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.

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.

Letting stupid slide…

Posted on January 23, 2012 by jdtharp

In the last week I’ve been assigned three different projects that at least one or more other offices have thought they had the lead in developing. I’m not saying communication between offices around here is piss poor or anything, but as a staff puke who’s main mission in life is to put out whatever fire springs up that day, I can tell you that there’s nothing more aggravating than finding out you just spent a day working on something that someone else two floors up was also doing. All that means is one of you just wasted the better part of a day that could have been spent doing something more productive. Of course spending the day building a paper air force would be more productive than creating reports that never make it beyond your own hard drive. I’m not bitter, though. That’s just the way of things.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only person who sees things like this. I seem to be the only one who every points them out as enormous wastes of time. Or maybe everyone else sees it and just accepts it as standard procedure. Maybe they’ve got the right idea. My career is full of moments I would have been better served to keep my mouth shut and head down. Letting stupid slide isn’t in my nature, but after a long, hard slog I’m starting to think it’s a skill I need to develop more fully.

Filler…

Posted on December 8, 2011 by jdtharp

I am a professional; highly educated, certified, and experienced. I’ve forgotten more about this kind of work than most people know. Today, however, I am going to be a warm body filling a seat because someone at echelons higher than reality has determined that the most mission critical thing 500 of us can do is make sure the auditorium is full during a presentation.

I’m sure whatever this graybeard has to say will be very interesting and informative, but not at all relevant to any of the eight or nine assignments sitting on my desk waiting to get finished in a semi-timely manner. It’s all a matter of priorities, I suppose. In this case the priority is clearly on looking good rather than actually doing good. As long as I know that up front, I’ll happily adjust my expectations accordingly… and make sure my Kindle has a full charge.

Type…

Posted on September 29, 2011 by jdtharp

As a technology organization, there are a few things that should pretty much always work. I’m past belaboring the importance of keeping the network up and running, though. The things that you need to focus on are apparently more basic. Like a keyboard that doesn’t drop every fourth or fifth letter while you’re typing.

Without this pretty standard piece of kit, you end up with sentences like “Norma people souldn’t be expected to wrk under thse conditions.” Which is all well and good until you actually start working on something, you know, that needs to get done in a reasonable amount of time. So now instead of actually being productive, I get to put on the editor hat and spend the day correcting everything that I’ve written. I shudder to think what tidbits got past me before someone bothered to point out that I was writing like a small retarded child.

I don’t know why I still hold out hope that someday basic office equipment issued by my employer will actually works as specified. Personally, I’d rather pony up my own equipment and have something I knew would work than continue to bend my spear on the underpowered and ill-repaired hand-me-downs we subsist on. Honest to God, this isn’t work, it’s just the vague illusion of being busy.

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.

Suggestion box…

Posted on August 5, 2011 by jdtharp

Every organization that pretends to focus on customer service has a suggestion box, or comment cards, or some kind of web survey for the good intentioned or flustered to “make their voice heard” by management. That’s all well and good, because usually at the bottom of the suggestion box is a black hole that devours any kudo or complaint before it has a chance to ever again see the light of day. Sadly, sometimes a well intentioned someone will mistakenly take one of these pearls of wisdom to heart and launch an all-out blitz to review an unsolicited recommendation.

Now usually I can avoid these academic exercises, but recently I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got tagged with giving one the once over. The truth is, what’s being suggested might actually be a good idea, but I’ll never know because the form was written in a language caught somewhere between incomprehensible gibberish and techno-babble. Instead of writing this off as the rambling of a well-intentioned crank, I’ve got to try to track this whackjob down and pick his brain before we send along a formal thanks, but no thanks letter.

Meh, that’s time well spent.

Telework…

Posted on July 15, 2011 by jdtharp

In theory, telework is a brilliant idea. Disaggregating your workforce to hundreds of different locations means your not necessarily subject to a single point of failure that could shut down operations. Power out at the home office? No problem. Half the workforce can log in from home, Starbucks, Nevis, or really any place with an internet connection. It’s the kind of idea that give planners a warm fuzzy when faced with how to prepare for typhoons, earthquakes, or terrorists bent on leveling your building. It’s one of those things that’s probably more brilliant in concept than in reality. On the whole, I tend to think most people generally want to do the right thing most of the time. But how many of your average employees are going to be able to resist the temptations that face them when they’re working from home or some other location – throw in a quick load of laundry, change the baby’s diaper, or making just a quick trip to the supermarket. I mean after all, no one will know you’re gone and you’ll be right back anyway. No harm no foul, right?

As an employee, I love the idea of telework if for no other reason than the very idea that being tethered to a desk eight hours a day equals a productive work week. The technology available has moved us beyond the need for dedicated office space for a great many kinds of work. Human nature being what it is, though, I suspect most people might just be more productive if they have someone looking over their shoulder from time to time… but personally, I’d rather sit at home in my fuzzy slippers and get eight hours of work done in three and call the rest of the day “research.”

Nothing…

Posted on July 8, 2011 by jdtharp

I’ve been in place now for just about a month. It’s fair to say that in that time, I’ve done nothing. In fairness, it took two weeks for the IT guys to get me set up on the network and then figure out that I needed access to a laundry list of systems. But after that, it’s been pretty much nothing. A few rounds of “hey check these numbers” or “go sit with so-and-so while he does something,” but as far as getting a sense of what I’m actually supposed to be doing in this new job? Yeah. Not so much. I know that sooner or later that’s going to change and they’ll want me to be at least marginally productive, but until then, have you ever tried to fill eight hours a day and 40 hours a week with nothing productive? Let’s just say that I’m reading a lot more news these days. If I can’t be productive, I should at least be well informed.

Inner teenager…

Posted on July 1, 2011 by jdtharp

It’s Friday. Before a three day weekend. I’m more than a little surprised that there are more than three people even in the office pretending to work today. Even with a mostly full staff pecking away at their keyboards, it’s painfully obvious that the biggest game in town today is watching the clock roll on towards 4:00… or 3:01 if the powers that be keep up with long-standing pre-holiday tradition. Either way, it’s safe to say we can mostly write today off as professionally useless.

On a related note, I’m usually accused of being a 60 year old man at heart, but long weekends have a tendency to bring out my inner teenager. The anticipation of being turned loose. The rush of heading out the door. Rolling down the windows. Turning the radio up. Forgetting about work for a few days. For me, at some basic level, that’s what freedom feels like. Maybe that’s not such a bad way to kick off the Independence Day weekend.

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