Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 268

Darts and a blindfold…

A few weeks ago it rained. It was a hard rain and the office operated the whole day under a policy of “liberal leave,” where people could use unscheduled leave without penalty. Now if fairness, this was allowed because a mile or two north of our waterfront paradise the snow was falling to beat the band… but still here at the office it was rainy day.

Fast forward to this morning. The roads throughout the area were covered and snow was falling from the sky at a respectable clip. Driving conditions, while not quite treacherous, was considerably less than ideal. Because the snow had started falling more or less at the same time people start showing up for work, the parking lots, sidewalks, and pretty much every flat surface was an ankle deep puddle of slush that no one had gotten around to treating yet. It would have made for an excellent opportunity to announce liberal leave or to cut the first hour or two off the work day. It would have gone a long way towards earning a little bit of employee good will in an environment where that’s in pretty damned short supply.

I’m sure there’s some kind of logic to how such decisions get made at echelons higher than reality… though based on almost two years of observation, I’m beginning to think the process includes darts and a blindfold.

Hear my voice…

No one recognizes the irony of posting voices from the past when my current voice is a bit ragged. Conveniently here in the 21st century, I don’t need to use my shredded vocal chords and raw-feeling throat to get the word out. Sitting at a keyboard and spreading my own version of the good news feels more natural anyway.

Anyway, we’re back on a regular Sunday schedule which means that the latest offerings from the archives are up and ready for your enjoyment. Featuring five posts from May 2007, we cover plenty of ground – from the joys of business travel to photography. One of the things that “expert” bloggers always tell you is to find your niche and stay in it. Fortunately, it seems my niche is being a cranky commentator on whatever happens to cross my mind on any given day. I guess it does help if you’re writing what you know.

That special time of year…

It’s the special time of year when the pollen count starts to reach into the stratosphere. I know this because for the last week my eyes have been itchy, I’ve been sneezing my damned fool head off, and the back of my throat has felt like I’ve been playing a game of swallow the razor blade. Between Claritin and ibuprofen, I’m holding it at bay, buy I really do wish it would be a regular case of sick so it could hit, be unpleasant for a few days, and then go the hell away until next time.

Like many of the bad things over the last half decade or so, I mostly blame Memphis. I didn’t have any allergies as an adult until I moved to the south and experienced spring with a new mix of flora and fauna. Apparently while my system learning how to deal with that, it was simultaneously forgetting how to handle the plants of my native land. On the bright side, by June I should be just fine. Super.

Mark that up as reason #6,273 why I never need to leave the Mid-Atlantic ever, ever again.

Burger…

There are plenty of places that try very hard to raise the simple and delicious hamburger into something like a high art form. I’m sure there is a place for a gourmet burger piled high with expensive and exotic toppings, but for my money there’s nothing better than a basic cheeseburger loaded down with ketchup, mustard, and raw onion on a buttered and toasted bun. Take one look at me and you’ll know I’m not exactly one to go in for the latest trends in Asian fusion or French cuisine. Those meals are more like an appetizer than a main course. It all boils down to personal preference, but I’m going to lay the blame squarely on the greasy spoon dining of my youth – Scotty’s, Kelly’s, and Marshall’s were all places to go to find a burger that was unapologetic about what it was and that didn’t need to be heaped with extras to taste good.

The real, local hamburger experience is getting harder and harder to find – it’s almost impossible unless you’ve been in an area close to forever. Ask most people where to get the best burger in town and they’re as likely to direct you to Sonic as they are to some mom and pop diner outside of town on the back road. For most of us, those places don’t exist anywhere but in our memory any more… But fortunately, that doesn’t mean the purists among us are stuck with some kind of fancy pants, snob burger.

Enter Five Guys. In my travels a few weekends ago I was lucky enough to spy what appeared to be a Five Guys Burgers and Fries not far away from me in Delaware. As far as I can tell, putting in an order from them is the next best thing to sitting down for one more burger in the battered, stained, and broken booths at Scotty’s. The atmosphere doesn’t even come close, but if you close your eyes and bite, the flavor is right there… Now if I can just talk them into putting brown gravy on the fries.

You’ll have to excuse me, but I need to go change. It’s time to start thinking about crossing state lines in search of dinner.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Filling in all the down time. I’ve got a marked tendency towards filling every available gap in down time with something I deem to be productive. That might be a good habit to have when you’re working full time, writing 20+ hours a week, and trying to keep a house from being covered in filth, but I’ll be honest, that part of me that is fundamentally a slacker really misses big blocks of down time – those chunks of time when I played video games, watched movies, and otherwise did absolutely nothing productive. Lately it’s been a mad dash to get it all in before crashing at 10:00 or 11:00 in hopes of squeezing in five or six hours of sleep. I’m not sure that’s going to, or if it can be an enduring schedule for me, but since there’s still so many things I want to get too and not so much in the way of time available to get to them, there doesn’t feel like there’s going to be much room for change in the foreseeable future.

2. Wants versus needs. In a perfect world I’d divide my day more or less equally between writing and sitting on a beach on some out of the way island. Unfortunately, I need to eat, need to pay rent, and need some kind of nominally stable income (which is what government work use to be before the sequester kicked in). Whereas I want to write, I actually need to work… unless I can gin up a way to start selling 137 copies of Nobody Told Me… The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees every day of the year. All I need to is improve sales by 6850% and I’ll be all set to unify my wants and my needs under one banner. I was probably happier before I knew that little factoid.

3. The Congress of the United States. One of my perennial favorites. On a positive note, they appear to have managed to pass a continuing resolution (not to be confused with an actual budget) that will keep the government open for the rest of the fiscal year while continuing the federal pay freeze through the end of its third year. Somewhere in the fine print, they also managed to allow DoD to dodge sending out 800,000 furlough notices for two more weeks… which doesn’t actually mean that anyone will be furloughed for fewer days, just that we’ll have less time to cram in all the days into an ever shortening fiscal yeah. I’m sure the Members are deeply relieved by this while they head home to enjoy their two-week Easter recess. Even now I’m sometimes still amazed that this is the way we really run this country. Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Paperback writer…

I really only ever planned to produce Nobody Told Me… The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees as an ebook. Representing the fastest and most direct method of putting text into hands, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to the added time and effort of putting together a print edition. A few emails and Facebook posts, though, prompted me into action. Since I’ve been home anyway, I started tinkering around with Createspace too see what a print book might look like. As it turns out, the fine people at Createspace (a tiny little subsidiary of Amazon) have gotten the process down to a bit of a science. When you’re a one man show, doing the writing, layout, publication, and publicity yourself and on less than a shoestring budget, there’s a fine line between making smart decisions and making decisions that mostly just serve your own vanity. Conveniently, the Amazon family of businesses have made it relatively easy to feed both beasts at once.

So there you have it, in the space of about six hours I accidentally became a paperback writer; or to be more exact, I submitted everything to Createspace and anticipate being a paperback writer in 24-48 hours. Now, don’t get too excited just yet. Once they aprove my work, I have to order a proof, wait for it to get here, make sure it isn’t all jacked up and/or make a billion and a half changes, and wait for clean copy before posting any links or letting it loose for distribution through Amazon and it’s affiliates. I don’t know whether to expect this to be a two week or two month process, but whatever comes if it, you’ll hear it here first.

Seeing the forest…

We had an awkward conversation at the office this morning. One of the most popular discussions happening around almost every one of Uncle Sam’s conference room tables these days is what the forced cuts of the sequester are going to mean for the job and for the individual employees. Since the almost universal answer is no one really knows yet, these conversations usually end in a great gnashing of teeth and another hour gone down the tubes. I’m pretty sure I know what those at echelons higher than reality are thinking though – that if they just plan hard enough, they can still figure out how to cram 40 hours of work into a legislatively-imposed 32 hour workweek.

In trying to account for and occupy every second of those 32 hours, they’re missing the broader point that in addition to the eight hours a week of “lost” time, people are also going to be using their sick and annual leave allotments just as they would under a 40-hour week – except now they’re using it over a shortened week, dramatically compressing the number of days available when leave can be taken. If pushed, I’d make an educated guess that a one-fifth reduction in the work week will actually result in the average office being staffed at somewhere between 50-60 percent on any given day during the furlough period.

If you want a crash course in my logic, here it goes: My personal observation is that on any given work day, about 15% of the total workforce is out of the office on some kind of approved leave. All other factors staying equal, with the sequester furlough (20%) and the use of leave (15%) 35% of the available pool of employees will be unavailable for work. Add in another 5% of the time when immoveable objects like mandatory training take place and you’re into the 40% unavailable range… So while the official talk is about a 20% reduction in work and the activities that will slow down and stop as a result of it, I tend to think someone is being rather optimistic. The real impact is going to be much closer to leaving only 60-65% of time available to actually get the job done.

Compile other intangibles like steadily declining morale, pay that’s likely to be frozen for at least three years, and general worry about being able to meet simple obligation like rent, food, and other expenses, with the direct negative effects of the sequester furlough, and you’ve got a recipe for intensely negative performance across the board. The problem, as far as I can tell, is no one is seeing the second and third order effects of this forest because the trees are so damned close. The media and certain elements on the Hill are fond of pointing out that the sequester hit and nothing happened. Those wheels are in motion and sooner rather than later the real impacts are going to start making themselves felt. That’s when the hard decisions are going to get made about what tasks get done day-to-day and which get tossed over the side for lack of time to do them… and that’s going to be when the real awkward conversations start.

Scheduling conflict…

So there was a bit of a scheduling conflict this weekend. Between kicking the book out the door, driving to Western Maryland and back, and trying to squeeze in some quality time, something had to slip… and because you guys are mostly good at not raising hell about it, it was weekend blogging that took the hit. I’d say I was sorry about that, but it was a really good weekend, so I’m really not very sorry at all. Since I like you too much to spout fake apologies, we’ll just leave it at that, ok?

I know, this won’t make up for missing yesterday, but for your reading pleasure five new “old” posts are now available in the archives. Now that the book is out and all I’m busy doing is hectoring people into buying it, we should be back on track from here on out… unless someone wants to hire me for a speaking engagement, symposium, signing, or birthday party. In that case, you’ll get updates when you get them.