Tag Archives: workflow

The most insulting loss of all…

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I had a whole post teed up from over the weekend. It should have been sitting here safely waiting on me to do some final edits in Word before dropping it over into WordPress for publication. However, it’s currently not sitting anywhere on my computer. There’s no record that I even edited or saved any documents over the weekend. It’s also not in WordPress. Not in my drafts, not sitting in my scheduled posts file, or anywhere else.

It has well and truly disappeared. And frankly, I don’t have the energy to put into trying to recreate it from scratch.

As of a couple of weeks ago, I’ve officially made 4,000 separate blog posts dating way, way back to February 2010. I say 4000, because that’s how many I’ve written – well, 4,004 including this one. I’ve only made 3,989 of them public. Believe me when I tell you the ones that are sitting there in private mode are some real humdingers. Most of them won’t see the light of day until after I retire, if then. They’re the few examples of times I couldn’t tell the story while obscuring at least some identifying elements slipping through. 

In any case, after 4,000+ posts, you can count on one or two fingers the number of times I’ve simply had one of them eaten whole. That’s the entire reason for my workflow of writing everything first in Word. I don’t expect this to become a common occurrence, but it does mean I’m going to have to take some time coming up with a better failsafe. I’ve got too many things sitting here in various stages of draft to worry that they’re going to randomly start disappearing.

At least I’m not getting paid for this, so all I’ve lost is time… though that may be the most insulting loss of all. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Operating one man down. The bosses don’t want to acknowledge in any meaningful way that we’re a man down – working at 66.6% strength with 100% of the day-to-day work they still think should be happening. Of course, that’s before whatever additional surprise “hey you” random shit and odd jobs come oozing in over the side on any given day. There might have been a time I’d work myself into a nervous breakdown trying to keep up, but let me assure you those days are long gone. The wheels will come off where they come off and I won’t lose a minute of sleep over a slow-moving accident that management had months to avoid. 

2. Failure to accept defeat gracefully. Look, sometimes you can plan a party and due to timing or circumstances, or because people had a really shitty time at your last party, no one gives any indication of being interested in showing up. Once you’ve exhausted all the options, called in the favors, and done everything you can do to get people interested, you really only have two options when you’re three weeks out and only have a score of people signed up. You either cancel things in a controlled, methodical way that creates the illusion of some reason other than you couldn’t convince anyone to come to your party, or you accept that you’re doing $100,000 of planning to put on a show in an empty auditorium. Either way. At least no one will be able to say I didn’t warn them.

3. Broken encryption. We have a group mailbox in which I spend half my time working. For the last six months or more, though, the encryption certificates for that mailbox have been invalid, so any time someone sends us an encrypted email, we have to stop what we’re doing and ask them to either send it unencrypted or send it to our personal mailbox. Then, sign off the group mailbox, sign into our own, and forward the message. It’s not hard, but it’s a time suck and fucks with the basic workflow of the day. The fix to this is an easy one, just requiring us to forward some paperwork over to the IT trolls. We’ve raised it to management on more than one occasion… but bosses being bosses have decided that they don’t want to do that because they have a “better way.” It’s one goddamned simple fix to make life in this cubicle hell marginally better, but it’s too hard to do. It’s about to become my newest workplace obsession and I’ll be talking about it in every forum possible until it gets fixed, I retire, or they fire my ass.

Go ahead, ask me…

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After a couple of weeks of relearning how to spend most of the day without a cell phone, I can say that it’s at best, unpleasant. I’ve made a few necessary adjustments to my personal workflows that have made the circumstance a bit less onerous, but I’m afraid there is just no good substitute for having my digital life at my fingertips at all times. Technically I guess I could go back to the dark ages and start carrying around a paper planner all day, but at that point why not just switch back to stone tablets and chisels? At least I’ve managed a few work around that keep me mostly connected during the day. They’re not seamlessly integrating my life, but they’re at letting me limp along, which I suppose is better than nothing. Just barely.

The real issue I’ve run into after becoming essentially phoneless for large chunks of the day is that I’m losing track of the myriad of notes and reminders I’d regularly send myself throughout the day. Outlook does a good enough job of keeping me on track with most official functions, but I’m feeling the absence of emails to remind me to look at one particular memo or stop for milk on the way home. I’m really missing the ready place to keep track of the copious number of ideas that passed the “I should write about this” test and made it onto my running list of possible blog topics. So it turns out the next step in the process of learning to live with traumatic loss is to come up with some kind of system of recording notes and ideas that doesn’t depend entirely on me seeing the right post it note three minutes before I’m going to need it.

Go ahead and ask me how much I enjoy creating solutions to problems that really have no need to exist at all in the 21st century.

Sausage…

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If you love sausage, it’s probably a good idea to not spend much time dwelling on how it’s made. Assholes, lips, and nostrils it may be, but somehow they work well together when conjured with the right mix of spices and applied heat.

It occurs to me that most things in the office are kind of like sausage. The end result usually turns out well enough, but taking a deeper look at how the gears are meshing behind the curtain is rarely a good idea. As I mostly just want good tasting sausage likewise I just want my automated work processes to be actually automated. If you have to spend hours talking about how many times an actual human person has to touch an allegedly automated procedure, chances are it’s not quite as automated as you think it is.

I don’t even to think that the money we pour out each year to build these magical systems that need dozens of people to manually intervene in order to give the illusion of automation. Seems better to just admit that automation is hard, expensive, and we just aren’t very good at it. Give me a routing slip, a clipboard, and an hour of walking around time and it seems like I could get the same results at a fraction of the cost as the high maintenance process designed and maintained by a small army of software engineers.

If you’re going open up the kitchen and let the world see how you’re making the sausage, don’t be surprised if more than a couple of them lose interest no matter how good you promise it’s going to taste once it’s cooked.