Tag Archives: teamwork sucks

Teamwork still sucks…

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TEAMWORK640-400x320My school of thought has always been that if given the choice I’d always prefer to be told what to do rather than how to do it. That’s how I approach most everything in my life. Now I’ve learned to turn that tendency off when required based on prevailing moods and opinions, but as a whole when I need someone to do something my default setting is always to tell them what rather than how.

That’s maybe one of the reasons I’ve never been particularly good at giving guidance. Despite being grown adults, it seems that most people want to be told exactly what, how much, or for how long to do something. Look, if I have to go into that level of detail with you, chances are it’s going to be faster if I just deal with it myself.

I’m not asking anyone to invent cold fusion over here. We’re talking about pretty basic stuff. If you’re pushing 50 and can’t figure out how to get there from here no amount of guidance I can provide is really going to help you. In fact it’s probably just going to make everything even more complicated than it already is.

There’s a reason that historically my best efforts are the ones when I’m left on my own to be a team of one. If I’m bluntly honest, this week has so far only served as a stark reminder that teamwork still sucks.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Team Building Activities. It’s pretty rare that I run into a topic on which I can’t speak with at least some degree of confidence. I discovered this week while developing and delivering a group presentation titled “How to Change a Diaper” that almost anything related to the care and maintenance of a human baby is apparently one of those topical areas with which I am completely unacquainted. I’m happy to give the presentation, but ecstatic to leave the details and task execution to others. In this case, ignorance truly is bliss.

2. Sleep. Yes, I know this is one that crops up from time to time, but it’s been worse this week than most. In your standard day, you only get 24 hours and to be frank, I’m not willing to give up any more than 1/4 of it on just laying around essentially unconscious. It’s not that I’m exceptionally busy or feel that anything I’m doing is especially important, just that I think there are better ways to spend the day that being quietly tucked into a warm bed. Lately, though, the standard six hours hasn’t really felt like enough. I probably just need to find a way to crank more caffeine into the system to overcome the increased coefficient of drag.

3. The media. Again. For the last week or so, they’ve been filling the television set with the story of an overzealous and potentially crazy neighborhood watch captain gunning down an innocent kid on his way home from the corner store. Other outlets are screaming that the kid wasn’t as innocent as we’re being lead to believe. Either way, it makes a good story and a nifty bit of narrative for the media to run with. What none of the stories do, though, is tell me exactly what happened. Personally, I’m reserving judgement until more than speculation is known. We were once a nation of laws rather than a media drive lynch mob. It’s a pity that’s not still the case.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics…

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It feels like I’ve been blogging forever… It especially feels that way when I have to flail around looking for something new to write about. Looking at the data, though, I can see that I’ve been going at it at one place or another since 2005. I guess time files when you’re hostile and willing to share it with the world. In fairness, five years in internet time basically is forever, so I guess I should consider that some kind of milestone.

Some weeks and months have been better than others. My best ever single day = 58 unique views (this was the iPhone 4 release day incidentally). Best month ever (June 2010), 388 unique hits. The statistic that I’m most proud of isn’t a hit count per se. It’s simply the phase most often used in search engines that brings people to the blog: Teamwork Sucks. Given that October is the one year anniversary of that particular post, I take a perverse pride that it still has legs. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and Google “teamwork sucks” and you’ll find that I’m #7. It’s like I’ve really made a difference in the world. We’re going to disregard the fact that Google’s link doesn’t take you to the actual post… It’s the thought (and that fact that it gets you to the blog at all) that counts.

Since Get Off My Lawn seems to be something that is here to stay for the foreseeable future, there are a few changes that I’m hoping to get to in the near future. I want to get a little more focused in my writing… 21 categories and 131 tags is probably something that I can cut down with a little effort. Bringing a little structure and order to the back room of this operation strikes me as being a very good idea.

It’s just policy…

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Policy
–noun, plural -cies.
A definite course of action adopted for the sake of expediency, facility, etc.: We have a new company policy.

Most of my professional life, I’ve been a policy guy in some shape, form, or fashion whether it’s writing, interpreting, or ignoring said policies. As a policy guy, it’s part of my mission in life to point out the general foibles of those who set policy… Even (and perhaps especially) when those policies are promulgated by those with whom I share bonds of affinity, friendship, and respect. Though it’s sometimes harder to poke the people you like with a stick, that mostly just means that it’s really worth doing.

As a matter of policy, my employer has decided that supervisory personnel are not allowed to work at locations other than at their assigned duty location (i.e. from home, a telework center, etc). Notwithstanding the fact that somewhere north of 60% of all personnel work somewhere other than the “corporate headquarters” and most of us supervise people who are geographically dispersed, the general belief is that you can’t manage what you can’t see. I have philosophical differences with this position, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such a policy per se.

The challenge comes when, for unforeseeable reasons, the message goes forth that all personnel, including supervisors, will telework until such time as they are directed to report to the office. Seems all well and good from the outside, but the malcontent in me has a compulsion to poke at it just a bit further. The message that was really sent here is that “we know you’re capable of doing your job from a remote location and that’s what you’re going to do when it’s convenient for us… But don’t ask to do it when it’s convenient for you.”

I don’t have any moral qualms with hypocrisy and I certainly don’t have issues with working from home. I’m better able to focus on writing and reading when I’m not interrupted by “walkups” or people yelling across the room a couple of times an hour… And as we all know from our previous reading, a productive Jeff tends to be a happy Jeff. Still, it would be nice to do it occasionally when it helped me meet some of my own requirements rather than being marks on a tally sheet showing how quickly we got everyone “back to work.”

I’m just sayin’.

Searching…

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People search for some really disturbing things on the internet, but I’ve found it curious that the most consistent search that brings this blog to the surface is the simple phrase “teamwork sucks,” which was the title of a post I wrote last fall during the epic battle of wills between me and the Army’s educational system. While that battle has chilled into what’s likely to descend into a long cold war, the post lives on… and gets a few hits a week because apparently, teamwork really does suck. I like the irony of something that only lasted a few weeks now seems to have achieved a degree of immortality because of Google… and some proportion of the populace that is bent towards misanthropic tendencies. That makes me happy inside.

In a related topic, I noticed that we’re starting to work our way up the Google search results list. There’s a pesky orthopedic surgeon with whom I share a name who is currently standing in the way of reaching the top spot. That’s not a battle I really want to take on yet… The time, effort, marketing, and endless tagging seem to be beyond me at the moment. Sure, it’s purely an ego thing… but is there really anything wrong with wanting to be the first thing Google thinks of when someone “mentions” your name?

Teamwork sucks…

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OK, team, for the record tomorrow is a federal holiday. That means that the sooner we get our shit together this afternoon, the sooner we can begin enjoying an extra day off this week. This is a pass-fail course, so no one is grading you on how many cute pictures you can put into a briefing. I hate to break it to you, but no one cares. You’re not being graded on this assignment and they guy who does your yearly evaluation will never know that you had 12 slides instead of 10. I grow weary of trying to nudge the discussion from “what sound lobsters make when they’re boiled” to something slightly more productive. I appreciate that you want to be a hard charger and do great things… but this is a mandatory training course, not your actual job. We all have enough garbage to deal with back at the office, so why are you trying to make life harder than it needs to be when we’re on TDY? Sorry, but there’s just no good reason that we should have been working at 4:00 today when they cut us loose to build a briefing at 10:30. You, my dear teammates, are asshats.

A Rant in Two Parts…

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1) Driving home this afternoon there was mass confusion on I-95 north. Typically such confusion is caused by one of three things, a) an accident, b) rubbernecking resulting from a recent accident, c) car fire. Not this afternoon, though. Today, the middle lane of 95 was clogged with a sub 50-MPH driving, flashers flashing, flags flying funeral cavalcade. WTF? The guy is dead, he’s not in a hurry to get anywhere and even if he was, doing under 50 on 95 is not going to get him there any faster. Would it kill you bastards to be a little considerate to the living. I’m sure Mr. or Mrs. X was very special to you, but even they would think you’re an ass for holding up traffic like that.

2) I had the apparently unrealistic expectation that people in graduate level classes would be able to write a coherent sentence. I was wrong. I was dead wrong. I’ve spent the better part of the last two hours editing a 10 page paper my “teammates” put together. Appalling is the only word that comes close to actually describing the grammatical carnage. I finally gave up after fixing the worst of it. If anyone is interested in reading the drivel these people came up with, please let me know. If nothing else, it should reassure your own sense of inherent superiority.

Centennial…

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I had hoped to write this centennial blog post in tribute to you good and true readers out there. This topic, however, has been preempted by an overwhelming need to rant. I will save my half-written homage to you people for my bicentennial post or other appropriate celebratory occasion. With that said, on to the rant already in progress…

So far my plans for this work week have included the following: 1) working in Winchester; 2) working in an undetermined location that would not be Winchester; 3) working in Baltimore; 4) Working in DC instead of Baltimore; 5) working my “regular job” instead of the “special” project I have been working on; 6) Working on the special project; 7) actually getting home on time and having some semblance of my normal life back for at least a week regardless of what “type” of work I was doing.

To give you a little idea what a normal day looks like, I wake up between 0400 and 0430 and leave the house no later than 0515. I arrive at the office at 0630, take lunch around 1130, and leave at 1500. If the stars are aligned and I have managed to not anger the Beltway Traffic Gods, I should be home by 1630. All of those times have some flexibility built into them to account for things such as traffic, stupid Metro, and the occasional last minute issue that needs to be resolved at the office. I like my schedule, but we only live together; I’m not married to it.

Today, for all outward appearances, should have been reasonably “normal.” Met with Big Boss Man at 0745 to get marching orders for the day and between three of us managed to churn out much of what he had requested well ahead of the Thursday deadline he requested. Feeling good about our head start on meeting this deadline, we adjourned a few minutes after 1500 and headed for the stupid Metro and our respective places of residence.

I knew there was trouble when I looked at my Blackberry sometime around 1545 and noticed that at 1523 we all received an email with the subject line, “Where are you guys” and no additional message. A follow-up email had come through in the meantime exclaiming, RETURN TO OFFICE. The difficulty was that by this point, I was squarely in the middle of bumper-to-bumper traffic trying to merge onto the exit for I-95 north. Quite simply, I was stuck and not RETURNING TO anywhere in the foreseeable future. By that point an additional follow-up email had hit my inbox, which by that point had the same effect as a horrendous accident in which modesty demands you avert your eyes, but curiosity gets the best of you. This last email was instructions to change our work schedules to 0800-???? for the rest of the week.

Now, simple civility demands that one may want to inquire if we were able to make those changes. After all, the last anyone had heard, this was to be a “normal” week. We’ve all been jerked from pillar to post for this damn project and for the most part we’ve done it with remarkable good nature. It’s not even that a schedule change lays us into an hour of the morning when traffic is a nightmare and parking all but nonexistent. It’s simply another straw on an already overburdened back.

For me, the bottom line is this: I’m tired. Exhausted is a more accurate description. Things have a way of looking better by first light, but right now, this minute, I just don’t care if we succeed or fail. I just want it to be over.