not raising the wage so it’s considered just another “lifestyle choice.”

3. Peanut Butter Jelly Time. I’m almost 36 years old and just had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of sugar free kool-aid for dinner. There are rare occasions when I really think I suck at being an adult. This would be one of those occasions.

Space Available…

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When you go to the trouble of moving multiple thousands of people 150 miles down I-95 and spend a few billion dollars kitting them out with new buildings all around, one of the things I’d think you’d do is make sure to have more than two rooms available in which to hold a meeting. Now usually, I’d rail against the need for meetings at all, but given the nature of my employer, they’re simply a fact of life to be endured. Therefore, it doesn’t feel like a stretch expecting that there would at the very least be a room available somewhere (that doesn’t require a 15 minute drive, a cross-country hike, or requisitioning a boat) for those moments when you need to put more than five people in the same room. God forbid you need to do something crazy like connect to the internet or join a teleconference or video feed being piped in from another location. That’s all apparently several bridges too far.

Instead of being able to use one of two such rooms within steps of where I actually work, I got to spend the vast majority of the morning making desperate phone calls and begging other offices to free up space for us to use… out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than for actual compensation in any form. So here’s tonight’s helpful tip from your kindly Uncle Jeff: If you ever find yourself working for a big, bureaucratic organization and in the position of deciding how many fully-equipped meeting rooms you’re going to need, go ahead and take you initial estimate, multiple it by three, and then add at least two just as safety stock. That’ll get you close to the number of rooms you’re actually going to need… because God knows the fate of the free world depends largely on your ability to find an empty room on no notice for whatever wild-assed meeting someone wants to have on the spur of the moment.

And it’s only Tuesday. Sigh.

Long range planning…

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When it snowed last week, I didn’t put a high priority level of effort into shoveling the driveway. After all, I have a large, powerful 4-wheel drive truck and given the relatively southern location and moderating influence of the nearby water, snow doesn’t tend to stick around very long here at the rental homestead. I shoveled out a parking pad and a path to the mailbox, figuring that that would be sufficient for a couple of days until the melt set in. It seemed like a reasonable decision at at the time.

What that decision failed to take into account was the air temperature wasn’t going to climb above the low 20s for days on end. I also didn’t count on getting another inch or two of snow sometime today. Still, with the truck, a snow covered driveway with a few packed down icy spots isn’t exactly a big deal. It wasn’t until last night that I remembered that I was going to drop off the truck at a local body shop on Monday so they could do the repairs from last week’s unpleasantness. That means I’ll be swapping out my 4×4 for a rental that will probably have more in common with a matchbox car than it does with an actual motor vehicle. That friends, is a failure of long range planning and a lesson in unintended consequences.

Now that the driveway is too packed down to shovel effectively, I’m jumping to Plan B: adding a couple of bags of road salt to my market list and hoping I can melt two ruts down to blacktop between now and Monday. Woops.

Planning for the end of the world…

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OK, well I might not have been planning for the actual end of the world, but I certainly spent a slice of the morning signing a lot of paperwork that will kick at my own personal world’s end. After all, nothing says happy holidays like planning out your own demise. Putting a will in order was something I’ve needed to do for a long time, but that doesn’t make the process any more enjoyable. Suffice to say, this Friday’s theme has largely been, “Wow, being an adult sort of sucks.”

I’ve never believed in being able to plan for every potential contingency, but I really do feel a little better having some basic guidelines in place in the event I wander off the sidewalk and get hit by a bus tomorrow. Frankly, before my time comes I’m planning on technology reaching a level where I can just download myself to the network and live on indefinitely as electrons… because really, what does the world need more than my brain in a computer with nothing but time to spew out new blog posts on into the infinite future?

Landlording ain’t for wimps…

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Everyone assumes that when you have rental property you’re making money. That hasn’t exactly been my overall experience, but I accept that it’s the general perception of how things work. Most of the time, the cash flow from the condo in St. Mary’s offsets the giant sucking sound that is the negative cash flow coming out of Memphis. Between the two, I come fairly close to breaking even more months than I don’t. Of course then we have the occasional singularity in which both the condo and the house are sitting vacant at the same time.

That moment you realize it’s about to happen is probably one of the few times in life you’re ever going to seriously consider becoming an arsonist as a valid career option. When you go from happily paying rent and breaking even on everything else to sucking wind on rent plus two mortgages, let’s just say that all the fantastic financial management lessons you’ve learned from Suze Ormond or Dave Ramsey go right the hell out the window. The only thing that matters at that point is how fast you can bring cash in the front door and how fast you can shovel it out the back. It’s not so much a case of planning as it is an exercise in crisis management and triage.

Fortunately, the two leases almost never expire at the same time, but when they do you’d better believe that you’re about to get a serious lesson in why landlording ain’t for wimps.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Bank of America (I believe this entry represents their 2nd oak leaf cluster for the year to date). I totally understand you wanting proof that my condo is covered under a master insurance policy that secures the entire building and not just the walls of my unit. Due diligence is a good thing. I’m happy to send you whatever information you need. I’m going to be less enthused the second time I send you the Bank-Of-America-Logo-1same information. When you ask me for the third time to provide you with exactly the same information I’ve sent you twice already, well, I’m going to start questioning whether I can really trust you to hold my mortgage at all since you can’t seem to keep track of something as simple as the name and phone number of an insurance agent.

2. Waiting until the last minute. All rumors to the contrary, I’m actually a fan of procedures. I like knowing that there is a way to do things and that if I follow the instructions step-by-step I’ll get a predictable result. When, after following all the required steps and procedures, I find that I’ve been bumped in favor of something that’s being thrown together at the last minute without going through the same wickets, it makes me wonder if in the future it might not be better to go ahead and wait to the last minute, declare an emergency, and then do whatever the hell I want. If flying by the seat of your pants gets the same result in the end and takes 1/10th the planning time, tell me again why I should follow the actual procedures?

3. Voicemail. Yes, thanks to the wonder of modern technology you can leave a message for me on my phone that I can listen to at my convenience. You see, though, the thing is that checking voicemail is never really convenient. I see that you called. If it’s a number I recognize, I’ll call you back as soon as I can, no message needed. If it’s a number I don’t recognize, you’re going to voicemail because I don’t want to talk to you so leaving a message doesn’t really do much beyond antagonize me. More often than not I’m going to delete your message without listening to it anyway, so why not save us all some time and effort? And if you do need to hear my voice immediately and I’m not picking up, chose one of the plethora of text-based communication tools available on your phone and send a quick “need to talk ASAP.” Even when I don’t have the time or interest to drop everything else to focus on just one conversation, there’s a pretty good chance I’m keeping an eye on text messages and email and will get back to you just as fast as my two little thumbs will carry me.

Logistics…

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Supply Lines As close as I can tell moving me and two dogs from one side of Maryland to the other is the greatest logistical challenge which has faced mankind since Patton’s army raced across northern Europe. At present the packing list includes:

1. Two bags for me
2. Two crates stuffed to capacity with “dog stuff”
3. One Rubbermaid container of Christmas presents
4. Two containers of dog food (they can’t eat the same thing, of course)
5. Two hats
6. Two coats (one light, one heavy w/ zip out liner)
7. One backpack waiting to be stuffed to the brim with computer and networking equipment, a laptop, an iPad, a Kindle, and all the associated power cables
8. Two dogs

I’m sure I’ll be adding to that list throughout the night, but if you’ll excuse me I need to go start working on the load plan for the truck. I think I should have sprung for the extended bed instead of just the extended cab.