Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 23

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 20 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 20 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. Artificial intelligence. Everywhere you turn, there’s an article or news story about AI – Deep fakes, creepy chatbots, ChatGPT – warning that we’re standing on the precipice of SkyNet. I’m somewhere between indifferent and intrigued. I mean I don’t especially want to spend the last 30 years of my run on this rock serving some new robot overlord, but the technology itself is undeniable fascinating. Honestly, if you take a look around at how humans have royally fucked up the 21st century, maybe it’s time we give AI a chance. I have to wonder if some of the fear surrounding AI is more concerned with it making better choices than we do rather than making everything worse. Take the humans out of the decision loop – our emotions, our ego – and hey presto we could be in for an interesting new world… or SkyNet. At this point, just roll the dice and see where they land. 

3. Office sickies. Look, it’s bad enough we’re piled back in the office, but when you have big buckets of sick leave and the ability to request unlimited telework on an ad hoc basis, there’s no reason for anyone I work with to be in the office hacking, snorting, snot dripping, and generally spreading whatever contagion they’ve come in with on any given day. “You look like shit and sound awful” should be the kind of thing that triggers someone, somewhere in leadership to send plague carriers home to reduce the chance of the crud spreading… but it’s increasingly obvious that we’ve functionally learned nothing about how to manage illnesses over the last three years. Y’all were screaming about wanting to “get back to normal,” well I guess here we are. Same as it ever was.

The broken promise of streaming entertainment…

I read an article this morning that cited a survey reporting that American adults are now getting more of their screen time through streaming services and apps like TikTok than through traditional television. The comments section was filled by people talking about the glory of cord cutting. 

That’s fine. Good on them. My cable TV subscription is still the one stop shop for 85-90% of anything I want to watch. For all my hostility to Xfinity and Comcast before them, the presence of their “set top box” means I don’t have to constantly go hunting for something. The older I get the more willing I am to pay for that kind of convenience.

I get it. I’m a contrarian… but needing to jump between from Netflix, to Hulu, to Amazon, to Disney+, to Peacock, to HBO Go, in order to watch one show on each of them, in my opinion, tends to be a marvelous pain in the ass that inevitably means stopping to log in to one app or another when all I want to do is push a power button and go to the right channel. Layer on the joy of finding that half the seasons of a particular show are on App A while the rest are on Streaming Service B and forget about it. Whatever percentage of a dollar I’m saving for making my life more complicated just isn’t worth it.

Frankly, we’ve reached a point in this evolution where I’m more apt to cut streaming services rather than cable television. The promise of streaming was that I’d be able to select just the channels and content I wanted instead of buying the whole universe of programs that included bundles of things I couldn’t care less about. That future never materialized and instead streaming became ordering up bundles of bundles instead of one big one with everything included.

Increasingly, if there’s a series I want to watch and I can’t find it free through my cable service, I’ll just wait until I can buy the damned thing on iTunes or Amazon – one and done, commercial free, for a fixed price. I imagine my days of being subscribed to multiple streaming services is just about over. They’re quickly approaching the point of being more bother than they’re worth.

I’m not a public relations man, but…

Whether the three most recent “unidentified objects” shot down over continental North America are Chinese spy equipment, rogue weather balloons, or the harbinger little green men from Uranus, the present administration has done a singularly bad job of getting out in front of the story. 

From day one, the story should have been that although the nature of the object is unknown, a Joint US and Canadian military recovery team has been dispatched to each crash site and that all materials recovered would be handed off to RCMP and FBI investigators who will be assisted by . Additionally, they should have announced that there would be update briefings held twice a day until further notice regardless of whether there was anything new to report.

The White House Press Office should have gotten way the hell out in front of this story. Instead, in the absence of regular engagement and what seems to be the desire to downplay the story, they’ve left the field wide open to speculation, conjecture, and crackpots of every stripe filling in the gaps with their own flavor of batshit crazy conspiracy theories. That was and is precisely the wrong approach to dealing with such a novel situation.

I’m well aware that there’s an ongoing requirement to balance national security concerns against the public’s interest in being fully informed – but given how much of the tracking and shoot down information is circulating in the public sphere already, the government, and the executive branch in particular, is being badly served by this plan to say as little as possible. Sitting quietly and hoping the story of US warplanes shooting down UFOs will die down on its own is both foolish and wrong. 

At least that’s the advice I’d give them if I were their PR man.

Making my bet…

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was considering taking the last of my retirement accounts – a long held Roth IRA – out of the hands of a new advisor and tending to it myself. Well, that transfer was finalized Friday afternoon. Exclusive of whatever a federal pension looks like in 12 or 13 years and discounting almost completely the idea that I’ll ever see a nickel of the cash I’ve poured into the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security, I’m now the chief cook and bottle washer for every last scrap of cash I’m counting on to keep me from living under a bridge and eating cat food in retirement.

I’m mostly feeling good about that decision. I’ll feel even better once I’ve unwound that account and gotten everything into low-fee, index tracking funds that just bump along into the upper right quadrant without needing a whole lot of thought or analysis. It’s not exotic or adventurous, but it’s the kind of thing that was good enough for Jack Bogle when he built Vanguard and for Warren Buffett to recommend for his wife. That should be good enough for me by any measure. 

So yeah, I’m going to go ahead and place a big (for me) bet that the international economic order isn’t going to blow itself apart in the next three decades… or if it does, there will be a 1950s style boom decade while it all gets put back together. Past performance, as they say, is not indicative of future results, but over the long term, I’m comfortable coming down on the side of people always wanting to make money and buy stuff. In fact I believe in free markets and free people so much, I’m staking the last third of my life on it.

A blow against the forces of chaos…

A few days ago, I was requested and required to provide an update on the current status of the annual spring event that I find both loathsome and obnoxious. Historically these sessions have always been fraught with danger. Gotcha questions, deep diving irrelevant details, adding requirements to no real advantage, and generally just busting my balls was the order of the day.

Not so this time around. We passed on the relevant information. Provided a broad overview of progress, the expected way ahead, and our proposed timeline and milestones. There were several clarifying questions and then approval to proceed as planned.

I walked into the room planning on needing every bit of bureaucratic arms and armor I could carry along. Not a bit of it was called for. In fact, the whole thing felt so unnatural that I’ve spent the last 48 hours expecting the other shoe to come hurtling out of the sky and land directly on my head.

This dog and pony show is still the bane of my existence, but it’s nice to be dealing with someone who doesn’t seem determined to make the slog harder than it needs to be “just because.” Is it possible that I’ve encountered a rare supporter in trying to stave off unnecessary chaos?

I was not expecting that to happen right square in the middle of the week, but here we are. It’s a brave new world.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

It’s been an unexpectedly decent week. Usually by the time Thursday night rolls around, I’ve got a veritable laundry list of topics to distill down into the final three. This week it’s just two and I feel like I owe you the honesty of that instead of just manufacturing a third item just to preserve the purity of my weekly format.

1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 19 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 19 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) for not getting this shit done. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence and the elected “leaders” of 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. People first. There was a work-related town hall type meeting held this afternoon. One of the minor gods in our firmament was scheduled to deliver remarks. It happens all the time. Business as usual. Or it would have been, right up until the point where an email got circulated reminding us that it was an in-person event and our attendance in person was “expected.” Never mind the millions we’ve spent on laying on remote communication and meeting capabilities. Never mind the absurdity of packing in as many as 750 people asshole to elbow so they can share whatever sickness one or two of them may be carrying around. Never mind the sheer convenience of participating remotely so one could both listen in to gain the information and continue to do other things in the background. The important part of the day was putting asses in seats so the venue looked full. I’ve been directed to be seat filler for events since my very first week working for this vast bureaucracy way back in 2003. I can’t begin to tell you how many town halls or other large group format meetings I’ve attended over the last twenty years. The number would be staggering. You might be tempted to think three plague years would have changed that… and you’d be wrong. Today was just another day of appearance being far more important than reality. Thank sweet merciful Zeus that Thursday is one of my regular telework days. Otherwise, I’d have been sorely tempted to violate one of my basic tenants of professional life: Go along to get along whenever you possibly can. It’s best I wasn’t there in person to ask how that whole “People First” thing is working out. I was, at least, comforted by seeing large swaths of open seating in the room when the live feed started, despite the AV team’s impressively quick efforts to crop that view off the screen. My colleagues, it seems, also elected to vote with their feet. Good on them.

Towards a modern theory of office work…

A hundred years ago when Henry had Model T’s sliding off the assembly line at River Rouge, the standard 8-hour work day made some kind of sense. That line ran at a steady clip for 8 hours and each person performed X task or attached Y widget. One task necessarily had to follow the other and it all needed to be synchronous.

Easily one of the most farcical things in the world is the idea that assembly line techniques should be applied to working with information. As a desk jockey, my work is annoying but synchronous. A large portion of the things I touch over the course of the day depend on input from one or more people who may a) be out of the office; b) have other competing or higher priority issues; c) need to gather additional information from one or more other people; or d) have retired on duty and don’t give a rat’s ass who needs what or when. As often as not, there’s no particular order of operations because Task A isn’t necessarily reliant on Task B being all the way done.

In spite of the work being largely asynchronous, my work day is a regularly scheduled 8.5 hours. The hours are more or less fixed. And you can count on one hand the number of days I’ve worked in the last 20 years that have included a full 8 hours of production. On my best days, an easy two or more hours is pissed away just by waiting for other people to do something or provide some information. On days that are not the absolute best, productive time might be just one or two hours with the rest being lost in the sauce.

The real ridiculous bit of this is that regardless of whether time is productive or not, the expectation is that you’re mostly at your desk for the duration. It feeds the age-old illusion that the appearance of work is far more important than the reality of being productive, in spite of any logic to the contrary.

It seems to me that once you’ve cleared the deck of the day’s required work – whether that took you three hours or eight, your day should be pretty much done; Congratulations! You’ve won at working today. Get on outta here. The notion, most often held by those of the managerial persuasion, that people with time on their hands should cast around looking to pick up work from someone else is patently ridiculous. It’s a sure path to end up not just being assigned your work, but also some of the workload for two or three of the local office slugs. Instead, by common consent, what really happens is we stay firmly ensconced at our desks providing the illusion of productivity, but being 300 posts deep in r/AmItheAsshole.

Look, people are going to abuse whatever system you put in place. We seem to be hard wired to get away with whatever we can get away with. All I’m saying is that applying 1920’s industrial management principles to an information workforce in the 2020’s might not be getting anyone the best bang for their buck… but it’s the path of least resistance, so here we are.

Strange or strong…

I used to really geek out for the yearly State of the Union Address. I’d cheer and boo and deliver a running commentary to the television the same way some of you guys will watch the Super Bowl this weekend. Now there’s a better than average chance I’ll be asleep not long after the president delivers the near mandatory, if almost farcical, assessment that “the state of our Union is strong.”

It’s a subjective assessment. I mean I’m not sitting here expecting Civil War 2 to break out on Thursday, but we hardly feel as unified and well put together as we were, say, in the heyday of the Eisenhower Administration. 

Now if President Biden walked into the well of the House and proclaimed the Union “stranger” than ever, he’d be on to something. Between the current oddball economic conditions, Russia flailing around in eastern Europe, China doing China stuff, and the modern Know Nothing Party being determined to wreck the institutions of government for shits and grins, strange feels like the more apt description. 

Wrap everything up in the bow of a 24-hour news cycle that’s obsessed with views, and clicks, and clout and even the smallest fire can give off the illusion of burning out of control. With all that in mind, I’m sure I’ll watch the opening number, but there’s really very little that this president or any other could say to convince me that the state of the Union is far stranger than it is strong. 

I need it to feel longer…

I spent most of the day mulling over how it could possibly have been Monday again already. I suppose it comes fast when the weekend lasts approximately 37 minutes. I made my usual and customary early run to the local grocery store, stopped at Lowe’s to resupply on bird seed, and then made my way home to pull up the drawbridge. It’s the same basic rhythm that’s ruled life here since the earliest days of 2020.

It was a weekend filled with reading, cooking, and generally puttering around the house with the animals. The last person I had to contend with face to face was the supermarket cashier. Unless something slips from the rails, she’ll have been the last person I see “in person” until the next time I wander in to the office. It’s a real thing of beauty if one of your big objectives is not dealing with the general public unless it’s absolutely necessary.

The consequence, it seems, of being entirely pleased and satisfied with the state of things is that these glorious “off” days is the perceived speed at which they pass. Days feel like they’ve become hours – like there’s barely a pause between Friday and Monday.

My question, then, is there some way to consciously slow it down? Do I have to fill the weekend with activities I loathe to give the impression that I’ve gotten a full 48 hours? What’s it going to take to make weekends feel like more than a speed bump on the route to Monday? There must be a secret… and I need it.

It’s dog and pony season…

I spent most of my productive time today working on details of two separate events. I use the word “events” here purposefully instead of “projects.” It’s intentional, because these two items are absolutely events – occasions if you will. So, break out the floral arrangements and reserve your best rented tux, because it’s dog and pony season.

The first, a three-day series of informational briefings to contractors about how we plan on spending our cut of the defense budget over the next two years, is, as ever, the bane of my existence. This will be my 9th year though this particular wicket. For a while I had a series of supervisors who’d always promise that “next year we’ll get someone else on this.” Nine years on, my various supervisors don’t even bother saying the words. Death, resignation, or retirement seem to be the only path away from this particular bit of fuckery.

The other, decidedly less labor intensive event, is what amounts to an overgrown trade show hosted in northern Alabama every spring. Laying out who should attend, if we want to nominate some special bit of equipment or process for a demonstration, and reminding everyone to get their hotel rooms booked early or they’ll be staying in 50 miles away from the conference center is the regular drumbeat of my life in January and February.

I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating, that none of this is especially hard work. Like most of my projects, I’m more a facilitator than a doer. I try to make sure the right people have the right conversations and nudge them back into alignment when they wander too far afield. None of it is hard, but every bit of it is a time consuming pain in the ass.

Almost every day, I ponder what one must be thinking to decide that I am the one who should be draped in the glory of planning conferences, events, and all manner of dog and pony related activities. My well-noted misanthropic opinions alone should make me uniquely unsuited for any assignment in which the goal is to engage and entertain large groups of people. But here we are. Again.

I’ll do it. Everything will exceed the baseline standard of “good enough.” If, however, you think I won’t bitch and complain about the process, the attendees, the inability of our own bosses to get documentation approved on time, and my general disdain for in person boondoggles and the utterly unnecessary logistics tail that accompanies them, you must not know me at all.