Tag Archives: what annoys jeff this week

An entirely unplanned month of down time…

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Some of you may have noticed that I basically took the entire month of July away from posting here. I didn’t exactly give up writing – my proverbial cup of post it notes and electronic memory aids runneth over. Whether anything will eventually become of those snippets remains to be determined.

When I started off this self-imposed sabbatical, I was wading through a health issue that left me decidedly unmotivated and challenged my ability to string together any kind of coherent paragraph. My attention span for a couple of weeks was just about nil. I doubt I could have written well with either a proverbial or literal gun to my head. Instead of forcing the issue and inevitably being frustrated by the results, I opted to just not.

What I wasn’t going to do here was half ass my way through it. That’s the kind of thing you reserve for writing you have to do – like in the office. It’s not the way you treat a blog you’ve been tinkering around with for well over a decade. If I couldn’t give it a fair shake, I’d much rather just bide my time until I was in a better and more editorially competent head space. 

There are still days when I feel I’ve mostly got cotton between my ears, but I’m happy to say that I do seem to be over the initial hump. I’ll give you a bit more information on that next time, but for now suffice to say that I’m feeling mostly like myself again. More importantly, I feel like the words aren’t a constant struggle to get down on the page.

Back in early July, when I made the decision to take a pause, I was afraid I’d miss the day-to-day rhythm of these posts. I missed the writing to be sure, but it turns out I didn’t miss the self-imposed daily deadlines. Knowing that, I’m taking the daily deadlines off the table for the time being and intentionally scaling back from five posts a week to a more manageable schedule of posting on Monday and Thursday (with the inevitable extra thrown in when the mood or breaking news begs for something more immediate). 

I’ll be keeping What Annoys Jeff This Week? as a regular Thursday feature. Monday’s post will be the usual wide-ranging sort, but hopefully will make use of the extra time to flesh out ideas a little more fully and exert some additional editorial control over the final products. As time and other circumstances allow, I fully expect to bring more days back into the schedule over the coming months. For now, I want to use this as an opportunity to focus on improving quality versus simply hitting quantity goals.

So, as we prepare to slip into August, I’m pleased to be back and eager to begin once again dispensing full-throated snark into the void.

Four hundred eighty one…

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As I was fiddling around with last night’s post, I did some tangentially related digging in the archive. I was somewhat absentmindedly thinking about the overall premise for Thursday night’s regular edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week and how out of character it would be to have simply one thing standing on its own. That, inevitably, sent me scurrying down my own internet rabbit hole.

I’ve always thought of WAJTH as a static item. A blast of three very short form topics showing up each and every Thursday nearly without fail. That it consistently shows up on Thursday is true enough, but for the rest, well, memory isn’t always the best guide to what actually happened in the past.

As it turns out, over the last 481 weeks – yes, that’s nine and one quarter years of being annoyed – WAJTW has apparently evolved. The first post, way back on September 1st, 2011 covered four topics. After that, for almost a year, posts swung between four and five topics. It wasn’t until August 2012 that I seem to have adopted the standard three topic format that has dominated Thursdays ever since. Maybe it took me that long to figure out how to condense the week into the three most annoying – or at least the three most easily set to print – things that happened.

I’ve been filling up pages of this blog for so long now, that it’s easy to forget that there really is an evolution of style over time. Looking back at some of those early editions of WAJTW, I like to think I’ve made some stylistic improvements in how I get my points across. Even if they are better written, I was a little impressed with how many of the topics from those first few weeks are still things that annoy the hell out of me on a regular basis. Some things, it turns out, really are eternal.

Tables, or A lifetime of questionable career decisions…

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Note: Yes, I know this place and time is usually reserved for the weekly edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week. Go ahead and read to the end and let me know if you don’t understand why I called a quick audible this week instead.

If you guys are tired of the current trend of posts I’ve been thinking of as “Chronicles of an Event Planner,” you’ll have to take my word that I’m even more tired of writing them. Sadly, though, life happens where we are and not necessarily where we want to be. That’s my way of saying sorry, but you’re going to have to live with at least a few more days of the jackassery that ensues when you try to drag 60-odd people into a room and make them talk about things they don’t really want to talk about.

Today’s illustration in the extraordinarily limited scope of my influence revolves around the size of the tables we’ll be using. Let me start off by saying the original floor plan – the one we’ve used repeatedly, over the last few years, was on target right up until some point late yesterday afternoon when it was not. Different configuration? Sure. Can do easy. Except for the part where someone at echelons higher than reality didn’t like the size of the other available tables – wanting six person tables instead of the standard eight person tables that were readily available.

This demand for smaller tables triggered the standard paper chase into which two senior analysts lost an ninety minutes each of productive time. The end result of this particular goat rope was that the eight person tables ended up being fine. All it took was sending a guy over to the venue, setting one of them up, snapping a few pictures showing it in its natural environment, and coming back to illustrate that believe it or not, we really do know what the hell we’re talking about.

Sigh. I’ve spent more time thinking about the various sizes and shapes of tables and how they can best be configured to create an intimate café feeling today than I would have ever expected to spend in my lifetime. It’s hard to imagine this was the job Uncle had in mind when he trained me to move Armies across the globe or provide relief supplies to those stricken by natural disaster.

Talk about the leading edge of a life marked with so very many questionable career decisions.

On tap…

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I know a few weeks ago I promised a new fiction project was in the offing. I haven’t forgotten about that. It’s safe to say the preliminary research and reading have taking a touch longer than I anticipated, but it’s still there on the agenda. I’ll try to make a fresh start of it after the inevitable mayhem and chaos that surrounds the last days of December. I’m not even going to even try putting a date on when that little gem might be ready to see the light of day.

Lest you think I’ve spent the last month dithering about to no good purpose, I do have a touch of good news for what’s on tap in the coming weeks. What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2013 in Review is coming along nicely. With plenty of fresh, snarky commentary, I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking, correcting, and generally updating each post to make it the very best level of vaguely hostile I can manage.

Assuming I don’t fall down and hit my head on something hard or develop the same debilitating sickness that laid me low last Christmas, I expect to deliver up WAJTW:2013IR for your New Year’s Day reading pleasure (plus or minus a few days). My best guess is the final cut will weigh in around 23,000 words and with all of the spelling, grammar, and usage corrections I’ve been making, the whole thing should be downright readable… something that doesn’t matter all that much when you’re blogging, but that paying customers seem to put a premium on for some reason.

All that’s left to do is finish editing October and November, finish writing December, write the intro, design the cover, and then upload everything to the interwebs and hope it all looks good together electronically. Sigh. Maybe I should reconsider that first of the year date.