Tag Archives: schedule

Guilt…

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I’ve been feeling guilty lately. Because I’ve never really trusted them not to either pee all over everything or shred every rug in the house, Winston and Maggie have slept in their kennels at night since they were puppies. They seemed find with it and since dogs sleep about two-thirds of the day anyway, I sort of figured it was no harm/no foul. It was leaving work late the last two days that got me thinking, though… On a typical weekday, when I leave on time and get home on time, they’re in their crates about 17 hours a day. That leaves seven hours for wandering around, sniffing, pooping, barking, and doing dog stuff. When I leave early or get home late, of course, that number decreases dramatically. And that’s when the guilt started.

Intellectually, I’m convinced that both of them are perfectly happy snoozing in their crates as they are on the living room floor. Emotionally, though, I felt a compulsion to give them a shot at having the run of the house at night. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable enough to let them wander all day while I’m gone, but surely if I’m there at night there’s a limit to how much trouble they can get themselves into without waking me up, right?

Well, it’s so far so good. Last night was the first step in this grand experiment. When I went to bed, Maggie sprawled out taking up more space than seems possible for an 80 pound Labrador. I’m not sure how big a fan of that I am yet, but it seems that the precedent is already set. Winston, I’m fairly certain, slept in the basement until around 3AM, when he came upstairs wanting an early morning belly rub. I’m not sure I’m going to be a fan of that, either. Other than those relatively minor issues, the test run went well. Nothing got destroyed. Nothing (obvious) got peed on. And they both seemed perfectly happy to lay around the bedroom until I got ready to take them out this morning.

Like I said, I know it’s nothing but my own guilt at getting home late that’s driving this, but I secretly hope they’ll prove trustworthy enough to justify this new degree of freedom.

Good intentions…

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I always sit down to write with the best of intentions… like taking time to edit whatever it was I just dumped on the page or hitting some topic that’s caught my attention with a painful level of detail. More often than not what actually happens is I hit “publish” as soon as I’m done typing and then fix errors as I find them… sometimes days or weeks later. And detail? Yeah, let’s face it, most of the time I’m lucky to stop rambling long enough to draw out a salient point or two. I’ve noticed that it’s mostly a battle between putting together quality or putting together volume. For the last six months or so, I’ve come down pretty squarely into the volume camp and tried to post five days a week. The part of me that’s curious about such things wonders if I’d write better if I only posted half as often.

One of the aspects of Get Off My Lawn that I’ve always enjoyed is that is has a “as it happens” feel because the posts a function of whatever happens to be going on at that moment. Setting a schedule of posting on say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at least to me, seems to take away some of that flexibility. I don’t want to turn this into a set piece affair, writing on some formulaic “topic of the day,” but at the same time I’d like to bring a little more editorial and quality control to improve how things read and look when they come hot off the press.

I read a lot of blogs and know there are many out there who seem to effortlessly produce large volumes of quality posts. It’s not a contest, but I’m definitely interested in how much time they spend composing their posts and where they get their ideas. I like to think I’m a better writer now that I was when I started blogging. I know I’m certainly more introspective now. I might even be more technically accurate, but better? I’m not so sure. Sometimes it feels too mechanical, like I’m posting just to post.

40 hours…

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The 40-hour work week where everyone arrives and departs at the same time each day probably made eminent sense when it was instituted for a country with a massive manufacturing sector committed to assembly line methodologies. When you’re living in an electronic age and the output product of your efforts live in a storage device as a series of ones and zeros, a fully regimented work schedule is a little harder to understand. In a plant where they build cars, you can expect X number of frames to roll by a given point on the line each eight hour shift every day of the week. OK, a standard 8-hour day makes sense there. In the information sector, Wednesdays might be the heavy volume day and represent 11 hours of required work while Monday only requires five hours of work. Even though the requirements have shifted, we largely cling to that magic eight hours a day, five days a week concept.

If I were king for a day, I’d propose a new standard for information workers. In this system, you’re paid your base salary for 2080 hours a year. On days when you get the work done in 5 hours, feel free to go on home. On days when workload is high, plan on staying a little longer to get it done. All things being equal, I’d be willing to bet that in most cases, the time would even itself out over the long term.

Of course we know that all things are not equal. Some people are going to abuse a system based on them being honest about their workload. Some people will work half days every day and others will put in 12 hours every day. So yeah, I intellectually understand that there are pretty high barriers to getting away from the standard work week. I get that my new system is a managerial nightmare and completely impractical, but on those days when I blow through my assignments in 4 hours, it sure would be nice to have the option of punching out for the day rather than sitting around watching the clock tick on towards the end of the day…. because let’s face it, when their actual work is done, no one is sitting around dreaming about what other great things they can do for the overlords, right?

OCD Takes a Night Off…

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One of the ongoing challenges with my self-diagnosed mild-OCD is that there are a whole bevy of things that normal people seem able to put on a back burner that stay a priority for me no matter what else is going on. That shaggy grass is going to get cut no matter how god awful the neighbor’s yard looks – and it’s going to get trimmed to. The laundry is going to get done once a week even though I could probably go three or four weeks without technically needing to wash clothes. Things are going to happen on a schedule even though there’s no rea practical reason why they need to. I’m a creature of habit, we all know this.

Tonight was the first night since I’ve been in the house when the compulsion to “do things” hasn’t been triggered the moment I walked in the door. The guest bedroom still needs put together and the basement looks, well, like a basement, but tonight I just came in, sat down and watched television rather than listened to it while doing three other things. It was sort of nice in a complete slacker kind of way. That’s not saying that the little voice inside my head that likes everything to be “just so” won’t make himself known again by this time tomorrow, but for tonight, everyone including the dogs seem content just to let things be.

Schedule…

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This is going to seem like a really minor detail, but for the last 7 years, my schedule as been 6:30-3:00. Start early, end early get back to the house with plenty of day left. Now we all know that I’m a creature of habit, but even I was surprised at how pushing things back just an hour would throw off my day. That’s not really a complaint per se, just an observation. Getting to the house after 5:00 is just downright strange at the moment. Once it settles in as part of the new normal, all will be well. After all, it is sort of nice not to necessarily want to go to bed at 9:00 most nights. With this new schedule, I push it back as far as 10:00 or even 10:30 if I’m feeling froggy. That’s right, we’re living on the edge here at the top of the Bay. Don’t ever let it be said that I’m not willing to broaden my horizons.

 

Meetings…

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It’s not an official duty day without attending at least one meeting. It is, therefore, imperative that we have an effective and efficient means of coordinating who should attend and when they should arrive. If only there was a widely available and heavily used computer program that would make that possible. Oh, yeah… Outlook does that. In theory. What setting up meetings in outlook really does for us, though, is generate mass confusion surrounding any meeting that we might ever attempt to schedule. In fairness, I suppose it’s not so much an Outlook error as it is operator incompetence.

Scheduling a major meeting at our “organization” (i.e. any aggregation of more than four people) involves a process that looks something like this:

Step 1: Set up a meeting request in Outlook

Step 2: Change the time and/or date of this meeting at least three times

Step 3: Receive one or more cancelation notices

Step 4: Get three follow-up meeting requests either the same or slightly
different than the first

Step 5: Receive a reminder email from the meeting organizer two days before the meeting

Step 6: Receive a reminder phone call from the meeting organizer one dat before the meeting

Step 7: 15 minutes before the meeting receive 1-3 automatic reminders from Outlook depending on how many of the original meeting requests the organizer remembered to cancel.

Step 8: Arrive at the appointed conference room to find it empty and the lights off

Step 9: Consider the misguided series of steps that led you to your current career.

If you’re lucky, the no one else will figure out when or where the meeting is actually supposed to take place either and you’ll at least have a nice quiet conference room to hide in for a while. Quiet weeping is optional at your discretion.

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.

Clock watching…

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Some supervisors live and die by the clock. I’m not one of them. If you get your job done, why should I care if it takes you five hours or eight? Of course if I know it takes you five, I’m going to find something else for you to do, but if you’re quiet about it and don’t draw attention to yourself, what’s it to me if you check in on Facebook or look up the afternoon’s scores on ESPN?

I’ve never understood the people who live to catch someone taking a long lunch or coming in a handful of minutes after their scheduled start time. If the work is getting done, who’s being hurt? Seriously, if you have nothing better to do than run a stopwatch on your colleagues, maybe it’s time to take a look at your own workload and see if you’re doing all you can. More importantly, if you want to continue keeping the official shot clock for the office, remember that it’s very likely someone just might start watching you and waiting for an excuse to follow your example.

Payback is what it is, so don’t be surprised when you get got.

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.

Early riser…

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I’ve had your sorry ass locked out of the office every morning for three weeks, told you five times that shift starts and 6:30, and still you’re already here when I pull in to the parking lot at 6:15. The hood of your car is cool so I know you’ve been here for a while.

The real question, of course, is why? You’re going to have to take my word for it that wanting to eat breakfast at your desk isn’t a good enough reason for me to want to get sued later because you worked 30 minutes a day longer than you were supposed to and didn’t get paid for it. So seriously, shift starts at 6:30. I’ll unlock at 6:25. If you want to keep coming in and standing in the hall for 30 minutes like a dipshit, that’s all on you.

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.

Sleeping in…

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I didn’t wake up this morning until 7:45. Yes, for me that counts as sleeping in. After a solid ten hours of sleep, my outlook on the world has improved dramatically. It’s the first Saturday in a long time when my schedule wasn’t preset by class work so at the moment, I actually have absolutely nothing on my “must do” list.

I think I’m going to enjoy having my life back.

Remember that time I bitched about taking too much time off?

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Yeah, I don’t usually bitch about that. I’m a lot of things, including a bit of a workaholic, but I’m a firm believer in using your leave instead of giving it back at the end of the year. I took a day of sick leave on Monday quite frankly because I didn’t get home until 1-somethhing in the morning and the 0530 wake-up call just wasn’t going to happen. Today I took off at 1:00 to go to a doctor’s appointment. Friday I’m taking leave so I can meet some repair people at the house. Next Thursday, I’m scheduled for a dentist appointment in the morning and a stress test in the afternoon. Friday I’m scheduled for a physical first thing in the morning. It’s all just ri-goddamn-diculous. What I want to do is go to work so I have a chance in hell of catching up from all the time I’ve spent on the road in the last month. Plus, I have to get up at 6:00 in the morning on a Friday so someone can play with my twig and berries, stick a finger up my ass, and not even get laid in the deal.

So yeah, this is why I avoid doctors like the plague. Once you see one, it’s like a never-ending cavalcade of office calls and follow-ups. There is always one more test, one more specialist, or just a few more minutes on the devil’s treadmill.

All I want to do is go to work and be left alone. Is that such a crime?