1. Virtually in person. Monday was one of those days where I was in the office fulfilling the (in my opinion) questionable requirement that our little team must always have a warm body in the building. Like the ravens at the Tower of London, the whole enterprise would collapse should we all simultaneously be doing the work from anywhere other than our assigned badly lit, gray-toned workstations. The only meeting I had that day involved seven or eight people… half of whom were also physically in the office. It’s awfully telling that despite so many people being on site, the whole meeting was held over Teams with everyone participating from their desk. If we’re all going to be meeting virtually from our own section of cubicle hell, I’d really love a non-corporate speak explanation of why there’s even a push to have more and more people in the office? You’ll never convince me it doesn’t defy logic and plain common sense.
2. Pulling rank. This week, as I may have mentioned, was the yearly spectacle where I attempt to stage manage / executive produce a three-day series of presentations. This year there were 9 organizations and 21 separate presentations across three days. This event rated permanent support from me, three guys who managed the IT infrastructure from soup to nuts, and a handful of rotating support personnel from each of the participating organizations that fell in for their portion of the event and then buggered off. By way of contrast, there was another event on Tuesday morning. This one lasted 90 minutes. It rated support from a staff director, six subject matter experts, three guys to manage IT, and another half dozen aides, support staff, and various strap hangers. If it sounds like I’m in any way angry and a little bitter, I like to think it’s justified hostility and just one of the many reasons why I hate the last week of April.
3. Choices. At the princely cost of $4.25 per gallon, I filled up the truck this morning from about a quarter tank and spent $77.60. I didn’t jump online to “Thank Brandon” or scream “Orange Man Bad” because I know the American president has next to no direct control over setting global commodity prices. I paid my bill without much comment, because paying his way in this endlessly beshitted world is a man’s job. Well, that and because no one twisted my arm 12 years ago in west Tennessee when I bought a big V8 powered pickup truck knowing full well that on its best day, I might get a little more than 16 miles per gallon. Brandon didn’t do that. I did… and so did everyone else who opted for size and power over efficiency. Want to find someone to blame? Take a hard look in the mirror.
Tag Archives: rank
Busy and important…
Imagine, if you will, ten grown adults in a room. All of them are very busy and important. You know this because they’re wearing ties. Ties are always the sign that you are a busy and important individual. They stare intently at the table before them covered with hundreds of sheets of colored paper, as if trying to divine the sanctified intent of the gods on Olympus. 
After a brief bit of this intent staring, all the very important and busy grown adults spend the next 90 minutes alternately locked in conversations unrelated to their reason for being there in the room or attempting to stifle yawns and not look completely comatose.
There’s an 11th person in the room, though. He’s not wearing a tie (because he’s a well respected malcontent and cynic – and because no one bothered to tell him in advance that he was going to be part of this particular gathering). He’s the guy in the room whose sole responsibility is for making sure the PowerPoint slides being shown on the “big board” get flipped on time. That’s another way of saying that for almost two hours, his only responsibility in all the known universe is hitting the right arrow on a laptop keyboard more or less in time with the disembodied voices being pumped into the room over speakers.
I realize that being busy and important is most likely a full time job. Still, I think that in austere fiscal environment where we need to make every hour count towards something productive, maybe one of the other ten people in the room could have handled the hard work of being PowerPoint wrangler rather than calling in an 11th and making that his only mission in life. Of course that’s only true if we care about efficiency rather than personal convenience and giving the impression of being too busy and important to add even the most basic and undemanding of tasks to the hard work of sitting there trying not to fall asleep.
JEFFREYTHARP.COM 