Tag Archives: work

On the first day…

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Day one of my Very Important Event is in the books. Nothing seemed to slide completely off the rails… although I couldn’t connect to the network there for a few hours so I honestly have no idea how well anything outside the room I was sitting in really went. That it went at all is pretty much a giant assumption on my part. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow if there are a shit ton of angry emails in my inbox or 1001 complaints that someone could use their eyes to find the right link. That’s a tomorrow problem, of course.

For tonight, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to cook. I want to sit here in this mostly dark room nursing another gin and tonic and scratching the dog’s ears while the cat sheds on me. Anything else feels like it requires way more brainpower than I want to allocate… so I’m not going to.

I’ve done more than enough things I’d rather not do today as it is. These last couple of hours are mine and everything else can bugger directly off.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Failure to plan. I’ve rented you the hall. I’ve provided the stage. I’ve laid on the cameras and the furniture. I’ve blocked off all the time in the world for people to rehearse, dry run, and generally get to feel comfortable with their part. What I can’t make people do, of course, is actually show up and do any of those things. Mostly I put in the effort because I want people to be successful – or at least I want to set the conditions for their success. What I’ll be intensely intolerant of, however, is when those same people who have displayed conspicuous indifference in planning find themselves in a panic five minutes before things go live next week… Because that’s almost inevitable while also being nearly 100% avoidable.

2. Work clothes. Having spent the majority of the last two years working from home, it hasn’t been necessary to keep much in the way of a “work” wardrobe. I mean mine almost exclusively consists of khakis and polos, anyway, but that’s all stuff I’d wear day-to-day in my real life. After two years of little exposure to the general public some, perhaps most of it, is starting to look a little tatty around the edges. That’s an issue I hadn’t noticed until I realized I needed something more or less presentable for five days this week instead of my normal one or two. If you think the idea of needing to buy clothes specifically so I can drive 40 minutes to sit in a cubicle isn’t grinding my gears, you must be new here.

3. The end of April. The back half of April is my hardest two weeks of the year. The only thing holding my temper just barely in check is not wanting to be unemployed. Stress is up because I’m supposed to be delivering a product that no one else gives a shit about until the day it goes live. My blood pressure is through the roof. I can track it year over year and it consistently spikes during these two weeks. I’m eating like shit, tossing and turning through the night, and generally just not taking the time to do the normal things that more or less keep me on an even keel the rest of the year. All in all, it’s not a great time when your general outlook is often described in such glowing terms as “bleak” and “kind of dark” on the good days.

Now is the spring of my discontent…

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And so it begins. The two weeks a year when I’m forced to put on a brave face and transform into a cheerleader, a producer, a confessor, a circus roustabout, a tyrant, and a Chatty Cathy all in the name of passing along some information that could just as easily be set loose into the world by putting it on a website.

“But that misses the personal touch,” they cry. Knowing how much money you’re going to spend and how isn’t enough. We can’t do without the networking, the back slapping, the crab puffs, and little finger sandwiches. Though they’ll howl just as loudly when we go back to charging $700 a head instead of giving the information away for free online.

COVID and the Plague Era has given me a great respite in that at least the last few iterations of this great dog and pony show have been online. No vast sea of party tents, no outdoor equipment displays, no tickets, no 700 extra people jammed elbow to asshole in an auditorium to listen to presentations they could have heard just as easily from home. Next year might be back to “normal”… and that’s a threat that hangs over me like a goddamned death sentence.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Return to work. I’m starting to see emails pinging around discussing the plan to “return to work.” What they’re really talking about is bringing people back to the office, which, if you’ve been paying attention for the last two years is not synonymous with “returning to work.” I won’t speak for anyone else out there, but for me, work has been work and the geographic area I’ve occupied while doing it has made effectively no difference in the end product I’ve churned out. Frankly, calling it “return to work” strikes me as wildly insulting. If you’ve got a shitbird who doesn’t do anything in the office, you’ll have a shitbird who won’t do anything while working from home. If you find you have a bunch of people sitting around not doing a damned thing, what you’ve got is a management and supervision problem, not a “working from home” problem. Of course that’s not the kind of answer that will satisfy those who are obsessed with seeing asses in cubicles. 

2. Failure to plan. So, here’s the thing… If some tells you that they need Thing A by the 6th in order for Thing B to happen by the 12th, you really don’t have any standing to act surprised when you send Thing A in on the 12thand Thing B cannot simultaneously happen on that day. That’s not how this works. It’s not how it should work. When there have been monthly and then weekly warnings of the dates involved over the last six months, you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I’m not overwhelmed by feeling like I need to jump through my own ass. I feel like there’s a very telling old saying about your failure to plan not being an emergency for other people that’s very pertinent here.

3. Situational awareness. It costs absolutely nothing to pay attention to what’s going on around you. It’s a freebie and I have no idea why so many people insist on not taking advantage of it. In the approximately 14.4-mile round trip from home to physical therapy today, I had to take evasive action three times to avoid being driven into by another driver. There’s the truck speeding out of the shopping center aisle into my travel lane without looking, the car who decided to drive in through a one-way exit, and the minivan who was fully in my lane coming around a turn on a winding country road. The only reason I avoided two T-bones and a head on today as because I happened to have just a touch of goddamned awareness of anything happening outside my own vehicle. 

Emotional support human…

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Over the last couple of months, I’ve been spending a bit more time in the office than I have been since the outbreak of the Great Plague. What I’ve observed in that time is that Jorah, my wonderfully loyal, if slightly neurotic dog, has unexpectedly developed an ability to tell the difference between my go to work khaki pants and my stay home jeans. 

On mornings when I’m working from home, Jorah joins me in the kitchen while I’m having my coffee and puttering around. He’ll stay put there until we head back to the sunroom to get the telework day properly started. For days I’m scheduled to schlep over to the office, instead of hanging out with me and making himself comfortable on his bed in the kitchen, he detours back the hall and sprawls out on my bed. He’ll stay there until it’s time for me to leave… When I’ll usually have to lure him out with a peanut butter stuffed Kong before I head out for the day.

The only real difference between home days and office days is the pants I wear. If I pull on a pair of jeans, all is well. If I pull on my khakis, the fuzzy little bastard pouts… as if spending all day in cubicle hell is somehow my idea of a good time. I think the implication here is pretty clear. I’m going to have to declare myself his emotional support human and just start toting him along wherever I go and can avoid having him abandon me on what are already the worst days of the week.

I’m a whore…

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I’ve never been the kind of guy who goes out of his way to find more work to do. As far as I’m concerned, that falls under the banner of working smarter rather than harder. I don’t try to duck work that needs doing, it’s just that experience tells me that if there’s work to do it’ll find me sooner or later. 

There’s another school of thought, of course. That school seems to be filled with people out there turning over every rock looking for things to do. They, as the kids might say, have no chill. They’ll find stuff to keep themselves (and you) busy whether it’s something that actually needs doing or not. The objective here, it seems, is to just be doing something.

If you’re looking for that kind of attitude, I’m not going to be your huckleberry. I’m a big fan of “meets standard,” or “technically acceptable,” or just good old-fashioned recycling of ideas from a three months ago that COVID put a pin in before they got off the ground. I’m not apt to recommend going out to find new work when the work we’ve already done is good enough. 

Look, I’m a whore. I’m renting my brain out by the hour, so whatever the John in this tale wants, I’m going to give them. It just always seems to me that there are better ways to get after things than covering the same ground twenty or thirty times. It’s fine though. I’ll do it… but they’d better not try to kiss me on the mouth.

Happily oblivious…

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Due to a slight misunderstanding of the schedule, I spent the first two hours on the clock more or less happily oblivious to what I was supposed to be doing today. I mean I was still working on things, just not on the things anyone else expected me to be doing. 

It’s exactly the turn of events that leaves me feeling as if I’ve spent the rest of the day playing (badly) a game of catch up. Don’t get me wrong, it was a better day in every way than any day I could have spent in the actual office… It just could have all been a lot less hectic and scattered if I had bungled the first 90 minutes.

Worse things, of course, happen at sea. I’m confident that today’s issues won’t repeat tomorrow. Tomorrow will be dedicated to making new and more interesting mistakes. I won’t say I never make the same one twice, but now and then something slides through. I try hard, though, not to keep paying for the same ground. For now, I’ll sit down with a good book and mostly forget that there was any turbulence at all today. I’m immensely thankful that I built a mental wall between work and life very early in my career. It’s proven to be a very helpful skill to have now that as often as not work is sitting within arm’s reach even when I happen to be home.

Sometimes good things happen…

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I went to the office today. That’s rarely the start of a good news story. As often as not, it’s the lead off line to some mind bending bureaucratic asshattery that’s driven my blood pressure up by 20 or 30 points. Plenty of that happened today, of course, but that’s not what I’m choosing to focus on today – lest anyone begin to think that I don’t see a bright side to anything.

The good part of having been in the office today was that I missed all four hours of landscape contractors attacking the front of my house. Instead of watching, obsessively, through the front window, I returned home to sleek edges, four cubic yards of fresh mulch already spread, and bushes trimmed.

In short, I got to miss all of the work and now get to enjoy all of the benefits. There’s the small matter of the $800 dollar check I still need to cut, but I’m choosing not to think about that at the moment. For now I’ll be happy that at least the front side of the house is properly ready for spring and that I didn’t completely destroy my back to make it so.

As it turns out, sometimes good things do happen while you’re at the office.

My philosophy of meetings…

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A big part of my philosophy of project management can be distilled down to one simple rule: Never have a meeting when an email will do. I conservatively estimate that on any given project that eliminates approximately 95% of meetings that otherwise would have taken place. 

There’s a catch, of course. Periodically, the Gods on Olympus sneak into their questions about the status of whatever project interests them in the moment an inquiry like “When was the last meeting on this?” I can tell you from experience that the answer they’re not looking for is, “Uh, I think we had a meeting about three months ago.” 

It won’t matter to them that you’ve got full command of all the pertinent information. It won’t matter that you’ve checked in weekly or even more often with all the people developing content and know that everything is on track. The only thing that will matter is that you haven’t had a meeting. You’ll never convince me that this minor obsession with meetings isn’t one of the big driving influences of why so many bosses are still hellbent on putting asses in cubes. Then, not only can they ask if meetings are happening, they can walk past and see people crowded into a conference room – pure management bliss.

Even though it’s not strictly necessary, I’ve been running a meeting once a month since before the new year. At least that way I can say with a straight face we’ve had meetings. Now that we’re closing in on the curtain going up, I’ve switched it to weekly meetings – because inside the 30-day window Olympian interest can become intense. At least I can tell them that, yes sir, of course we met on that just a few days ago and be 100% honest.

What I won’t mention, of course, is that these weekly meetings never take more than 20 minutes. In fact, today’s lasted a grand total of 21 minutes and conveyed exactly three new bits of information that I’d already sent out this morning by email. We’d have put up a better time but there were one or two technical snags that cost precious seconds.

But, by God, now we’ve had a meeting about it and nothing makes officialdom happier than knowing there was a meeting. I’ll shoot to get next week’s down to sub-15 minutes times. I feel like that level of success is really within my reach.

Breaking in the new equipment…

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So, I got a fancy new laptop from work last week. Let me lead off by saying overall it’s a tremendous improvement from the five-year-old laptop I was previously saddled with using. That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t a few issues.

The first, which I discovered on my first full day of using the laptop away from its “docking station” on my desk at the office, is that there are only two USB ports. Those ports are arranged in such a way that it’s impossible to simultaneously plug in my removable Wi-Fi adapter and any other USB device. The adapter is slightly wider than a thumb drive… but sufficiently wide that it makes the second port unusable. Fine. A $13 USB hub ordered from Amazon later (plus $2.99 for same day delivery) and I can now use my air card and a mouse simultaneously. I won’t comment on the aesthetics of that whole set up other than saying it looks like absolute trash sitting on my desk at home. 

This morning, a piece of software I use all day every day fired up as expected and a few minutes later promptly disappeared. It’s as if it never existed on my machine at all. No trace of it anywhere. 

This necessitated a call to the obviously misnamed “Enterprise Help Desk.” The gentleman I eventually spoke to was nice enough, going so far as musing that it was strange because the last person he talked to was having the same issue with the same missing program. More people with the same problem might sound like it’s worse, but in fact being part of a big problem is much better, because something that impacts many users is far more likely to get attention than if you’re the odd man out in the wilderness somewhere. If it’s a group problem, it might actually get fixed. If it’s an individual problem there’s a pretty even shot that your ticket will just linger long enough for someone to mark it complete regardless of whether they’ve solved your problem or not.

Here I am, hoping that I really am part of the many rather than the few. In the meantime, I’ve been directed to the web version of the program that I need to use all day. Honestly, if there’s anything more problematic than not having the software you need, relying on its underpowered web version is it. As always, my standard disclaimer applies… if Uncle wants me to be able to do something, I’ll be given the resource to do it. Otherwise, I’ll cheerfully report that there’s nothing significant to report or that we just can’t get there from here.

On the up side, at the rate we upgrade our office technology, I could have as few as one more new computer to go before I call it a full career. So, I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.