Tag Archives: work

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Plateaus. I’ve been hovering about a pound or two on either side of 190 for a little over a month now. I’m not doing anything different than I was when I was steady losing. I’m just… stuck… in a spot where the numbers say I should be losing slowly but steadily. The obvious option – slash another hundred or two hundred calories out of the day isn’t appealing since I’m already coming in around 1800 a day. Losing even more time in the day to being out walking or on the damned exercise bike is equally unappealing. This process has already monopolized more time and effort than I really wanted to allocate for it. Fifteen months in, and there’s still not one bit of this effort that has proven to be a good time. 

2. The reward for good work. The reward for good work isn’t recognition, or accolades, or more money, it’s simply being assigned more work. In some cases, it’s being assigned more work that someone else in your work unit can’t or won’t do. Not only does that become a bit awkward when passing in the hall, but it’s also a bit agitating in that I don’t have the stomach to just let projects die on the vine because I don’t want to work on them. I wish I did. In the government there seems to be a whole cottage industry in being able to duck assignments you don’t want just by quietly refusing to do a damned thing with them. As I trundle into the last third of my career, I wonder if it isn’t time to take a page out of that book since there are no obvious consequences.

3. Buyer’s remorse. I bought a spanking new La-Z-Boy recliner a few months ago. It’s very comfortable. It looks good. I spent at least an hour sitting in it in the showroom before making the decision that it was the one I wanted sitting in the living room for the next 10-15 years. I thought I made a solid decision. Here’s the thing… I don’t like it as much as the recliner that it replaced. I don’t enjoy the fact that it’s a rocker as much as I thought I would. Because it’s a rocker, it also comes on a raised platform, and this is where my displeasure was unexpected and something I couldn’t have reasonably accounted for in the store. I’ve always kept a dog bed on the right-hand side of wherever I ended up sitting in every living room I’ve ever had. While I watched TV or read in the evening, I’d casually dispense ear scratches or pets. Because of the raised platform configuration of this chair, I can’t sit there and pet the dog while he’s laying down without throwing myself into some oddly convoluted listing position. So, I’ve done the only reasonable thing and pulled the old recliner out of mothballs and pressed it back into service while relegating the fancy new La-Z-Boy to the sunroom/office as a comfortable place to sit during the duty day.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Pay their fair share. I hate the phrase “pay their fair share” when politicians, particularly Democrats, talk about tax policy. What the fuck exactly is a “fair share?” In 2021 the top 1% of income earners paid almost 46% of federal income taxes while earning 26% of total income. Sticking your hand in someone’s pocket “because he can afford it” smacks of confiscatory do good-ism at best and undisguised socialism at worst. Maybe the actual issue is the government simply has too many irons in the fire and is spending entirely too much money in areas where it has no business operating. God knows I’ve seen enough cash poured directly down the toilet in my 20+ years driven entirely by a general officer who was visited overnight by a series of good idea faeries and decided some new project or program was his one big chance to leave a mark in the history books. 

2. Training. I sat through what I expect was the 20th iteration of “threat awareness” training this week. Look, being aware of terrorists and insider threats is a good thing. But the material hasn’t changed in as long as I can remember. Some of the case studies they discuss are now 30 years old… as if we haven’t had a bevy of fresh new insider threats crop up since then.  Do the bosses really expect I forgot everything from fiscal year 2024 already? If the training is going to be mandatory – and worse yet – in person year after year, the minimum I feel like the audience could reasonably expect is to change up the delivery a bit. Unless the objective is to check a box on some form somewhere. In that case, mission accomplished. Carry on.

3. Florida. People who live there seem to love it, but watching storm after storm slam into Florida I’m trying to imagine any situation that would ever make me want to live there. Sure, Maryland gets a little too humid in August and maybe a little too cold in January. We get tapped by a hurricane maybe once in a generation and even then, it’s mostly a glancing blow from a storm that expended most of its fury by the time it clawed its way to the middle and upper reaches of the Chesapeake. Unless you live on perilously low ground, it’s an inconvenience. Compared with living in a location where I’d have to be prepared, for a good part of the year, to load the car with my most irreplaceable belongings and flee for higher ground. From the looks of things, plenty of people think it’s worth it, but I’ll never be one of them.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Opportunity. I think I was hit on while shopping for books at one of my favorite used and antiquarian shops last week. As I was looking through stacks of stuff deep in the bowels of the place. A 30-something blonde, well proportioned, with a pixie cut appears at my elbow. “Excuse me,” she cuts into my browsing. “Do you know if they accept credit cards here,” she asks. I’m sure I mumbled something confirming they did without more than glancing up from whatever book about the age of fighting sail I was considering. But she hovered there. Expectantly? Maybe waiting for me to pick up the thread? I have no idea. I didn’t even consider the possibility until 8 hours later when I was safely back home with my feet up for the evening. Chalk that up to a potential missed opportunity.

2. Reengaging. Last week while I was enjoying my traditional early July vacation, I was largely disengaged. I was disengaged from current events, from people, from writing, from just about everything except tending the house and animals and occasionally dipping up the road for some carryout. Honestly it was delightful. Then, as it does, this week came trundling along and required me to reengage with the world and everything has basically been awful ever since. There’s a lesson somewhere in there, I’m sure. 

3. Meetings. Yesterday, I sat in an in-person meeting for the first time in at least a year if not more. Sitting in a conference room with 25 or 30 other people felt, in a word, archaic. It was like engaging in a pantomime from some bygone era. An old fashioned meeting happens so rarely that for the first 30 minutes it was almost an entertaining novelty. As that novelty wore away, though, it was impossible to forget that each of those 30 people was a potential plague carrier and represented more people than you’ve been around in a single room in months if not years. I’m not saying there’s never a role for these in person meetings, but if we can hold them to no more than one a year, I think that would be entirely sufficient. 

A roll of the dice…

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You’d think that after nine days off, I’d have been rested, relaxed, and at least nominally prepared to go back to work. All those things might have been true on Sunday night, but on Monday morning exactly none of them are true. Wading in to the week deep backlog of email pretty much put an end to any opportunity for good feeling that could have bled over into the work week. Funny how that works.

One of the skills I’ve mostly mastered over the years is leaving the “work stuff” safely at work. I’ve been doing it so long now that I can even do it when the work stuff resides, for more days than not, in my home office. Once the lid on the laptop closes at the end of the day, it might as well cease to exist. It’s honestly a helpful mental trick if you can manage it. 

Unfortunately, because I like getting paid and would absolutely suck at living under a bridge or in a refrigerator box, eventually I have to start paying attention again – or at least I do for the next 11 years or so. Even so, it’s getting increasingly difficult to keep up the appearance that everything is a Big Serious Issue just because someone at echelons higher than reality says it is. 

Look, I get it that most everyone wants to believe whatever they spend their time doing is the changing the world or saving the universe. It’s comforting, but objectively it’s almost never the case.  On an average day, the average person working themselves into a lather doesn’t do much besides raise their own blood pressure.

In any case, I’m back at work for the next few weeks… and keeping my mouth from calling out every bit of fuckery I see seems like it’s going to be the project of the summer. How well that will work really is a roll of the dice at this point. 

At work (but not really)…

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Look, I am nominally “at work” this week. There are a couple of days where I’ll even schlep into our very own version of fluorescent-lit cubicle hell to prove that I’m doing my job for the man. With that said, I think it’s only fair to point out that while I may be physically present, my brain is already deeply plugged in to the vacation time that I’ll be taking next week. 

As I cast my thoughts back to 2023, I seem to remember every time I took some time off leading to some new and unpleasant medical issue popping up. As we approach leave taking season 2024, I very much would like to believe that trend can’t possibly continue. I’d like to not spend the lion’s share of this year’s vacation time not sprawled on the couch or hanging out with new doctors. 

After whetting my whistle for down time this past Friday, I’m honestly checked out.

This week is already off to a stupid start, with something I thought I put nicely to bed last Thursday before I logged off for the long weekend raising its ugly head while I was otherwise occupied. I suppose I shouldn’t be in any way surprised that it’s only after something should have been done, finished, and over that the great and the good have decided to start paying attention to it. Ass backwards seems to be the only way we ever really do anything.

I know this is just another work week, but I’m absolutely going to need people to ratchet back their expectations to the absolutely bare minimum – and then maybe go just a little bit lower. Short of someone walking over to my desk and literally setting me on fire, I’m going to have a hell of a hard time finding the motivation this week. All I’m saying is that if there’s something you need from me – and you want it done with any level of attention to detail – maybe wait until we get into June. Otherwise, you’re going to get what you get and I’ll make no apologies. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Morale building activities. Our office seems determined that it’s going to lick the morale problem by doubling down on potluck lunches and after-hours team building events. I invite you to piss directly off with that nonsense. If you want me to be part of a team activity, schedule that mess while you’re paying me for it. And damned well don’t expect me to cook (or inflict my colleagues cooking on me) in order to participate. Why the hell we can’t just take an hour or two, get out of the office, and patronize a local restaurant like normal people is completely beyond me. It’s all a hard pass for me. If that reinforces my rep as a non-joiner or problematic player of team ball, so be it.

2. Late night interruptions. The number of times each week I wake up at two in the morning to take a piss, spend an hour flopping around not sleeping, and then drifting off for an hour or so of absolutely ridiculous dreams before waking up to start the day bleary eyed and disgruntled is something of a too regular occurrence. It’s not every night, which would drive me batshit crazy, but it’s easily once every week or two and that makes it more than regular enough to be obnoxious. There’s a whole level of frustration knowing you can’t hold your water or fall back asleep on command the way you used to. Most other nights I still manage to sleep like a baby, but not knowing whether the night will be restful or ridiculous is just short of infuriating.

3. Protests. I’ve always looked slightly askance at protestors as a group. Clogging up sidewalks, roadways, or parks and making a spectacle / nuisance of yourself never seemed like a good way to make any kind of point. Once I started working in DC, I developed an even lower opinion of the average “protestor.” Inconveniencing me as I’m just trying to go about my daily activities is, I promise you, no way to ever convince me of the virtue of your cause. In any case, any time I see news of protestors getting all froggy – whether it’s on city streets or on college campuses – I just get preemptively annoyed and assume they’re chanting and occupying whatever for some cause I’ll inevitably think is foolish. 

It was the end of a decade…

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For the last ten years, approximately a third of my work year has been dedicated to party and event planning. This week is the first time since 2014 that the annual big show is set to start and my fingerprints aren’t all over it. My feelings are unexpectedly mixed.

I’m absolutely thrilled that I haven’t needed to convince dozens of presenters that they need to do things my way. I’m ecstatic that I haven’t had to deal with months of schedule changes and wanna be primadonnas making absurd demands over every detail. I’m incredibly grateful that I haven’t had to spend time discussing the best way to lay out tens of thousands of square feet of circus tents, how best to remove light poles from the parking lot, what live bands we can get for three consecutive nights of social extravaganzas, or whether it’s strictly legal for the US Government to host a whiskey tasting and cigar bar as part of an industry engagement event. 

I won’t need to figure out the inevitable chaos of registration and check in. The moment something goes wonky with the live stream won’t be my problem. I won’t be fielding complaints from people in the audience who have an outsized sense of their own importance because they’re an Executive Vice President of Who Cares. 

I’m not going to get a panicked Teams message that the bathroom is flooding. I won’t spend the night dreading the possibility that the whole tent complex could blow down if a reasonably strong thunderstorm happens to pass through the area. 

There’s nothing about that that doesn’t feel good. 

There is, however, a small part of me that will miss being a minor shot caller this week (Mostly because number of bosses who wanted their name associated with this mess was always very limited). I’ll miss working closely with some of the key players without whom the whole effort would collapse. I might even miss the sense of barely hidden mayhem and chaos that could break out at any second during a live event.

It’s just as well that this experience has passed to others this year. I’m not at all sure I’d have been in the mental or physical headspace to give it the level of attention it needs way back when planning kicked off in the fall.

I wish the team leading this ongoing, multi-year hot mess the very best of successes. I hope they knock it out of the park… if only so people will stop thinking my name is somehow inextricably linked with this particular Big Show. This week is going to feel just a little bit weird, but then I guarantee I’ll be 100% pleased as punch to have the thing be someone else’s problem. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Every year around September I opine that there isn’t anything more useless that a formal performance evaluation. Every spring, though, I’m reminded that I’m wrong, because truly it’s impossible to imagine a more pointless “management tool” than the yearly midpoint assessment. It’s all the aggravation of spending time putting paperwork together and none of the remunitative reward of getting a performance bonus. Midpoints are a 100% paperwork drill out of which there’s no significant accomplishment. If I’ve been a turd for the last six months and management hasn’t said anything, they obviously don’t care. If I’ve been an all star for six months and don’t know it, than that’s 100% my own problem. All the midpoint process does is ensure my copy, paste, and update skills are just as sharp as they were a year ago.

2. Last week included new computer day at work. This week has involved a pretty extensive amount of trying to figure out how my own personal workflows will function in a Windows 11 environment. After two days of hunting and hoping and yelling at this computer, I’m absolutely not loving it. In fact nothing is currently working as seamlessly with this new system as it did with the old one. I’m not saying new tech is necessarily bad, just that when the powers at echelons higher than reality decide it’s time to roll it out, they very rarely consider much beyond “ohhh, new and shiny.” I’m sure this will all be functional at some point in the future, but currently it’s causing no end to aggravation. Truly it’s a death by a thousand cuts.

3. Breakfast. This morning breakfast was a “lower carb” everything bagel and precisely two tablespoons of reduced fat cream cheese. Breakfast used to be a proper bagel, slathered on regular cream cheese, a couple of eggs, cheese, and maybe a bowl of cereal. Sure, that’s the diet that has probably killed me, but for starting the day satiated and relatively happy. Look, I know I can’t go back to eating that way, but it doesn’t mean I’m ever going to be fully satisfied with this “reasonably healthful” approach to food.

And we’re back…

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After Christmas I took a little break. I was feeling legitimately good for the first time in months, there was a lot going on. Honestly, I just didn’t have the normal burning desire to sit down and get anything off my chest.

Today, however, I spent my first day back at work working in the actual office. Rest assured after eight hours as a standard office drone, I’m cured of not having anything to say. I won’t say it’s a great routine, but it is a routine and I appreciate it for that if nothing else.

Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve all been led to believe that the purpose of vacation is to enjoy some downtime and come back rejuvenated. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, as I don’t think I’ve ever come back from a vacation re-energized and excited to be back to work. At this stage it’s safe to say that’s just not who I’m ever going to be as a person.

But back I am. Because the animals are expensive and I’d well and truly suck at living under a bridge or sleeping on the nearest park bench. There are, if nothing else, standards to be maintained.

I won’t say the day was entirely unproductive, though. I did spend an unreasonable amount of time today plugging in all the federal holidays for 2024 into Outlook and starting to plot how to maximize my days off for this new year. So I’ve got that going for me.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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In the best spirit of the Christmas season, I feel like I should throw out something that doesn’t annoy me this week first. That’s the fact that today marks the Winter solstice for 2023. We’ll now begin seeing incrementally more daylight each day. If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.

However, it wouldn’t be Thursday if there weren’t at least a few items to call out as annoyances for the week. As my ultra-long Christmas weekend is now underway, though, I’ve shaved it down to two instead of the normal three and present them to you in no particular order.

1. Calculations. I usually do a reasonably good job at calculating how much leave I have to “use or lose” at the end of the calendar year. I base all of my other leave planning around needing 64 hours to cover the week of Christmas and the week of New Year. The fancy pants automated leave tracker, though, is telling me I’ve unexpectedly miscalculated by approximately 10 and one half hours. If it’s right, it means I could be leaving more than a day’s vacation on the table. If I’m right, it means my use or lose balance for next year will be 10+ hours short. I think I’m right… but not with enough conviction to take a risk of losing vacation time. So I guess my vacation is starting mid-afternoon Thursday instead of at close of business Friday. That part isn’t actually annoying, but having such a large variance in my normally precise end-of-year calculation is, at a minimum, perplexing.

2. One more thing. I’ll never understand the mad rush of some people at this time of year to get just one more thing done before turning out the lights for the year. As I’m plodding through the week, I couldn’t help but notice that there are at least seven separate actions sitting in our tracking database with deadlines between Christmas and New Years. Someone at echelons higher than reality actually looked at those things and thought, “Yup, we absolutely have to have an answer on these absolute nothings before the dawn of 2024.” That’s just the stuff that people have bothered putting in the “official” tracker. The week will be replete with unofficial asks as well. Look, if it’s something involving a hazard to life and property, sure, the holidays are just another few days of the year… but if it’s just standard requests for information, maybe stow it for a week or two until someone might actually give a shit. Otherwise you’ll get what you get… and I promise you it won’t be much.