Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 255

The storm before the bigger storm…

So the intrepid leadership of the Dysfunction of Defense has magically discovered a way to reduce the total number of required furlough days for civilian personnel from eleven to six. On the surface, that sounds like a fine thing and if you’re not picky about the details and surrounding circumstances, I suppose it would be. Being the slightly jaded and cynical jerk that I am, of course, I have a slightly different take on how things are going inside that five sided funny farm on the banks of the Potomac.

As close as I can figure, reducing the number of furlough days probably has as much if not more to do with the legal requirements for the Department to close the books on the fiscal year before the clock strikes midnight on September 30th. Someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of The Building has probably realized that along with the rest of us schleps, the finance and logistics people they need to close out the fiscal year are also working 20% fewer days and not authorized overtime. In my experience, that makes completing the year end financial festivities a statistical impossibility. Woops.

Another perk of getting everyone back to the office in the next week or two is that it gets everyone into a nice routine for the inevitable shitstorm that’s going to take place at the start of FY14. My best guess is that the fiscal year about to start on October 1st will include such highly sought after features as Debt Ceiling Induced Government-wide Shutdown, Furlough: Part II, Reductions in Force, and Pay Freeze: Part 4. Hopefully I’m wrong about some or all of those predictions, but I don’t think I am.

I have the sinking feeling that this six day furlough was a dry run – the storm before the even bigger storm ahead.

Battery backup…

A couple of months ago I finally had to break down and face that my iPhone 5 was falling down on the job. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the blasted thing to hold a charge for any longer than about six hours under what I would consider not particularly heavy use. A trip to the Apple Store, a battery swap out, and all was right with the world. Or at least it was for about a month.

I’ve been trying to avoid admitting it to myself, but when I looked at my phone at 9:45 this morning and saw it holding only a 48% charge I’ve been forced to finally admit that history is repeating itself. Which means come Furlough Friday, I’ll probably be trudging back to the Apple Store in the hopes that they can right what has once again gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Sleek as it is, I can’t say that iPhone 5 has been my best Apple experience. If it were my first, I think I’d have a tough time justifying sticking with the platform at this point. I’m absolutely dependant on my phone and need it to be something that “just works,” rather than something I’m hauling around extra charging cables and an external battery pack just to keep in service. My last, Hail Mary play is restoring the phone to factory presets and adding apps back one by one to see if I can determine if one of them is causing a battery sucking do loop. That’s pretty much the only big gun I have left.

If all else fails, I hope there’s a Genius in Delaware who can fix my phone. If we go for round three of this mess, it’s going to be time to start seriously looking at other options and that’s not a road I particularly want to have to go down.

Winter in the archives…

We’re well into winter in the jeffreytharp.com archives. This Sunday’s update comes to you from January and February 2008. Grad school was wrapping up, home improvements were happening, it was before things went off the rails for me in Memphis. It’s so strange to read these old posts and relive the experience, especially when I’m looking at it through hindsight’s lens and knowing that a few years later the neighbor’s questionable approach to lawn care would drop precipitously down the list of things I cared about. Early 2008 was still good times in the Mid-South. And if this little blast of nostalgia is any indication, apparently I’ve added enough distance now to start looking back on some of that time a little fondly.

Half way…

This afternoon I’m heading to the 71st birthday party for one of the best bosses I’ve ever worked for. More than a boss, I’ve always considered this guy a friend. As much as this post should be about him, I think we all know that I’m going to find a way to twist it around and make it about me, instead. That’s just what happens when you have a healthy ego and your own domain name, I guess.

I initially didn’t give it any thought much past “Absolutely, I’ll be there.” Now that it’s had some time to simmer, of course, the idea of 71 is starting to sink in. Not that it’s an unusual age so much as it is that in a few months I’ll be blowing through the halfway point to that milestone. Yeah, that might have caused a “Whoa!” moment.

I don’t feel halfway there. I don’t really feel a quarter of the way there. Aside from the occasional aches and pains, the ongoing chemistry experiment that keeps me alive, and the fact that so many people around my age seem to have kids in high school, I don’t think I’d be aware that anything had changed at all.

If the birthday boy is any indication, apparently I can coast out the second half feeling exactly the same way. God knows that’s the game plan I’m looking to follow.

What I Did on My Furlough Day (Part 4 of 11)…

Well, we’re four weeks in to DoD’s brilliant cost-saving furlough and routines are starting to develop. Saturday Part 1 (a.k.a Furlough Friday, a.k.a. Old Friday) has become the default day for running errands, going to Walmart for groceries, and beating the lawn back into submission. Basically I’m still putting in a full day’s work, it’s just work that I’m not getting paid for and use to be considered part of the weekend routine. Aside from the making of a new routine, there’s nothing significant to report. Hanging out at home, minimizing expenses where I can, and generally trying not to have an aneurism every time someone mentions a five-week Congressional recess or a multi-million dollar presidential vacation.

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give him a bank and he can rob the government… but if you elect him to office he can steal it all.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Failure to follow directions. Don’t ignore the very clear directions I provide and then try to raise hell and cry the blues when everything goes to hell in a handbag. I will not hesitate to refer you back to the previously ignored instructions and remind you that I told you so.

2. Bright Ideas. No. You didn’t just have one. Almost no one has legitimate bright ideas. What you most likely had was a bad idea masquerading as a bright idea. The two are very much not synonymous. If what you’re thinking about hasn’t been done anywhere, by anyone before, there’s probably a reason for that. Just let it be.

3. “Helpful” salespeople. I know the sales people are just trying to be helpful (and boost their commission), but when I show up at a shop asking for something specific, I’m not really interested in something similar but more expensive. I’m actually interested in the thing I’m asking about. I know some people wander in not having a clue in the world what they’re looking for, but rest assured I am not one of those. Although I appreciate your pluck and determination, what I really need you to do is bugger off.

Wrong gear…

It’s the end of July. The part of me that spent two years checking off classes good for a teaching degree and then spent 28 months actually teaching still rebels this time of year. Some people go into teaching because they have a passion for their field. Some do it because they like kids and want to “touch the future.” That always seemed like a particularly pervy phrase to me, but I digress. The point is, I mostly went into teaching because it seemed like a great way to maximize time not working.

By now the average teacher is probably yelling at me about all the time they spend prepping, planning, grading, collaborating, talking to parents, and taking refreshed training after class, on weekends, and over the summer. My solution to that was to simply not do those things. I was usually in my room 30 minutes before the first bell only because that gave me time to eat whatever breakfast I picked up on my way in from the house and the busses barely cleared the parking lot before I was headed for the doors at the end of the day. As for grading on the weekends, at night, or at some other time when I wasn’t getting paid for it? Yeah. Forget about it. I guess someone people work for love, but I’ve always been more a “work for money” type of guy. Maybe that’s another reason the whole teaching career never took off, but again I digress.

What I seem to have at the moment is a distinct lack of motivation and the deep seated wish that all manner of jobs came with a 45-day chunk of free time right around the middle of summer. Sure, I’m making sure the paper shuffles from here to there, but in my head isn’t even in the same city as the ballpark where the game’s being played. That’s not a good long-term plan. Once the days start getting shorter and the nights cooler, I’ll snap back to reality. Right now I feel like a car running in the wrong gear – still moving forward, but doing it in a monumentally inefficient way… and you just can’t fix that shit with more cowbell.

August: By Request…

It’s been a while since I’ve opened up the request lines around here. With July rolling to a close, the summer doldrums well in place, and realizing that I can’t write about sequester and furlough every day and expect 99% of you to keep reading, it seems like as good a time as any to let someone else do a bit of the heavy lifting involved in topic selection.

The rules are simple and straightforward:

1. You pose a question or identify a topic of your choice. Be ruthless, I’m looking for a challenge. Just don’t ask about math. I don’t do math.

2. I carefully hand craft a response and post it on jeffreytharp.com for your amusement.

I’m tempted to say that nothing is off limits, but there’s not a chance in hell that I’m giving you jerks passwords or account information just because you were froggy enough to ask for it. With a very few limitations, though, the gloves are off so feel free to pick your topics and ask your questions with reckless abandon.

I’ll keep the request line open for the entire month of August (or until I get tired of it), so the sooner you leave me a comment, the sooner I can get on with the serious work of writing a sarcastic response.

Half and half…

As part of the Magical Mystery Furlough of 2013, half the people stay home on Mondays and the other half stay home on Fridays. It’s one of those ideas that sound better in theory than it operates in practice. The logic was that inflicting the furlough on two separate days would mean that offices were open and “servicing the customer” during normal business hours. Like I said, it sounds fine in theory. I mean what customer doesn’t enjoy a good servicing, no?

What’s really happened, of course, is both Monday and Friday have become bureaucratic dead zones – the lights are on, there are a few people around, and we can officially say that the office is “open.” Just don’t try to get much done because odds are at least half of the people you need to talk to are scheduled out on the opposite Furlough Day. It’s hard to believe no one at echelons higher than reality saw that coming.

What we end up with is a functional work week that takes place only on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday because that’s the only time most people make it to the office nowadays. That’s not taking into account the people who are out in the normal course of using vacation days or sick time. Since no meetings were harmed in carrying out this furlough, anything that was usually scheduled on Monday or Friday now takes place on one of the other days too. That’s not even accounting for the meetings we now have to have to talk specifically about the impacts of sequestration and the furlough. Far be it for me to criticize, but let’s just say productive time is becoming an increasingly rare commodity.

The lights are on. We can say we’re still open five days a week. But what’s been lost in productivity is far greater than the sum of everyone’s collective 20% reduction of hours. Maybe this whole asinine exercise will save Uncle a penny or two on the dollar, but what he’s losing in the productivity, morale, dedication, and respect of his employees will cost him a shitload more than that in the long run.

It’s a new year…

It’s a new year, or at least it’s a new year in the archives. This morning the calendar rolled forward to 2008 and I’m happy to deliver up for you the first five posts from January. If I’m remembering the year right, it was one of those perfect storms of family obligations, trying to slog through to the end of grad school, slowly starting to realize that I wasn’t as in love with work as I thought I was, and the usual malcontentery that you find here on a regular basis. Not all of those themes come through in this first set of posts, but that should give you the flavor of what was banging around in my head when they first appeared on ye olde MySpace blog.

Each of today’s archive posts first appeared over five years ago now. It’s remarkable how some things change and some feel like they’re in exactly the same place they were 2000 days ago. Life’s funny like that.

Without any further suspense, go ahead and check out the archive for January 2008.