Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 19

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 28 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 28 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Reading. Hey, it’s fundamental! I don’t mean that people need to sit down and read 1000-page doorstops (though I suspect life would be altogether better if they did). There are very few things that agitate the living shit out of me more, especially this time of year, than people who have been given all the pertinent information – via email, or slides, or instant messenger – but who come back a day or a week later and ask the same goddamned question. Asked and answered, your honor. Read the SITREP. Read the briefing. Read the email. I promise the answers you seek are already in there. It has the added benefit of not swamping me in endless discussions of things that should already be common knowledge.

3. Leakers. The press likes to call them “leakers.” It’s polite. It’s inoffensive. By contrast, I prefer to think of them as weak-minded, cowardly treason dogs. Delivering up classified documents to the media or the internet or your very best friend in the world is an act of treason. Full stop. They took an oath, the same one I did, to “support and defend.” If there are issues, there are certainly avenues we can all avail ourselves of to bring them to light. In the last extreme, we are entitled to resign in protest and ring public alarm bells. What a leaker, a traitorous bastard, does, is substitute his or her wisdom for that of everyone else – taking it upon themselves to be the arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be in the public domain. In doing so they betray their nation and worse, they betray their oath. They’re worthy of nothing but our scorn and the deepest, darkest hole the US Bureau of Prisons or United States Disciplinary Barracks has to offer.

Just in case…

I realized today, and not for the first time, what the hardest part of my job really is. It’s not, as you may think, that it involves holding a large number of often conflicting ideas in my head simultaneously. It’s not that basic day to day operations can be derailed at the whim of any number of layers of management and supervision. It’s not even that the good idea fairy seems to take great joy in shitting all over my head at every opportunity.

Truly the hardest part of this job is that the bathroom is on the wrong side of the secure door – which means any time you have to take a crap, you can’t doom scroll Twitter, swipe through Tinder, or ponder your Facebook friends list. In a world where newspapers aren’t a thing anymore, it as often as not means you’re stuck looking at four blank walls until boredom sets in. That’s no way to expect a civilized person to take a comfort break.

I usually explain the pile of magazines on my desk by noting how unreliable the network is and wanting something close at hand to while away the time while we don’t have connectivity. But you and I both know why I make sure my magazine stash is really always topped off… just in case.

Two week warning…

We’re two weeks out. It’s the time of year when I should be approaching caffeine poisoning or have my blood pressure trending towards stroke territory. And yet as I sit here, I’m feeling mostly swaddled in a calm indifference.

By the time this week ends, I’ll have done 80% of everything that’s doable within my span of control to attempt pulling this circus off without too many problems. By the time next week ends, I’ll have spooled out 90% of my effort. The final 10% will burn off across three days from the 25th through the 27th. Very little of what happens during those three days will have anything at all to do with me.

By that point, I’ve given you the stage, gotten people ticketed, fought with dozens of people about getting their presentations delivered in something like a timely manner, and attended to all manner of details both petty and large. What I can’t do, though, is make everyone happy. Attendees will be mad that they’re not getting coffee and cookies, briefers will be mad that we don’t have the mic they really like, senior leaders of every stripe will be visited by the good idea fairy a few hours before show time and want to change everything.

But next week, this ponderous beast begins taking on a life of its own. As the clock runs down, the series of events begins that we’re all individually unable to stop. By then the best we can do is attempt to nudge events back towards the right path and let them flow through to their illogical end.

At this point, stepping out one more time to the edge of the precipice, all I know for certain is that in two weeks the circus will be in town. Some of it will go well. Some of it will not. And then it will be over. After that we’ll all spend six months forgetting that we have to do it all again for 2024.

On ignorance and knowledge…

As I return to the wider world after a weekend mostly ignoring the news, it’s hard not to remark on the level of fuckery my former political party seems to be engaged in at the moment. 

In setting itself up as the party that opposes all forms of abortion, seeks to stringently regulate free speech, and continues to call for Russian appeasement, I’m left to wonder if the Republican Party is actively trying to lose the votes of everyone under 25 years old for the rest of recorded time. Has anyone at the RNC looked at any demographic or polling information about anyone born after about the year 2000? They seem determined to stake out the positions almost precisely designed to antagonize this rising block of voters. It feels like a sure recipe for trading some short-term wins for long term electoral obscurity.

A million years ago, I was attracted to a Republican Party that stood for strong defense, lower taxes, and government that got the hell out of people’s way. That same party now, with its traditional principles hollowed out by MAGA, runs hard in the other directions – seeking to give aid and comfort to Russia, threatening to blow up the economy by refusing to honor the country’s lawful debts, and attempting to involve government in the very core of individual healthcare.

Cowering in the face of foreign adversaries is a bad look. Claiming you don’t want the government meddling in healthcare decisions (i.e., Obamacare) while intentionally meddling directly in actual healthcare decisions between doctor and patient would be absurdist schtick if it wasn’t so damned dangerous. Staking out an infinitely irresponsible position on the nation’s fiscal issues makes elected Republican officials look like nothing so much as modern know-nothings placing the entire post-World War II global financial order in jeopardy. 

I can’t remember a time since I started following politics seriously in the mid-1990s, when one of the major political parties was so determined to be on the wrong side of so many important issues – and so determined to make itself irrelevant to entire generations of the voting public. It’s a hell of a thing to watch this kind of self-inflicted immolation. It’s also a sadly predictable side effect of the misguided belief that “democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

What we’ve learned…

After three days with Anya closeted away under medical supervision, we’ve learned a couple of things:

My girl is a perfectly happy cat, doing normal cat stuff, right up until the point where it’s time to take her medicine. Drops, pills, or even just generally being held result in adverse consequences for those attempting to make her do what she doesn’t want to do. Otherwise, though, she’s happy to receive the attention of her temporary keepers.

She’s eating, and drinking, and pooping, and getting the meds she needs to get over the hump following her eye surgery. It’s as good a result as I could hope for a few days after surgery.

I’d be lying if I said part of me doesn’t feel just a little vindicated after claiming so many struggles trying to get her through the first 30 days of treatment. I honestly was starting to wonder if I was somehow gaslighting myself about how hard it was to get this animal to take her meds. The professionals, however, have confirmed that she can, indeed, get spicy.

I’m glad to have confirmation that it wasn’t just me somehow being ragingly incompetent. However, it raises other issues. Unless Anya learns a bit more tolerance to handling and being medicated as she gets older, it could be well near impossible for me to single handedly deliver any kind of even slightly involved or complex home care. Sooner or later, it feels like we’ll inevitably run into a situation where following the best possible medical advice simply isn’t feasible because the patient refuses to cooperate.

That’s not an ideal scenario in a cat with FHV who is likely to need some level of treatment periodically throughout her life. In my more pessimistic moments, I foresee a series of hard decisions where we have to weigh treating the illness versus treating the patient. At some point there has to be a compromise between the best possible treatment and what’s physically possible. Now that we’ve addressed what I hope will be her biggest medical problem, I think we’ll be making future decisions based on quality of life overall versus the often simpler calculus of what’s medically possible.

When the time comes, someone please remind me that sometimes the best action is no action at all. I always find that hard to remember when I’m in the moment.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 27 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 27 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Mandatory training. We have a laundry list of mandatory annual training we have to either sit or click through each year. It must, theoretically, be completed by the end of each fiscal year, or the end of September if you’re not tracking the federal budget year. In any case, this mark on the wall being five months off doesn’t stop management from starting to harp on “getting the training done” here in April. Look, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. In none of those have I ever come up short on checking the block on the absurd amount of mandatory training our employer requires. If Uncle wants it done in April, the due date should be April and not September… unless the intent is just to check some other box that proves we’re all high speed and running ahead of schedule. In that case, carry on, I suppose.

3. Twitter. Every 7-10 days I have to go on a mad tear muting and block people who show up on my “for you” feed. Regardless of what Mr. Musk seems to think, I’m not in the market for getting additional exposure to right wing nutters, conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxers, or rednecks butthurt about their favorite beer. Still, about a week from now, Twitter’s “for you” will be full of them again. You know, I’m beginning to think Twitter’s algorithm might not be entirely guided simply by tweets that I interact with and they could be pushing an agenda.

Arriving at midpoint…

In my twenty years of government service, I’m not sure I’ve done many things more useless than spending time typing out my “self assessment” as part of a mid-year review. That’s coming from a guy who has spent countless wasted hours sitting in every possible flavor of meetings ranging across topics that would alternately make your eyes water or send you deep into boredom induced coma.

I’ve always held the opinion that if we’ve gotten to the midpoint of the year and I’ve been fucking things up left and right, someone would have told me to get myself sorted out long ago. If I’m plugging along, getting things done more or less to standard, chances are the bosses are mostly leaving me alone – unless it’s to assign more work. Continually being assigned more work is a sure sign that you’re most likely on track. I was a boss long enough to know that I didn’t tend to take work from high performers and assign it to the local chucklefuck.

Anyway, I spent some portion of the afternoon carefully rewriting 2022’s year end self assessment to reflect half a year’s work in FY23. Since it’s not one of those things that impacts pay or benefits, you can rest assured that I gave it all the attention and focus that it so richly deserves.

A good report…

Anya got a good report from her surgeon. They were able to break down all of the adhesions and resect “a lot” of conjunctive material that has been hooding her eye for months. They laid in dissolvable stitches in a few spots to, hopefully, keep everything retracted as it heals. 

There’s a chance, they say, that the issue could reoccur over time. The ophthalmologist recommends this be a “one and done” shot at correcting it. If it reoccurs, the chances that it will continue to do so is apparently high no matter how many times we go after it. At that point, the course of action is to leave well enough alone since it’s not life threatening. I don’t think he or I have the appetite to chase diminishing returns.

Doc says the eye will probably end up looking “a little wonky” because of how much material they cut out. We’ll see how things look when the swelling comes down. Not that it matters. We may also have to revisit her third eyelid. He’s optimistic it will retract more on its own when the swelling goes down, but if it doesn’t, we’ll figure out what the right approach is – somewhere between do nothing and a follow-up surgery.

Our girl checked out with a bag of pills and drops to administer over the next few weeks. I’m (mostly) happy to be leaving that part of the recovery process in the hands of professionals. I’ll hate not having her here, but that’s entirely outweighed by the benefit of making sure she’s getting her meds in a more timely and less traumatic way than I could possibly manage on my own. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy to have a proper medical staff watching for infection or any other potential post-operative issues… and I’m obviously thrilled that I’m not going to be the bad guy chasing her down and forcing meds on her for this stage of things. 

For now, Anya is a temporary resident of Pennsylvania. How long that lasts remains to be determined. I’m satisfied that the surgery went well and we’ve hopefully improved her quality of life in spite of whatever short term trauma we might have caused… I’ll be happier, tough, when she’s back home bouncing off every wall and flat surface in the place.

Some thoughts from a “law and order” man…

The 45th President of the United States has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury. As I understand the process, that means 16 members of the jury determined that there was sufficient evidence to allow the district attorney to bring formal changes against Donald Trump. With the exception of the single fact that the defendant formerly held the highest elective office in the land, it’s nothing that doesn’t happen a thousand times a week in jurisdictions around the country. 

The MAGA wing of social media has, predictably, erupted with cries of political persecution, false narratives, attempted distractions, and allegations of misconduct from everyone from the prosecutor to the sitting president. Collectively the usual talking heads of that movement have claimed almost everything – except that their guy is actually innocent. It’s a rare tweet indeed that asserts Donald Trump simply didn’t do the things of which the State of New York is accusing him. I’ll leave you to make of that what you will. 

Under the American justice system, all criminal defendants are entitled to the presumption of innocence. It’s the obligation of the prosecutor to prove them guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. You won’t see me making an assertion of guilt here. I wasn’t in the courthouse and wasn’t privy to the evidence presented to member of the grand jury. Nor, outside the crashing gong of social media, have I heard the arguments for the defense. My opinion is, at best, informed by widely available reports and, at worst, colored by the overwhelming contempt in which I hold both Donald Trump and his fellow travelers who have consumed the Republican Party.

The MAGA activists and I agree on one thing, though – this indictment and tomorrow’s arrest and arraignment of the 45th President of the United States is absolutely a low water mark in our politics. How they and I arrived at this assessment, though, are based on wildly differing views of what constitutes embarrassing, egregious, and criminal behavior. History, the kind written a hundred or so years from now, long after tempers have cooled and the actors have all left the stage, won’t be particularly kind to the brand of abject fuckery that Trump and his most devoted followers have wrought. Unfortunately, we’ll be watching this uniquely stupid story play out in real time for the rest of our lives – regardless of whether he’s found guilty by a New York jury or not. 

Not for the faint of heart…

Anya is scheduled for eye surgery next Tuesday. The plan is to remove some of the conjunctive material currently obstructing her left eye as a result of the repeated eye infections she went through early in life. The underlying eye is mostly undamaged and this operation is intended to remove the existing trouble areas in order to prevent them from eventually adhering to the eye itself. It’s not inexpensive, but it’s work that needs done that should improve both her long term health and her ongoing quality of life.

She’s expected to be discharged Tuesday afternoon with a new round of oral medication and eye drops. Some of these could need to be given as often as every six hours for the first several weeks as she recovers. How a normal person who has a job or any other commitments can arrange to do such a thing is entirely beyond me. I get that the discharge instructions present the optimal course of action, but expecting an owner to be able to pin down a cat and deliver these meds on 16 separate occasions every 24 hours strikes me as perfectly absurd. Each drop, after all, should be followed by a 5-10 minute waiting period, so it’s not as if you could grab her up just 4 times a day and apply everything in a single go. I’m not embarrassed to say that I may have hit the panic button when I caught wind of what the coming weeks could look like. There’s simply no way I could sustain that level of post-operative care for any length of time.

Over the last four or five days, Anya has gotten increasingly combative and has started running away any time I walk into a room. She’s actively avoiding me, cowering, and essentially seeing me as an enemy. With most shelter cats, the advice and expectation is that they’re going to have some amount of time – weeks or months – to decompress and acclimate themselves into their new home. Anya never got that time. Three days after her arrival, I had to start holding her down and pouring meds into and onto her. It’s little wonder she’s losing whatever little bit of trust we may have developed.

Mercifully, I’ve got a friend who helps run a large veterinary practice outside Philadelphia. She’s going to arrange medical boarding for this poor gray fur ball for the duration of multi-time a day treatment. There, the techs will be doing the heavy lifting of keeping up with the schedule seven days a week and the on-staff vets will be around should something need to be addressed immediately. So, as soon as she’s released from surgery, we’ll be taking a short road trip through southeastern Pennsylvania to her temporary home.

Since Anya’s particular flavor of eye infection is often triggered by increased stress, boarding isn’t entirely ideal. It does, however, feel like a better option than having this poor animal at home with me stressing her out and inevitably missing doses of the medication she needs to recover from the surgery in a timely manner. It’s a real devil’s bargain.

I asked the doc yesterday if waiting until Anya was more settled here at home and more comfortable being handled was a reasonable option. He was of the opinion that although the eye isn’t currently an emergency, addressing it was something better done sooner rather than later as it created less overall risk to her sight in that eye.

I absolutely hate the thought of her being gone for two weeks or more, but I hate the thought of irreparably damaging what needs to be a trusting relationship with her even more. I’ve never shied away from getting my animals the best possible medical treatment I could find, but damnit, this one is hard because I don’t have the skills, nor the ability to learn them fast enough, to even be a part of the recovery process. Even if I did, Anya isn’t in the right headspace with me yet to give me the benefit of the doubt.

I know she’s going to be in good hands. The friend who’s helping me by arranging all this for Anya was also responsible for bottle raising Hershel before he came to live with Winston, Maggie, and I. I couldn’t possibly trust anyone more to keep a proverbial eye on my girl and make sure she’s getting everything she needs to get well. Still. The next weeks are going to be tough in a whole different way than the last month was hard. There’s a mile of difference between knowing what’s best and actually wanting to do it. It’s one of those times when the best interests of the animal have to be pressed well above my own selfish desires.

When all this is over, I’ll be putting on a masterclass about the hazards of taking on “project animals” from the shelter. She’s mine now. I’ll see it through. But Jesus, it’s not for the faint of heart.