Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 263

So you were expecting a thank you?

Secretary Hagel announced this afternoon that the department was reducing it’s number of planned furlough days for civilians from 14 to 11. That’s down from the original estimate of 22 days they were talking about back in February and March. Judging from the blip of coverage I’ve seen, the media consensus is that defense civilians should be doing cartwheels and singing hosannas at the “good news.” That’s a problem for me.



While it’s true that 14 is better than 22 and 11 is better than 14, I’m not willing to concede the point that any number of furlough days is a “good” thing. In fact it’s bad precedent for the next 9 years of sequestration planning, it’s bad for productivity, and it’s bad for morale. I’m not going to get on the band wagon of a 5% pay cut this year (after 3 years of frozen pay) being a good thing. I’m not lending even the hint of my accepting the idea that this is anything other than a political problem being solved on the backs of a workforce that they’ve already spent three years beating like redheaded stepchildren.

The story we’re being sold is that leadership has “saved” the workforce from the worst effects of the sequester. The reality is that all you’ve done is replace one really shitty course of action with another slightly less really shitty course of action. It’s hard to imagine why I wouldn’t be falling all over myself with gratitude. I wouldn’t thank a mugger because he didn’t take all the cash in my wallet and I’m not going to thank our illustrious leaders for legally doing the same thing. If they were expecting a thank you for their half assed attempt at “leadership,” boy did they come to the wrong place.

The Rains of Castamere…

Since there’s only so many times a reasonable blogger can gripe about back-to-back-to-back meetings, I’ll give it a rest tonight. Instead, I’ll simply mention a fun few seconds dashing from one meeting to the next. Admittedly, I have a probably inappropriate habit of whistling to myself if the hallway happens to be empty. Sometimes it’s whatever song is stuck in my head from the drive in, sometimes it’s something I heard at my desk. This morning, it was The Rains of Castamere. Something about it’s bleak overtones seemed to fit the day of meetings without end. Of course it’s even better when a complete stranger coming from around the corner recognizes the tune and makes it a brief duet without saying a word.

Quick math…

I was going some back of the napkin calculating this morning and it looks like I’ve got about half a year’s worth of archive posts left to go. It feels like I’ve been drawing down on that source for a long, long time. I guess I have been leaning on them pretty hard to get Sunday posts up without needing to worry too much about originality. Don’t worry, though, I’m sure when the time comes, I’ll find something to fill that gap in your Sunday mornings. Maybe it’ll be time to recruit a guest blogger so I can continue to have basically one day a week off. We’ll see about that when the time comes.

Since we don’t really need to worry about any of that until closer to the end of the year, I’ll simply direct your attention to the center ring, where this week’s feature presentation highlights the joy of suburban living as well as the run up to Hurricane Dean. While Dean turned out to be a bust for the US, that week was one that opened my eyes for about the way we throw large numbers around without giving it much thought… especially when we’re talking about the budget. Trust me, it only sounds dull. If you knew how often these conversations took place throughout the District, even the most spendthrift among you would have more than a moment of pause.

Without further adue, I present you with the world that was, in mid-August 2007.

Brew…

So once upon a time, one of my more farfetched strategies to get back to Maryland involved a scheme to buy the rights to an old Maryland beer’s name and label and re-found the tradition of brewing in Cumberland. For any number of really good reasons, that plan never went past the “that would be cool” phase of research and development. After spending a couple of hours at the Fordham Brewery in Dover this afternoon, I think it’s safe to say I have a new respect for the art and science of the “small” craft brewer. From what I can tell, it’s about as far from the stovetop brewing I did in my St. Mary’s County condo as a model plane is from the space shuttle.

Alas, it seems that brewery owner is going to be one of those things best retired to the list of ways I’m going to spend my eventual Powerball winnings. If you ever find yourself in Dover on a Saturday and have an hour to kill, I highly recommend stopping in and taking the $5 tour. With a payout of five samples and a free pint glass, how can you afford not to?

Sunday drama…

As we all know by now, I’m a creature of habit. In the spring one of those habits is enjoying Game of Thrones as each new episode airs on Sunday nights. Sunday night dramas have been part of the routine since The Soprano’s was the highest rated show on HBO, so let’s just go with the assumption that the 9PM timeslot on Sundays is a very well established and sacrosanct part of my weekly schedule – the parting shot signaling the end of the weekend.

Now anyone who has seen the show or read the books knows that when they sit down to watch an episode they’re signing up for 54 minutes of greed, sex, violence, and dragons. Given the show’s ratings, it seems to be a pretty popular Sunday night pastime for a great many people. As I learned this past weekend, my mother is most decidedly not among that legion of devoted fans.

Rather than watch last weekend’s episode, I mostly cringed through it under a barrage of commentary ranging from “I don’t know why anyone would watch this” to “this is stupid” to silent painfully obvious eye rolling. I’d say it was probably a demographic problem, but there’s the tricky fact that George R.R. Martin is himself part of mom’s age group. It’s more likely just a case of widely divergent opinions on what constitutes great television… and possibly a leading reason why I need to seriously consider adding a second cable box to the household and avoid the awkward Sunday drama.

I don’t think mom will be running out to get a subscription to HBO any time in the near future… but maybe she’ll change her mind when she sees Boardwalk Empire this summer.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Bank of America (I believe this entry represents their 2nd oak leaf cluster for the year to date). I totally understand you wanting proof that my condo is covered under a master insurance policy that secures the entire building and not just the walls of my unit. Due diligence is a good thing. I’m happy to send you whatever information you need. I’m going to be less enthused the second time I send you the same information. When you ask me for the third time to provide you with exactly the same information I’ve sent you twice already, well, I’m going to start questioning whether I can really trust you to hold my mortgage at all since you can’t seem to keep track of something as simple as the name and phone number of an insurance agent.

2. Waiting until the last minute. All rumors to the contrary, I’m actually a fan of procedures. I like knowing that there is a way to do things and that if I follow the instructions step-by-step I’ll get a predictable result. When, after following all the required steps and procedures, I find that I’ve been bumped in favor of something that’s being thrown together at the last minute without going through the same wickets, it makes me wonder if in the future it might not be better to go ahead and wait to the last minute, declare an emergency, and then do whatever the hell I want. If flying by the seat of your pants gets the same result in the end and takes 1/10th the planning time, tell me again why I should follow the actual procedures?

3. Voicemail. Yes, thanks to the wonder of modern technology you can leave a message for me on my phone that I can listen to at my convenience. You see, though, the thing is that checking voicemail is never really convenient. I see that you called. If it’s a number I recognize, I’ll call you back as soon as I can, no message needed. If it’s a number I don’t recognize, you’re going to voicemail because I don’t want to talk to you so leaving a message doesn’t really do much beyond antagonize me. More often than not I’m going to delete your message without listening to it anyway, so why not save us all some time and effort? And if you do need to hear my voice immediately and I’m not picking up, chose one of the plethora of text-based communication tools available on your phone and send a quick “need to talk ASAP.” Even when I don’t have the time or interest to drop everything else to focus on just one conversation, there’s a pretty good chance I’m keeping an eye on text messages and email and will get back to you just as fast as my two little thumbs will carry me.

A whole lot worse…

For eighteen months, “furlough” and “hiring freeze” are words that continually show up atop the list of search terms that drag people kicking and screaming to my little slice of the internet. Having spent an outlandish amount of time bitching and complaining about both over the last two years, I guess that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. I’d love to tell you all that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and that Uncle Sam’s financial woes are behind him, well, there’s really nothing out there that indicates that’s true at all. From all outward appearances, Uncle has managed to paper over the worst of the problems for the time being. While that seems like a good thing, it probably just means that he’s managed to kick the can further down the road and that when it comes time to settle the tab, it will be even worse than we thought.

By my most recent calculation, I’ve worked under a hiring freeze of one sort or another for about a third of my career. I’m not feeling the pinch at the moment because I’m not actively looking for an eject button, but if I was options would be pretty limited. Having personally experienced the fresh hell of sending out multiple hundreds of resumes to get a handful of interviews, I don’t envy anyone looking for fresh horizons under the latest incarnation of the freeze. Even more unfortunate, I don’t see the market thawing any time soon, either.

Uncle has been warning about employee furloughs for months now. The general public reacted badly to the notion of laying off food inspectors and air traffic controllers, two very visible activities carried out by random, faceless bureaucrats. I have my doubts if there’s going to be the same outcry for defense workers. Working behind the wire, most of the public will never see or know what we do on a daily basis. As a result, us staying home for a week or a month isn’t something they see or experience firsthand. That makes us easy to ignore and therefore an excellent target of opportunity for cost reduction or avoidance.

So far, the department’s official position, at least the one that it’s opted to communicate to the workforce, seems to be ignoring the issue and hoping it goes away… at least that’s what it looks like from the inside. Predictions range from “nothing’s going to happen” to having to take the full 22-day furlough within the last 3 months of the fiscal year. Someone at echelons higher than reality probably has the smattering of a plan, but for the time being the drones are being kept well insulated from anything that resembles official information.

As we grind towards the end of fiscal year 2013, I think we’ll come through with minimal disruptions. What no one is talking about yet, and what I’m convinced is going to bight us all in the ass is that sequestration is a ten year event. Even if we ride out year one with cost savings through attrition and quietly cooking the books, we’ve still got nine years of draconian cost savings to generate…and in my mind that means things are going to get a whole lot worse in the out years before they ever start getting better.

Recycling…

If you spend any time reading the recommendations about “how to be a bestselling author in 978 easy steps” one that they come back to time and again is how important it is to get new material in front of readers as quickly as possible. That sounds well and good until you really start to think about the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into something as seemingly simple as publishing a “short” 150 page book. The reality is that I don’t see any way to do it in less than 18 months that doesn’t involve either giving up my day job or not sleeping. While one of those options would be temporarily awesome, it would inevitably lead to poverty and starvation. The other would probably lead to some kind of REM-deprived psychosis. Neither is an option I find particularly attractive for the time being.

There is another option I’ve been kicking around for the last few weeks. I’ve got a blog just sitting here with seven years worth of more or less untapped material. Most people read a post once, maybe twice if it’s really epic, and it’s never seen again. With a little editorial effort, a few thousand words of fresh content, and some flashy layout, I could conceivably have two new books set to press in short order. It’s extraordinarily tempting, if for no other reason than it buys me time to work on something completely fresh while I’m editing these together.

It’s an idea still very much in its infancy, but I’m starting to outline two lines of effort:

1) What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2012 was a Bitch. This would be an anthology of 52 weeks of what is generally the most viewed posts I publish each week. Some I’d freshen up and expand a bit from what appears on the blog, but mostly they could be plucked root and stem and used shamelessly for retail purposes. It has the decided perk of also being a self-licking ice-cream cone – as long as Thursdays each weak feature WAJTW, every year I’ll have popping fresh new material for the next edition.

2) Epic: The Best of jeffreytharp.com. Over the last seven years I’ve posted more than a few epic rants covering everything from work to neighbors to random people at Home Depot. I haven’t dove into the research yet, but I’m betting that there’s more than enough here to turn into a respectable ebook maybe something in the neighborhood on 25-30,000 words. It’s definitely going to require some polish – if you haven’t been reading the Sunday archive updates, take my word for it; some of the early work is pretty rough hewn. Still, I think there’s plenty of meat on the bone.

So will either of these ideas come to pass? Honestly, I don’t know yet, but it does seem like a waste to sit on what’s got to be upwards of half a million words of content and not do anything with it. It would be like running my own personal recycling program… and that’s a good thing, right?

1,147 Mondays…

22 years, 24 days, 6 hours. That’s the amount of time between this evening and my first date of retirement eligibility. I didn’t start out the day with that stuck in my head. What I was really focused on is what an utter disappointment Mondays are in the grand scheme of things. Monday is the week’s little way of pissing on your leg and calling it rain.

Maybe somewhere there is a happy group of people who leap out of bed on Monday mornings excited and ready to get back to their cubes to get started on the exciting week ahead. It’s a good bet that I’m never going to be that kind of person. The best I can manage on Monday is a grudging acknowledgement that at least Friday afternoon is a few hours closer… and if I really want to put on my optimist hat, I can always do some quick math and find out that there are only another 1,147 Mondays standing between me and having the right combination of age and years of service to qualify to retire. Eligibility, of course, doesn’t mean that it makes financial sense to hit eject, but that’s going to have to be a separate discussion.

But hey, looking on the bright side, in less than three years, I’ll have whittled down the number of Mondays into the triple digits. Wow. Yeah. That’s depressing. Stupid Mondays.

The finest Sunday traditions…

In keeping with the finest Sunday traditions here at jeffreytharp.com, while you’re out there getting ready for church or making plans for how to spend the day before the start of the work week, I’m here dredging up the past for your reading pleasure. Today’s installment of “from the archives” is from August 2007. Featuring one good bit of soul searching and four smaller bits of commentary on life, it seems that early August six years ago was a bit of a time of introspection… of course sometimes that makes for some pretty good reading. Enjoy this week’s archive posts and I’ll see you back around the same time next week.