Tag Archives: work

Meeting notes…

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I wish I could tell you that I make some of this up just to have something to post, but the fact is most of it is “ripped from the headlines” of day to day life. Today’s post, for instance, comes directly from a meeting I happened to be stuck in for two hours last week.
Without exercising anything other than the most basic editorial control to allow for spelling, here’s what crosses my mind while I’m doing my best to look like an attentive and responsible adult:
– “We’re on your calendar to talk more about the calendar.” WTF? Really?
– Oh look, another meeting where the only output was lost time. Glad we didn’t accidentally do anything productive.

– Yeah, we have plenty of “management ‘tools'” around here already.

– It’s apparently time to play an exciting game of “Who the Fuck is on First?”

– Yes please, let’s add more training requirements because I’ve got nothing but free time.

– “We have a plan.” Yep. Been hearing that phrase for the last six months… still no plan.

– Yay! Let’s schedule another recurring meeting!!!!!1!

Seriously, folks, these are the only notes I took during that entire meeting. I’d have been happy to make note of anything that might have somehow been relevant to doing my job more effectively or efficiently, but that’s really not the purpose of these meetings. If you’re still trying to guage my level of my boredom, it’s best to imagine every other inch of the page filled with doodles… and then multiply how bored you think I was by a factor of three or four and then you’ll be in the neighborhood.

Hard and fast rules…

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I came across this post as a stray draft a few days ago. I have no idea if I published it before or if it’s something I wrote that has been sitting in electronic purgatory for months or years. If I have posted it previously, it’s something that bears repeating. If I haven’t, it’s a post that’s deserves its moment in the sun.

In any case, here I present the following few hard and fast rules to live by that I’ve learned while serving as a cog in the vast recesses of the bureaucracy:

1. You can do it all.

2. You can’t do it all at the same time.

3. Timelines are meaningless and largely serve just to take up additional space in a PowerPoint slide deck.

4. Planning is, at best, a work of educated fiction.

5. At that moment when things seem to be working well, the wheels are about to fall off, the engine to catch fire, and the transmission explode, so don’t get cocky, kid.

6. There’s no such thing as “idiot-proof.” The world strives to always produce bigger and better idiots.

7. There’s no good work you can do that a general officer can’t undo with an offhand remark.

8. People rarely get the justice they deserve.

9. All projects can be a combination of fast, cheap, and good… but you can only have two at any given time, so choose wisely.

10. When all else fails, when you think the situation can’t possibly go any further downhill, when not even the third reorganization in eighteen months gets the results you hoped for, look out, because things can always, always get worse.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Throughput. I’ve said it before, but it bears saying again: When you have X amount of time and Y amount of work, unless you’re managing things pretty closely the sum is almost never going to be zero. There will always be more work than time. The best most of us can manage is to prioritize the effort and try to get to the important stuff. If there’s important stuff that’s not being tended, it’s probably a good idea to tell someone it’s important rather than relying on them to read you bloody mind.

2. Scheduling. It’s Thursday night. The list of things to get done between now and Sunday evening is already twice what I should reasonably expect to get done. I shouldn’t complain since I make my own list, but still, I’d love to at some point have one of these nice restful weekends I hear people talking about. At least there’s a hard stop at about 8:30 Sunday night. The Dead are back and a man has to know where his limits are.

3. Election. Oh dear god how is this election not over yet? Please make it stop.

Flexible and transparent…

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I wish I could tell you that I was about to launch into a sales pitch for the newest cell phone by telling you how it’s improved screen was flexible and transparent, but I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to lament that I sat in a meeting today where we were told that things are changing rapidly and that we should smile more because that makes things better. We were also told on three separate occasions that it’s really, really important to “be flexible,” and that the powers at echelons higher than reality want to make the whole experience “transparent” for everyone.

Honest to God I don’t know how anyone is expected to sit through that kind of putting-lipstick-on-a-pig banality without fierce eye rolling. Worse yet I don’t know if it’s what people say because they don’t know what else to say or if they say it because they believe it. Frankly neither option is particularly palatable.

After the 100 minutes of my life sacrificed today that I’ll never be able to get back, I wish I could tell you that I have a warm fuzzy that anyone has some kind of clue what’s going on, but again that would probably induce another massive eye roll. The truth is, I haven’t had a clue what’s happening in six months or more. What I do know is that now “everything we do” has to somehow be tied in to the newest overlord’s three main priorities… Which, of course, addresses a couple of big showy ideas, but does precious little to address the everyday issues of running an organization of 70,000+ people.

I guess as long as we’re ever smiling, flexible, and endlessly transparent, it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference whether we know what the end state is actually supposed to look like… since when you don’t know where you’re going anyplace can be a destination.

Just to be on the safe side, if anyone needs me I’ll just be taking another shot at rearranging these deck chairs, because slamming directly into an iceberg feels every bit (if not more) likely than anything good happening at this point.

Actual work (and why it doesn’t happen)…

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There is the occasional rare day when I can sit down and focus on one or two major projects and feel like I’ve mushed the ball forward even if it’s only by a little bit. Today wasn’t that day. The fact is, I don’t remember much of what I worked on today. I try very hard to do a mental dump on my way out the door in an effort to not drag any additional jackassery back across the river with me at the end of the day. Maintaining that massive, immutable, and nearly impenetrable wall between work and “everything else” might just be the most important thing I do on a daily basis. It’s the preserver of my sanity.

I vaguely remember that at one point or another today Outlook tried to trick me into a meeting I didn’t need to go to, and someone wanted me to fix a broken folding table, and there was a very serious discussion about where to store 30 outdoor umbrellas for the winter, and picking 8 people to take a bus ride to DC next week fell squarely on my desk. Those are exactly the kinds of things that end up being the reason actual work ends up being so often late, halfassed, or just completely blown off. You’re just going to have to trust me when I saw it’s almost never intentional.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get some of my real work done… but I’m not overly optimistic. Some week’s just go like that. Although past performance is not a guarantee of future results, it’s often a healthy indicator. With this week so far as a guide, the best I’ll likely be able to manage is keeping my head down and trudging on towards the weekend. At least it’s no longer in any way surprising that this is how the “real world” works.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The hidden meeting. My days are full of meetings. In fact that might be the only thing that’s consistent from day-to-day. With that being said, if you don’t tell me a meeting is happening I can’t even make the effort to show up and offer you whatever drippings of wisdom I can squeeze out of my overtaxed mind. I probably should have been there. I can even pretend to be sorry I missed it, but really any reason to be stuck in one less meeting is just fine by me.

2. That dinner doesn’t cook itself. Now that the days are getting shorter I find myself really wishing to come home to a nice meal instead of arriving to find a bunch of separate ingredients that I then need to turn into a nice meal. Last week there were far more cereal-for-dinner nights than I’m comfortable admitting.

3. Acorns. In and of themselves, I have nothing against the seed that grows the mighty oak. My only objection to them is this time of year the dogs seem to think they are magical treats dispensed from on high. My trees are majestic, but because of them I’m going to spend the next to days following the Maggie and Winston around shooing them away from the buffet.

Distractors…

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I’ve always had trouble finding my mental focus in loud environments. I don’t know if that’s what makes the hermit life so appealing to me or if it’s the other way around. It doesn’t really matter which caused what. The end result is the same – sitting at my desk with glazed eyes completely unable to cobble together a single coherent thought. It’s just one of the many joys of existing in cubicle hell.

If I’m honest, I’ll admit that the day to day isn’t as bad as I feared, but with that said the bad moments are absolutely hellish. At one point this afternoon I was an unwilling third party participant to at least six conversations taking place simultaneously within 20 feet of my desk. Keeping track of the thread of my own thoughts proved to be something between challenging and impossible for the better part of two hours today. For the record, that doesn’t lead to good staff work and leaves me feeling just about as annoyed in this particular workplace as I’ve ever been. That’s no mean feat.

When other people leave the office they’re in a rush to meet for dinner, or go shopping, or engage in some other socially acceptable form of human interaction. When I leave I can’t get away from that sort of thing fast enough. Home is far from silent, of course. There’s the clatter of dogs on tile, television or radio humming quietly in the background, HVAC noises, or appliances running. Somehow those things manage to not be distracting. Half a dozen overlapping conversations, on the other hand, leave me tired and more than a bit frustrated with my own inability to focus through the distractors.

Whatever reason, the subdued sounds of home, a good book, and something pressed from the fruit of the arbor feels like exactly what I need to steady myself.

On the mend…

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The first day back to work after a proper vacation is traumatic enough. The first day back after the better part of a week out sick is something altogether different. It’s the combination of having a ridiculous backlog of work to go through, still feeling vaguely like ass, and having experienced none of the restorative effects of sitting somewhere sunny enjoying run drinks I guess.

At any rate after a week of guzzling Gatorade, more meals of soup than I want to think about, and generally feeling like so much warm death, my shoulder is back to the wheel. It’s good to be off the couch and all, but as it turns out I’m not all that opposed to staying home and dividing my time between binge watching Netflix, reading through two or three titles on my Kindle, and napping periodically with one or both dogs. Maybe that’s a good sign that I won’t be bored in retirement.

All things considered, it’s good to be on the mend… but as it turns out there are definitely worse things than periodic self-enforcing periods of general rest. Even knowing that, after a day back I’m ready to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

Checking boxes…

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I got my annual reminder today that I had successfully completed almost none of my mandatory online training for 2016. Training is important, or so we’ve been told. It’s so important that in at least one instance I successfully completed the exact same training module once a year from 2007-2016. Yay Constitution Day Training!

I spent two years earning a teaching degree and another two and a half years actually doing it. I’m a voracious reader and self-educate on any number of topics. You don’t need to convince me of the importance of training or education. With that being said, if you want me to think of it as a priority, perhaps you might consider changing up your program of instruction once or twice in a decade. No matter how fine a narrative I consider a book like Team of Rivals, it ceases to become informative if I read it every year and can predict with near 100% accuracy what’s going to appear on the next page.

On the other hand, if the intent is to simply make sure that one of the multitude of annual training requirement boxes is checked off before time expires, well the powers that be are doing a fine job of course development and instruction. When I know that’s the goal, I can box check with the best of them.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Ghosting. If you thought dating at 18 was an exercise in the absurd, you should really try dating at 38. I don’t do it often, which is a testament more to my incredible shrinking tolerance to people than it is the number of opportunities available. As obnoxious as I find most human interaction, I think the thing that bothers me most are the ones that just disappear. You plug along being your normal charming self, go on a few dates, and *poof* suddenly they disappear from social media and stop answering texts. It’s one of those times when having generally low expectations of people is such a valuable trait. If you had any kind of decent personality I’ll probably spend a day or two wondering if you ended up in a ditch somewhere, but after that I’ll file you under T-for-twatwaffle and move on with my day. In retrospect maybe I shouldn’t be annoyed and just appreciate that I’ve been saved from discovering that factoid six months down the line after I’ve invested more than a few hours and a couple of meals into figuring out if you are a total asshat.

2. EpiPen. I’m always a little perplexed when people seem to be surprised that it costs money to keep yourself alive if you’re not in perfect physical health. As I pointed out to a colleague, a hundred years ago, people who needed EpiPens or really any significant medical intervention to save them from the earth’s flora and fauna just kind of dropped dead. While I’m not endorsing that as the ideal solution for people with allergies, but when death is the consequence, spending a few hundred bucks to stay alive doesn’t feel like too stiff a price to pay. Somewhere along the lines in this country we’ve developed the idea that more and more “essentials” should just come at no cost to us. I have no idea where that kind of mindset comes from. There’s a cost for everything in life, the only real question is whether it comes out of our pocket in the retail line when we decide it’s a necessity or at the point of a gun when government decides the next installment of our tax bill is due. We can give the government enough power to feed us all, to house us all, to clothe us all, and to medicate us all… and on the day that happens we’ll all be well and truly slaves.

3. Accountability. I’m bombarded multiple times a year with reminders to fulfill approximately 178 yearly training requirements. Among them are such classics as ethics and cyber security. Let me not check those boxes on time and there’s hell to pay. Let me violate one of the rules, policies, or laws they cover and there’s a good chance I’ll end up seeing the inside of a courtroom if not the inside of a federal minimum security prison. I’m smart enough to know that the rules are always somewhat different for the rich and powerful, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It certainly doesn’t mean I have to give my vote to a candidate who doesn’t feel in any way constrained by the rules and requirements that have a tendency to make the job such a pain in the ass for the rest of us. Just once I’d love to see a little accountability and a story of a senior official caught in a web of misconduct that resulted in more than solemn-faced apology or blanket denial.