Tag Archives: time suck

Tea with the queen…

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I was invited to tea with the queen. Well, not exactly tea and not with the queen, but there’s a rough equivalency. It certainly felt a lot like being a bit player serving at a 16th century royal court.

What I was really invited to to was to spend the better part of 90 minutes sitting quietly against the wall watching the gods on Olympus eat their lunch while discussing the important matters of the day. Let me repeat that for those in the back… I was summoned into the elite presence to watch people eat their lunch.

Yes, I was also there to provide deep background information on the flying circus and traveling medicine show that I’m nominally charged with running, but in reality I was there, missing my own lunch, in order to watch a large group of other people eat theirs. 

It’s hard to imagine that was the best possible use of 90 minutes with less than two weeks to go until zero hour, but I suppose the pay’s the same whether I’m getting anything done or not. So, if anyone out there is in need of someone to stop by and watch you eat, feel free to get in touch. I’m quite sure I’ve had these experiences enough now to qualify expert.

Late to the party…

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It turns out YouTube is for more than cat videos and an occasional source for demonstrations on how to make some minor household repair. I’d been so busy with Netflix and Hulu that I really underestimated it as a platform for actual quality content… so yes, I’m arriving late at this particular party – and I’m coming to it by way of my usual circuitous route.

After seeing some stupendous English country manor featured in a period drama I traipsed down the rabbit hole looking for a bit of information about the house itself… which led through Wikipedia to Google and ultimately through a whole series of clicks to YouTube and a fairly recent BBC documentary called The Country House Revealed. This, of course, led to a whole series of other programs built around the 18th century homes of the English aristocracy, which led to programs about renovating 400 year old houses, which led to various “reality” house hunting shows based in the UK.

The internet is a strange and wonderful place… as long as you manage to avoid the scammers, cheats, and schemes. Although I’m never quite sure if that’s better or worse than losing hours of your day with experts trying to decide if a particular pile can be traced back to Sir Christopher Wren or not. In any case, I’ll never doubt the utility of YouTube again.

The eternal meeting…

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We have the same meeting every two weeks. I don’t mean just a regularly occurring staff meeting or anything, but rather a meeting where we all get together and discuss the exact same issue, come to the exact same conclusions, and then part company knowing full well that we’re going to do it again in 14 days just like clockwork. Nobody, myself included, has the intestinal fortitude to recommend that we stop having this meeting so it seems possible that it will continue on indefinitely into the future, just as it has been held for as long as any of the current participants can remember.

As far as I can tell, meetings are the great enemy of government work – probably work in any large organization. I’m not saying if we cancelled this meeting that my productivity would suddenly jump by 200%, but it would free up an hour or two every week to do something, anything that might be even marginally productive. After all, when what you’re currently doing is complete dead time, even a fractional improvement in how you spend your day is a huge improvement in productivity. That’s not even counting the morale bump that would come from permanently cancelling time sucks like this one. Of course the likelihood of any of that coming to pass is somewhere between slim and none, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to go to.

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.