Jeffrey D. Tharp's Blog, page 27

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 11 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. There’s probably plenty of blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 11 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) for not getting this shit done.

2. Feigned concern. Suddenly, with cryptocurrency crashed off its highs, and big players in that universe collapsing, and taking hundreds of millions of dollars in customer “investments” with them, there’s a hue and cry that something must be done. You didn’t hear much of that when early adopters were making millions off of every dollar invested. But that’s not the point, is it? Crypto, not backed by a national economy or the full faith and credit of a government, not pegged against any number of global currencies, or even backed up by a giant vault of gold, is like walking in your local casino and putting your bet down on red. Pretending surprise and alarm that the ball dropped on black, people are now outraged. Look, I still hold Bitcoin. At its high that holding represented about 1/500th of my net worth. Now it represents somewhere less than 1/1000th. If it went to the moon, great. I’d take my winnings and go home. If it collapsed, also great. It’s a tax loss that offsets a bit of earned income. If you took a 3rd mortgage on the house and pawned everything you owned because crypto couldn’t lose, well, yeah, you’re an idiot. I know there’s a subset of popular opinion out there that believes everyone must be constantly coddled and protected against their own stupidity, but damn, sometimes stupid should be painful and people should be allowed to take their lumps.

3. Singing. You know what doesn’t happen when I’m working from home that does when I’m in the office? Well, it’s a lot of things, but the one that’s currently topping the chart is the fact that while I’m home there’s no one sitting 15 feet away with their headphones on singing at full volume like they’re the only motherfucker in the motherfucking world. I was raised to believe in valuing civil behavior, but every now and then expecting a guy not to take his red stapler and beat someone unconscious is asking a hell of a lot.

The other spooky season…

I know everyone leads hard on October as the spooky season, but I’m going to need to give at least partial credit to mid-December as well. Oh, sure, it’s not spooky in the conventional sense, but the middle to end of December is the one time of year my personal email clears out. As of last night, there’s not one single receipt, shipping confirmation, or any information at all about items purchased, in transit, or being returned. If you happened to be familiar with my online buying habits, you’d know just how unusual that is.

It’s the time of year when my online orders dry up. It’s less because of not needing anything than due to the logistics of this time of year. Delayed orders, out of stocks, items lost in transit, abnormally long shipping times, and then the ever-present weirdness of having UPS, FedEx, or Amazon drivers stumbling around the yard in the dark well after I’ve gone to bed on those occasions when a package happens to get through.

Unless it’s something urgent, my proclivity for online buying is momentarily paused. Whatever I need for the time being should be easy enough to lay my hands on locally. Even so, it’s a sure bet that my Amazon cart will be full to the electronic brim by the time I get around to getting back to normal operations sometime around the first of the year. For now, I’m willing to wait out the worst of the Christmas rush. I’m sure it’s just a weird personality quirk, but I’d rather hold off on ordering completely than spend any bit of the next week or two raging about shipping and logistics.

So yeah, whatever else it may be, the back half of December feels like its own unique flavor of spooky season. 

Don’t expect a Christmas miracle…

Most parts of life, in my estimation, are about finding the proper amount of motivation. Whatever goofy shit you can’t find a way to avoid doing, requires at least some motivation to get through. For instance, I rarely actually want to do laundry… but I like having clean socks and underwear. See, that’s the motivation. 

As I sit here, with a mere 24 working hours between me and a 17-day weekend, let’s just say that motivation is more than a little hard to come by. Systems not working right? Fuck it. “Urgent” email asking things that have been answered three times already? Don’t care. Computer refusing to download a critical system patch that will result in the machine becoming unusable after Friday? Yup. That sounds like a January problem.

Look, I like getting paid on a regular basis. That’ll be all the motivation I need to muddle through the next three days… but it’ll be just that – a good old-fashioned pre-holiday muddle. Don’t waste your time looking for over and above. Disabuse yourself of the idea of it being a zero-defect environment. It’s the time of year when everyone’s just going to need to be satisfied that there’s a warm body here at all. Anything past that truly is a year-end bonus… or perhaps a Christmas miracle.

Permanency with an asterisk…

I’m not particularly religious. It’s been decades since I sat through a church service that didn’t involve a wedding or a funeral. I was raised in the local Methodist church back home as a kid, but drifted away as a teenager. Like the poet said, “Mama tried.” Even as I’ve fallen away from the flock, I’ve maintained what I’d describe as an academic interest in religion. It seems to me that any force that has so powerfully influenced civilizations across thousands of years is probably worth having an interest in.

I may have been raised Methodist, but I don’t have any deep insights into the inner workings of the church, its governing body, or the personalities involved. I honestly hadn’t thought much about it at all until a few weeks ago when someone mentioned attending a meeting to decide if their little church would stand with its parent denomination or brake away. The divide, unsurprisingly, is over the current hot button cultural issues with gender, sexuality, and inclusivity leading the way.

I understand that the issues have already caused people who had been sitting in the same pews for 60 or 70 years to step away on their own before the whole congregation even made a decision. In a community that puts a premium on doing things the way they’ve always been done, that’s quite a statement. Whether that statement is about the church, its congregants, or some people’s determination to be stubbornly intolerant to anything that doesn’t toe the line of their own standards of goodness and right is probably up to debate.

The community where I grew up has always struggled to hang on to its young people. With the double yolk of declining populations and youthful disinterest in organized religion, the local Methodist congregation has already been in steady decline to the point that it’s made up of predominately elderly members. Just having this cultural fight, let alone setting up as a breakaway sect, in my estimation, only has one outcome for this small church nestled hard against Western Maryland’s mountains – its numbers will drop to a point where the congregation is no longer viable regardless of whether they call themselves United Methodists or Global Methodists. It’s already happened to churches in the small towns and villages across the country as younger members shifted to more modern forms of worship. This will be another old-line church that folds as the ground around it shifts in ways that ye olde John Wesley could never have imagined.

As someone who long since gave up practicing religion in any real sense, I’m surprisingly moved by these discussions and their implications. The little white church perched on a hill overlooking town always felt like something solid – a permanent fixture that remained even while the town itself changed. Permanency, as it turns out, should probably come with an asterisk, as terms and conditions apply. 

Arizona independent…

I mean you’re not really surprised Krysten Sinema has left the Democratic Party, are you? Over the last two years, Sinema, along with Joe Manchin, built themselves into the powerbrokers of the Senate. That’s easy enough to do when you’re one of two critical votes giving the Democrats majority control. With the just finished election in Georgia giving the Democrats a true Senate majority, Sinema’s departure was the only real way to prop up her status as a Senate dealmaker or deal breaker in the next Congress.

I haven’t read any opinion pieces on it – and probably won’t at this point. Sure, it’s a blatantly self-serving tactic to preserve her power and influence, but that’s just politics. Democratic leaders in the Senate will still need to court her vote and give her voice an outsized hearing in the great debates to come. If anything, they’ll need to be even more solicitous as long as she keeps at least one foot outside the big tent of the Democratic Party. 

I don’t expect a newly Independent Krysten Sinema changes all that much. It’s not as if she’s going to start suddenly voting in bloc with the Treason Wing of the Republican Party. She can, though, be a voice of restraint against any serious far left tomfoolery the progressive caucus in the Senate dreams up. Really, it leaves us more or less exactly where we have been – and honestly a Congress that’s busy tying itself in knots and not passing a metric shit ton of unnecessary new laws isn’t the worst thing I can think of at the moment. I mean an actual federal budget would be nice to have, but as long as they can stumble along and get the continuing resolutions passed on time, maybe that government is best that governs least. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are ten 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 the last 30 months didn’t prove that working from home works. All this 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. Gotta love working for the sick man of the enterprise. There’s probably plenty of blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published ten weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing their members (and those who they “represent” against their will) by not getting this shit done.

2. Traffic control. When I leave for work, there are two main routes from my house to tie in to Route 40, a major track for many local commuters. There are a few other ways to get from here to there, of course, but both of those take me significantly out of my way. Wednesday morning, I was most of the way up one of these primary routes when I found the way blocked by a county deputy with his lights flashing. Behind the deputy was a rollback, diligently attempting to extract a truck who on this particular foggy morning decided to jump the ditch and attempt to climb a tree. I’m sure everyone there was doing fine work, but it might have been nice to maybe block that particular road where it starts rather than directly at the scene of the incident. It would have saved a shit ton of us a 20 minute backtrack in the dark hours of the morning.

3. Netflix. I’m usually a big fan of Netflix. I find a lot of their original programming delightful. I’m currently being entirely charmed by the first season of Wednesday. Where Netflix is falling down is their ceaseless drumbeat of emails and advertising to try to convince me to watch the newly released docudrama starring the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Let me be clear – Netflix would have to hold a literal gun to my head to convince me to watch that absolute dumpster fire. Even then, it would be under loud and continuous protest. The level of money grubbing and attention seeking displayed by those two incredibly privileged, overly coddled twatwaffles would be breathtaking if it weren’t so transparent. Netflix might think they’re worth $100 million, but I wouldn’t give you a plug nickel for the set. I wish the happy couple every opportunity to disappear into the privacy, obscurity, and irrelevance they say they want… and that they so richly deserve. 

Tossing the schedule…

As the end of the year bears down on us like an onrushing bus, I’m strongly leaning towards temporarily abandoning the normal schedule.

I give it the good old college try to get a post up here every weekday of the year. With the exception of federal holidays that I sometimes forget are weekdays, I mostly hit the mark. You’ve probably noticed that at least a fair amount of what ends up on these pages is at least tangentially related to work. Given that we’re about to hit a two week stretch when work will be the very last thing on my mind, there’s likely to be a dearth of quality source material from that front. If I happen to also mostly ignore the news, well, there’s no telling what, if any, ideas might percolate. 

I don’t think I’ll be taking a two-week break – the chances of me shutting up for 17 days in a row is absolutely nil – but I do expect the final two weeks of the year will be a time when I toss the schedule completely out the window and let posts fall when and where the motivation strikes.

With all that said, don’t be surprised come December 19th if you don’t see a spanking new post hitting every night promptly at 6:00. I promise you’ll still get a healthy dose of angst and hostility over the ultra-long Christmas/New Year’s weekend, but I don’t want to commit myself to any kind of a schedule. It’s my longest break of the year, after all, and I fully intend most of it to be a true break from any kind of expected performance. 

The death of downtown is greatly exaggerated (probably)…

I read an article this morning that more or less decried the death of the downtown business district due to the continuing popularity of remote work. The percentages cited are hard to get around. 

The city I’m most familiar with, having spent three years commuting into DC five days a week for three years back in the early stretches of my career, it looks like the in-person workforce is about 65% of its pre-pandemic high. Back when I worked in DC, my regular commute involved a 30-minute drive, a 40-minute Metro ride on the Green Line, and a 10-minute walk. So that was an 80-minute one way trip under perfect conditions and assuming I left the apartment no later than 5 AM. That time could easily double if there was even the hint of trouble on 95, 495, or the BW Parkway. The trip home in the afternoon? I never made that in less than 90 minutes and the worst day was 3.5 hours from door to door. 

You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I’m not surprised that the average employee isn’t knocking down the doors to get back into their downtown cubicle, burn up fuel, buy expensive downtown lunch, or generally feed the beast when they don’t need to do those things as part of getting their respective jobs done. It’s not captured in any of the articles or studies I’ve read, but if the downtown businesses that supported armies of office workers are losing out, it feels intuitively like there should be a corresponding uptick in the money being spent by these workers at the shops and stores closer to home. Those are more diffuse, of course, and necessarily harder to track. They’re not the story that the big players want to tell.

The death of the great urban downtown is, I suspect, being greatly exaggerated… but maybe there really is a crack in the idea that downtown must be synonymous with gleaming office towers only occupied from 7 AM to 7 PM five days a week. There really is a better way… of course that would involve real estate investors and management companies spending some money to bridge the gap between what was and what will be. Whether they’ll want to do that instead of just paying for bitchy articles about how much better it was when office buildings were full remains to be seen.

Not quite off a cliff…

I never intended or made any effort to use this blog as a money-making venture. First and last, it’s been a project purely for me to vent angst and aggravation out into the universe. I’m told keeping it all bottled up is bad for you and this has been my now year’s long venue for getting it out of my system without picking fights or putting my career in too much jeopardy.

Even though I don’t make any editorial decisions based on them, WordPress is chock full of metrics that, if one were so inclined, could help tailor content and optimize its potential reach. Back in 2021 it was picking up a surprising amount of traction for a nobody blog with no particular focus and no stated purpose. Over the last year, those numbers have, if not quite cratered, then trended back towards the historical mean.

Maybe it’s an issue with algorithms or maybe it’s a case of “they’re just not that into you.” That’s fine. Just like I don’t find my self worth in my profession, I don’t look at my daily page views as anything more than they are – a snapshot of who happened to pass by on any given day. 

I don’t know how long the average blogger lasts, but having been at this since way back when Myspace was a thing, I’ve got to be one of the old timers by this point. The focus of blogging has certainty changed since I started tapping out my first proto posts is in 2006. The ones I come across now have a lot more marketing flare, topical focus, and longer form writing than they did back then. God save me from ever feeling the need to be slickly marketed or well put together.

It’s well that this is something I’m just doing for me. Here in a couple of weeks I’ll roll up the full year’s numbers and they’re going to look anemic next to last year’s “state of the blog.” I’m surprisingly ok with that.

I’m still here. I’m still writing. I’m still offering up thoughtful and not-so-thoughtful takes on whatever abject fuckery is going on in the world and manages to catch my attention. I’m doing, at least one these pages, exactly what I want to be doing. 

Taking full advantage…

It’s finally Friday night after what felt like an exceptionally long week. I’m feeling tired, but mercifully not sick. So, I’ve got that going for me, anyway. 

I’m sure there are those of you out there with grand and glorious plans for the weekend. Good on you. Me? Well, all I really want to do is sink down into a nice comfy chair with a good book and a decent gin drink and lose myself for a little while. Mercifully, I can do exactly that for just about as long as I can stand it over the weekend. Aside from laying in the weekly groceries, there’s nothing on my “must do” list. 

I intend to take full advantage of the situation… So, if anyone needs me, please don’t.