It's someone else's fault, and everyone should know it

If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
--God, Futurama

Dilemma of the day: fix a problem myself quietly, or point it out to others?

Work has been quiet this week. Most people are out of the office, of course, but I'm not, so I'm getting a little done on the doomed project. Technically, my review was supposed to start two days ago. However, all the people who could officially tell me to get started are out, and it is not ready at all. I have a couple questions, other people have a couple questions for each other, and I'd need to do work to actually implement the changes requested by the "informal review" before my own review can "officially" start. So instead, I've been working on a known issue that's only sort of part of my review. It's nice to get ahead of things a little... but then, this part is such a pain and so time-consuming that I really wouldn't want to do it at the same time as everything else.

In the process, I've found a few errors that had escaped notice until now. One problem in particular mushroomed from a molehill into... well, a heap the size of a person or so. I can't possibly compare this problem to a mountain, especially not considering what project it's a part of. It's a total of less than half a page that needed to be added or revised. But I definitely thought that I had identified the whole problem only to realize there was more to it at least three times. "OK, if we say this, then we have to refer to it in this other section. Wait, there already is a reference, but it's to the previous version. Wait, do we even have the latest version?"

I'm 90 percent sure that I've figured out the true extent of that problem by now. The thing I still haven't decided is whether I should fix it quietly by myself or e-mail the person responsible for it and ask him what he really meant and what to do about it.

There are a few reasons that I should probably ask for help.
1. Conscientiousness. As I said, I'd estimate a 90 percent chance I have the problem figured out. That's a 10 percent chance I don't. If it turns out that I am wrong about this, then finding out later on and having to fix it then is more work than firing off an e-mail now.
2. Ass-covering. Document that I'm working on the project at a stage when there's little tangible sign of it. Point out how many problems are other peoples' fault or could have been prevented by them.
3. It's in one of the unhelpful guy's sections, so I'm extra inclined to give the problem back to him if I possibly can. From where I sit it looks like his carelessness has caused so much unnecessary work that I'd like to spread some of it back onto him. Make him clean up his own mess.

But the fact that it involves the unhelpful guy is a good reason not to point it out, because, of course, of the difficulty of getting useful information from him. Really, the smartest, most efficient thing to do would be to fix the problem myself, but the main appeal of pointing it out to other people would be to say "See what he did this time? See what I have to deal with?"

Can't make this up

This is ridiculous.

-----Original Message-----
From: H.
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2011 12:01 PM
To: R., the lawyer on the doomed project
Cc: me
Subject: FW: the doomed project weekly review

FYI below -- I tried to discourage this but TMBB will be reviewing L** sections during your review. Please provide a link to the document you want them to review.

Very respectfully,
H.
Signature block

-----Original Message-----

From: B.
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 3:03 PM
To: H.
Cc: B2.
Subject: RE: the doomed project weekly update

Will push for this to be in parallel with the legal review. I don't know that we'll see changes as a result, but with those portions being fairly contained, this being a conceptual review, and PC review going for another week, I think we should be ok even if there are some changes...

-----Original Message-----
From: H.
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 1:26 PM
To: B., H.'s boss
Cc: B2., H.'s other boss
Subject: FW: Large OSV: The Week In Review (Dec 5, 2011)

Hello,

Please see email below -- this will delay legal review, which is currently underway. We were given assurances that this was vetted through all impacted offices. Please advise.

Very respectfully,
H.
Signature block

-----Original Message-----
From: N.
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2011 12:10 PM
To: H.
Cc: several people on the team and their bosses
Subject: RE: The doomed project weekly update

H.,
Since there is lots of ongoing discussion on L**, I think it would be worthwhile to have [team members' bosses' bosses, or TMBB] do an "informal" review & comment on those pieces of the reg text at this point rather than wait. This would include the new sections recently added to address training, construction, etc for L**, which were not in previous versions reviewed and commented on by TMBB. I'm not advocating that you delay any of the other work or adjust the timeline.
R,N.

To summarize, a bit about operational L** was added to the doomed project relatively late in the process. Fine. It's there, it's in, just in time for the "pens down" date when the subject matter experts would stop work as everyone agreed, so that me and the lawyer and economist could do our work in turn. But last week the team members' bosses' bosses, or TMBBs, pointed out that they've had an "informal review" of all the rest of the rulemaking, but it didn't include the bit about operational L**. So they're asking for the chance to do an informal review of operational L** as well.

At first glance that might look reasonable. Just a chance to do with one section what they've already done with all the rest. However, there are at least four problems with it.

1. "I'm not advocating that you delay any of the other work or adjust the timeline." I found that breathtaking. Why isn't he advocating that? He should be. Experience indicates that he should: the previous informal review took more than a month. I'd personally say that the last-minute stuff is in a rougher state than the rest, but you don't need that level of familiarity with the project to know that there's a problem here. Simple logic indicates that he should: the whole point of a review is that TMBBs might want to make changes, and if they do, that would take time. And really basic human courtesy indicates that he should: other team members have their own jobs to do. This guy wants to take other peoples' time for his review. All in all, that one line was ridiculous.

2. As H. points out, it was agreed upon by everyone that the "pens down" date came and went more than a week ago. The time to ask for something like this was back then. It's not like they just noticed the operational L** stuff on Friday. But either TMBB are so disorganized or haphazard that they didn't think of it at the time, or they thought of it but didn't want to kill the feeling of progress at the meeting. Neither of which speaks well of the quality of management here.

3. H.'s own boss said "with those portions being fairly contained, this being a conceptual review, and PC review going for another week, I think we should be ok even if there are some changes". The assumption there is false. These portions are not fairly contained. There are literally a dozen different sections in the document relevant to this. It took me a nontrivial amount of time just to make the document for review: find all the sections, copy-paste them into another document, and ask the lawyer about four borderline cases and an illegible section. TMBBs asked about the operational L** stuff added at the last minute, but he also asked about "training, construction, etc", neither of which is the last-minute stuff. This leads into yet another problem.

4. I left a ton of details out of the above e-mails, but basically, we decided we should put together everything related to L**. "Training", "construction", the operational L** that was added at the last minute and all the rest. All together, that's over 60 pages, about 20 percent of the total document. If they really did just want what they specifically listed, then that wouldn't have saved too much effort because I couldn't have easily figured out what those were without help, and if they were unclear that's just replacing one problem with another. But if they want to do an additional review of 20 percent of the document, this is a very, very late date to start it.

What a mess. I finished putting together the file for review this morning, so my job here is done until TMBBs have comments on it. But I found it interesting how such a relatively simple request could get so much wrong.

Could I do a better job? ... Well, maybe not.

Now and then I get to wondering about whether I'm actually doing everything I can to help other people. I complain so much here about clueness people and unnecessary work, but every so often I find myself thinking things like, "You should already know that, it was sent out in an e-mail... three months ago, along with a bunch of other information, mostly on another topic." or "You should already know that, it was discussed at several meetings... not like most people on the team come to even half the meetings, though." or "The whole team knows that, we've been doing it all along... but you just joined a month ago."

Maybe I could be doing more. I could go into more detail in e-mails to the team or group discussions. Minutes of meetings are normally e-mailed to me and H., but maybe people would be better informed if they got regular reminders about that stuff. The team is big enough that new people show up relatively regularly for one reason or another, and we could brief them better. How much would that help things?

But I have my doubts that that would do much good, because it never takes too long for people to ask stupid questions that I'm absolutely certain have been adequately explained, but they still don't know.

For example, in a meeting last week, the unhelpful guy asked which spreadsheet was the economic review matrix. Not only has he been told that many times both in person and by e-mail, not only has the economic review matrix been in use for months so if he didn't know he should have asked before now, not only has he personally been to meetings where he, the economist and I worked on the economic review matrix... but a computer screen was projected for the entire meeting to see open to the relevant folder on the network, and the economic review matrix has "economic review matrix" in its name. (And yes, it's clear that he could see the screen from where he was sitting and all that.)

Basically, the answer to his question was literally in front of his face. But he couldn't figure that out - and the unhelpful guy may be a recent, perfect example of this, but he's far from the only one - so I don't think more complete briefings by me would make too much of a difference.

The management will continue until morale improves

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" - Source unknown, probably Narcotics Anonymous

There was a meeting of the doomed project. In addition to the usual problems, apparently we've attracted attention from on high. This is never a good sign.

In addition to the doomed project, there are also two other projects with related focuses. There is a lot of overlap in resources between the three projects - in plain English, a lot of people who are assigned to more than one of the teams. At today's meeting, we learned that team members' bosses' bosses have noticed that these projects are having problems. To address this, they have told us to start updating them weekly on status and activities via a spreadsheet, in hopes that they can better identify exactly what the problems are.

This spreadsheet has rows for each person on the team (at least 20) and columns for various types of input (six). (If we had nothing to do with a certain issue, leaving its column blank is acceptable, but everyone is expected to fill at least something in weekly.) It will probably be a bit confusing, because in some ways it resembles spreadsheets the team has already been using but not in other ways and is used very differently. There is going to be a new spreadsheet created every week, and everyone on the team will be responsible for reporting on their own activity that week.

When faced with the problem "People on this project are working too hard and being pulled in too many directions", I'm sure that adding a new, nearly pointless requirement isn't the absolute worst way possible to help, but I'm also sure it's not a good way.

I suppose I could take a positive view of this. The proposed spreadsheet originally had seven columns of various categories of activity, but in this morning's meeting the team decided that we could narrow that down to six. (We eliminated two or three columns as redundant, but also added a new one and split another column into two separate ones.) So that means we'll have to keep track of a little less and it'll be a little clearer than the original draft. So the meeting could have gone worse than it did. That's good, I suppose.

(More general update on the doomed project: it recently transitioned to a new phase. The ball is now mainly in the lawyers' court, to be followed by mine, and then the economists'. This means that the subject matter experts will have to do a bit less for the next few weeks than they did for the past few months, and the lawyer, me, and the economist each will have more during our respective phases. As slow and horrible as things have been, and as abjectly we're going to fail at the official deadline, and as much as I'll hate the period when the ball is in my court, we actually are making progress. I think.)

Inherent in the system

I have to admit that while I'd say many problems with my job and in this office are the result of modern American politics, the American political system, or human nature in general, others are simply most likely due to errors by individual people after all. (For example, I'm lazy. But that's not news.)

The recent thing that prompted this post is that while the doomed project had a deadline of one year (actually, more like 14 months, but anyways), my supervisor pointed out to me a week ago that that's only counting from when the Congressional mandate was made. We had unofficial hints and informal warnings that it would be coming for several months before that. It was foreseeable. If this organization had acted on those hints and created a new team or took the team assigned to the general revision and put their feet to the fire, we might actually have made the deadline.

Why didn't we? I'm sure there are lots of reasons. Even if intergovernment cooperation was as good as it could possibly be, it would still take a certain amount of time for information from unofficial backroom channels of Congress to percolate to decision-makers in this agency and for them to make and implement their decision. There's a finite number of people with a finite amount of time to work, so putting them on this project would take them away from another. And maybe someone in this agency tried to prevent the mandate from happening and simply failed. And maybe the people in charge just didn't think the deadline would be a big problem at the time.

Given the state of the project right now and hindsight being 20/20, though, we should have started working on it earlier than we did. I'm sure there's some reason we didn't, but I have a hard time imagining a good one.

A maze of twisting passages, conclusion

I theorize that both the problems with this office building I have gone over in exhaustive detail and the problems we don't have that one might expect are both due to the pressures unique to federal government facilities.

Obviously, the federal government has a ton of money and people, and more security than even the biggest corporation. All of this makes it willing and able to take the long-term view. But at the same time, people in charge of federal departments have less personal investment in the job. At the very highest levels, political appointees are expected to change with every new president, and at every level I think a mentality of service to the organization is more common in government than in private industry. And of course, there's a huge austerity mentality in government. Fraud and waste exist of course, because government is staffed by homo sapiens, but it's rarely in ostentatious ways. Private industry will splurge on a modern, fancy-looking building or pleasant interior design if they can barely afford it, because private industry recognizes the importance of employee morale and a good public image. In government, though, no one wants to explain to a Congressman with a hardon for budget-cutting why you didn't take the very lowest bid. In government, a bad image is a good message. But then, pushing back in the other direction yet again, it's very easy to justify computers and desks. Obviously, everyone needs to sit somewhere and type on something, right? And it's easy to buy that kind of thing in bulk. Likewise, there's a certain expectation that a government agency will educate and inform people about its domain, so it's not too hard to throw in decorations and miniature exhibits relating to that - even if the building is not generally open to the public.

So the people who work here get a building with floorplans that are simple on paper but very user-unfriendly when you're walking around in them, computers newer than the software on them, private spaces fit for lawyers' offices and public spaces fit for struggling small businesses, and cheap but plentiful art and exhibitions even though no one from the public ever sees them. Bizarre until you think about it.

My mind is blown

Seriously. Apparently I'm not the first person in the world to notice that version control is a problem. Who knew?

I talked with some friends online yesterday and things turned to my griping about that problem at my job and someone mentioned that there's actually quite a lot of stuff like that already out there. In July I patted myself on the back for having that idea. Now that I actually look it up, apparently some kinds of have been around for over 10 years. This is what happens when English majors pontificate about tech issues without deliberate research.

This morning I talked to M., the economist on the doomed project about it. I think one big problem is that people here, if you'll forgive the oversimplification, are dumb. However, he explained that there are a number of other reasons as well. For one thing, the federal government contracts out tech support on five-year contracts. If they didn't think to ask for revision control software when the last contract was signed, they might not be able to get it until the next one. For another, there are all kinds of security issues, since some people here work on classified stuff sometimes. That slows down approval of software updates greatly. You and I might say that open-source software is generally more secure than Microsoft products that haven't got the last couple security patches yet, but apparently the people who matter think differently.

Red-faced

Just a few minutes ago I went to talk to H. about several problems with the doomed project. While we were talking, something came up I hadn't noticed before now. A part of the project that's chiefly my job happens to be scheduled over Christmas. The schedule thinks I'll have seven days to do something, but once you factor in the official holiday and extra days I'll be out, it will be four at the most. I should have noticed this much earlier, or at the very least at a certain meeting yesterday, and it's sheer luck that it came up in this conversation, so I was a bit red-faced about it and consider myself lucky that we came up with a solution.

And then, five minutes later, I hear H. in my boss's office. (It is just on the other side of the wall from my cubicle, so I can hear laughter or raised voices but I can't make out the words of a conversation.) H. is laughing. Heh, um, whoops.

Seriously, nothing to worry about. H. called me when she got back to her desk to say that she had briefed my boss about the schedule conflict and its resolution in neutral terms, and the laughter was when they were talking about something that had happened this morning. And even if they had been ranting about me, well, H. and my boss both make it clear that they're happy with my work overall, so at the absolute worst it would just be an embarrassment. But no one likes to imagine people talking about them behind their backs.

A maze of twisting passages, Part Three

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes: That was the curious incident.
-Silver Blaze, by Arthur Conan Doyle

One thing about the building that seems kind of weird when I think about it is problems we don't have.

For starters, this place is not dingy overall. Computers are newish (even if software isn't). Office supplies are plentiful. My desk chair here is nicer than the chair at my computer at home. Most of the furniture here would not look out of place in a nice law office. (Admittedly, I assume that the desks, shelves and office furniture of my peers would be for interns or behind-the-scenes paralegals or whatever, and only a dozen people in this building have furniture fit for a lawyer in private practice, but still.) My cubicle doesn't give much privacy, but some peoples' cubicles do, and some people have actual offices.

This compares favorably to similar workplaces in private industry, at least in my experience. The one time I went to the home office of my contracting company, it was in worse shape than this. My previous job was in publishing, and the desks there were described as "Soviet-era" for their sturdy construction, dented metal exteriors, and general ugliness. Only the owner of the business had his own office, and most people didn't even have cubicle walls to make their own, just a desk. Computers were more out-of-date there than they are here. People at that previous job would be jealous of my workspace even as they looked down on the larger building.

There are a couple problems here that I didn't mention in previous posts, though. First, the walls, especially in public spaces, take forever to get fixed. Just standing up I can see a bunch of scuffs on one piece of wall where a chair has been repeatedly bumped up against it for years, and a segment of wall with a couple feet of in the plaster or whatever where wiring was removed. Both have been like that as long as I can remember. On a door around the corner there's a gap in the paint where a sign used to be. (Not where the paint was faded; the sign was presumably attached to the door before the paint, they painted around it, the sign was removed.) The paint jobs are even worse on the stairs. There's a huge range in quality of conference rooms: from worse than my own office to better than my boss's boss's office.

All in all, there is widely variation of quality of different things here, and on boring afternoons it's kind of interesting to think about why.

Why I would give Congress a low approval rating

One annoying thing about the doomed project is that it relies so much on the exact text of a Congressional mandate, which is annoying because Congress apparently doesn't have a style guide, or if they do it doesn't match ours.

There are two specific examples. First of all, the word "shall". My office does not use it any more. I don't know exactly when we stopped, but it's bad. It's archaic; you'd never ever hear it in conversation and it has long since fallen out of daily use. It's vague; "shall" probably usually means "must" but sometimes it could mean "can" or "should", and how can the reader tell which? Regulations have to be clear. And this is exactly what they have to be clear on - whether something is or is not required. Occasionally we get subject matter experts using "shall" because they're in the habit of reading or even copy-pasting from 15-year-old material, but we tech writers just correct it and move on. Writing regulations in plain English is often a challenge and is sometimes not worth the trouble, but it's always something to aim for, and avoiding archaic, vague language on important points is a great place to start.

Congress, however, freely uses "shall". At least they did in the mandate on the doomed project. It's hard for me to lay down a definitive, blanket rule in the project about it when Congress is doing the reverse.

Also, there's the phrase "interim final rule". To us, it means nothing. As I've said, the normal process for a project has two publications: a notice of proposed rulemaking followed by a final rule*. Sometimes, for something where we're allowed to or really need to skip the notice phase, the notice is replaced by an interim rule, which is effective immediately but has a period for public comment and will be followed by a final rule for any necessary revisions. "Interim rule" is a defined term in our internal guidance, and is meaningfully distinct from everything else, and just makes sense in layman's terms. However, "interim final rule" is none of the above. It doesn't appear in our handbook or on the fancy laminated poster-sized flowchart of the rulemaking process and it seems intuitively contradictory, at least in my opinion.

But, again, Congress uses that term. I'm not sure what they think it means. It appears in the mandate for the doomed project more than once.

So the doomed project has "IFR" all over the place, and "shall" keeps popping up. Obviously, these are not major problems, but they're my problems, so they're annoying.

* Sometimes there's also a supplemental notice between those two for when things change signicantly before the final rule, and sometimes there's an advance notice before the notice for when our ideas about what we want to do aren't firm enough for a notice. But the notice (or IR) and the final rule are two basic steps that almost every project has.

A maze of twisting passages, Part Two

It's worth noting that my comments about the building are not just my opinion. Like I said, there's one floor which was recently remodeled. The windows there are waist-height to ceiling, wall to wall. Clean, well-maintained exposed piping on the ceiling allows most of the floor to be lit more brightly and breaks up the monotony. As for colors, there are more browns, yellows, wood patterns, and genuine wood. Some conference rooms even have wallpaper that looks kind of cool.

People who work on this floor are lucky compared to people on other floors and they know it. The window nearest the set of elevators on my side of the building has a styrofoam cup, and over it there's a notecard taped to the window right where people would come to bask in the sun on nice days. The notecard riffs on the old Mastercard ads, with prices for things like "quick peek" and "longing look", and the final line is "escapist fantasy... priceless!"

But here's the funny thing: there is money in the styrofoam cup, and I'm pretty sure it's not just a joke or aspirational seed money. So clearly, a lot of people share my opinion of the state of most of the building.

However, there are still at least two problems with the remodeled floor, both of which happen to be problems with the layout, that make it clear that it's still in the same building as the maze of twisting passages and designed under the same pressure, even if they don't actually have twisting passages up there.

The first problem is that the numbering scheme of offices, cubicles and conference rooms on the remodeled floor is... insane? Incomprehensible? Nonexistent? Well, I'm sure there's some logic to it, and I totally realize that the floors I'm familiar with could be confusing to some*, but the remodeled floor is a huge leap in confusion. I think even-numbered rooms might be on the opposite side of the building from the room with a number one higher or lower than them. When I want to go somewhere there I normally just pick a direction at random and walk until I find the room number I'm looking for.

And second, the middle section of it is blocked off. You need some kind of security clearance to get there. This is a problem because it's the middle of the floor. If you take the elevator there and happen to be on the wrong side of the building (and I never know about that until I get there because, like I said, incomprehensible numbering), you can't take the most direct route to where you need to be, you have to walk all the way around. They couldn't have blocked off one quarter of it to the side and left unimpeded traffic through the center of the building? No, apparently not.

So all in all, the remodeled floor would be rated much higher than the rest of the building by anyone who cares about interior design, but it still is never going to win any awards and still reveals the pressures that shape government buildings.

* I see people who probably don't work here much getting off the elevator near my office confused, probably because the only direction is badly designed. A floor plan is posted near the elevators closest to me, but it was designed from the point of view of the other end of the building, so there's a "you are here" sticker and there's an intuitive place to assume you are when you look at it and they are on opposite sides of the map. They should have either used a much bigger, more obvious sticker, or designed two different maps, one for each side of the building. It's symmetrical, so it's not like two maps would have been too hard.

Confrontation

We had a meeting about part 12(c) of the minor project near the end of October. Verdict: we got to do the table our way. Victory. The meeting was more than a bit aggravating, though. The senior tech writer (sort of my manager but sort of not, the most experienced writer who is kept in the loop on all this stuff but he doesn't actually manage anyone) came along but left me to do most of the talking. Optimistically, maybe he would have jumped in if he thought I was screwing it up, but he doesn't seem much like the type. He's a very bad speaker. Bad in a public speaking sense, although he manages to ramble and trail off in one-on-one conversations too. It's just as well I kept things under control there.

In the end, I think I did OK. My arguments may have shifted a bit over the course of the meeting, going from "You can't use these previous rulemakings as a guideline because this one is different" to "Well, you can use these previous rulemakings as a guideline, because they actually mean something completely different than you thought." Underneath it all, of course, my real reason for it was "Do it our way because this is our choice, and our way is this way because my boss says so". My boss's way was probably the best way, but I could have made a good argument for my way if we weren't already behind schedule, and it wouldn't be too hard to come up with an endless variety of tweaks to the formatting of a table. The differences between them would have been almost trivial.

It was downright weird, maybe the most decisive I've had to be so far in this job. It's a pity it was over this. There are lots of problems that actually matter in this job, but the only significance to this problem was the internal turf thing.

Literally a maze of twisting passages, all alike

One insidious mind-numbing part of this job is the building. It's almost a perfectly typical base of operations for a faceless bureaucracy. There is one floor (recently remodeled, more open floor plan, better lit) out of seven that differs from the rest, but even it is mind-numbing in some ways.

Probably the worst thing about it, especially as the winter is starting, is the lack of windows. There are none in my office, nor any offices I go to regularly. The cafeteria has windows and I get lunch there most days and bring it back to my desk. (Maybe my mood would be greatly helped simply by eating down there. But then when could I blog?) Even in the cafeteria or offices that do have windows, high cubicle walls and generally bad layouts make it hard to see the sky in anything more than just narrow glipses. The only time I see the sun during work weeks in the winter is during the five-minute shuttle ride on my morning commute, and when I get lunch or deliberately go outside for some reason.

In the halls of most floors, the walls are off-white or eggshell and the trim, floors and ceilings are various shades of gray. In offices on most floors, the grays continue with eggshell cabinets and are supplemented by conventional shades of peach, tan and light brown on cubicles and metal filing cabinets. I think the desks are wood-patterned plastic.

Lightlessness and monotony aren't the only problems with the layout of the place. Halls on either side of the building twist around the elevators and stairs and bathrooms. In a building with a sensible layout, going from one hall to a parallel one requires making two left turns (or two right, depending on which way you're going), but here it requires turning left, then right, then left, then left (or the reverse, depending). The layout is simple enough on a map, but when you're walking through the halls they almost feel labyrinthine.

Various offices have seals or flags outside the door as appropriate and there are decorations, but there aren't too many and they are mostly staid, conservative and cheap. Paintings depicting the history of this department's field or people in this department doing heroic deeds, but mostly in a boring, representational style, at least a step below the quality of art in a hotel lobby. In addition to the art in the halls, the main hall on the first floor of the building is taken up by a permanent exhibition about the history of the department, and there are also several smaller historical or educational exhibits on other floors. However, these confuse me a bit. I don't understand who they are for. This place is hardly a tourist attraction. In fact, you need employee ID or an escort to even get into the building. The only people I can think of appreciating the exhibits are visiting dignitaries with unaccountable free time, and new people in the first month or so of their time here.

So my office building is mazelike, gray, drab and windowless. There are few decorations in public areas, and those we do have are either cheap and crappy or pointless, if not both. Admittedly, us writers in cubicles get the worst of it, and some people with offices and windows have downright nice workspaces, but still, from where I sit, this place is soulless.

Correction

Oops. I was way off in my "Alternate History" post, and probably in other posts about the doomed project as well.

Today in a meeting people referred to another requirement mentioned in the Congressional mandate that I hadn't thought of when I wrote Thursday's post. After hearing that, I dug out the actual mandate and read it. I had thought it only mentioned the size limit, but no, it clearly says a lot more than that. It says that we have to ensure the safety of individuals and the environment and specifically mentions certain staffing requirements. So I have to reevaluate that gray area. It's not as big as I thought, and it starts within the mandate. I thought a lot of the stuff in the rule was scope creep, but we really are required to do a lot of it. Which is kind of funny, because the meeting today began with H. complaining about scope creep and at the time I was thinking to myself "Of course it's scope creep. Limit this project to the mandatory size limit change and closing the standards loophole and it would be 30 pages, published six months ago. Oh, the mandate also mentioned staffing? Huh, I wonder what else it mentioned? OK, with staffing maybe it would be 50 or, hell, even 100 pages, published three months ago. The remaining 200-plus pages of the document and ongoing work is all scope creep."

That's obviously not the kind of thing anyone could say out loud, let alone me, but all these meetings about putting in just one more part or changing just one more thing get aggravating. But the staffing was brought up in the meeting, and that made me wonder just what else exactly fell under the mandate that I don't normally think of, and so I actually looked it up, and, wow, the mandate is actually fairly broad. And to be clear, there really is quite a bit of scope creep. Anything that's not truly essential for safety, rather than just being kind of nice, is scope creep. Anything that applies to things below the former size limit is scope creep, especially anything that only applies to things below the former size limit. Anything related to cross-platform compatibility is scope creep (I think). It's just that lots of stuff that I thought was scope creep probably isn't, and it's objectively harder to tell what is.

So anyways, what does all this mean? That the idea of meeting the deadline was always crazy to begin with.

Alternate history

Obviously, the doomed project is a mess. But how should things have gone?

To be clear, the original timeline was impossible. The team was formed in December 2010 or so, it was a normal project in all respects except for the deadline pressure and one piece of red tape Congress cut for us, and the timeline called for publishing an interim rule in the summer and a final rule by the end of 2011. That can't be done. Not by this agency, not with this kind of project, not without more time and/or more red tape being cut for us. Two projects I'm on have both been under review by other agencies for more than a year, and that's just for one stage of them. Rulemaking projects can not be completed in a year. The second version of the schedule, though, with the interim rule published by the end of the year, actually might not have been crazy.

When Congress gave us the mandate, the Congressmen behind that amendment (or rather, the industry lobbyists, but that's a topic for a whole other post) probably pictured something less than 20 pages long, almost all of which would have been organizational stuff or legally mandated boilerplate restating our justification for doing it. They probably thought the amendatory instructions could be less than a page long.

That's unrealistic in this case. The amendatory instructions couldn't have been shorter than three pages. Blame the current regulatory status quo for that. I don't know whether it was created by one particular regulatory project or by accretion of regulations over the years or what, but either way it wasn't logically organized. Add in another page or two to the preamble to explain that we had to fix a previously existing mess, and that's at least a 25-page document.

And you know, if we had done it like that, the deadline doesn't look crazy. Still difficult, considering how many people need to approve of it, and unfair, considering how much of it is out of our control, but not crazy.

But then there's at least one more element, which Congress didn't foresee but should have. Basically, it's a conflict between two standards. The mandate was phrased in terms of the current, most modern standard. But another standard exists that is also used in some parts of the industry. If we just did what Congress said and ignored the other standard, it would carve out a huge, bizarre exception. It would give people an incentive to use the older, deprecated standard. It would probably be objectively bad for the country, and would certainly be bad for this agency. But since Congress didn't actually tell us to do this, we would have to spend time to close that loophole and justify our actions. So that would add about, say, five pages to the document and one week to the timeline. Now we're right on the edge of the "not crazy" line.

And then we get to the stuff that does not fall under the mandate at all. (Which, again, is a gray area.) Some of it probably should be included no matter what because it really is necessary for basic safety, environmental protection, or to enforce other requirements. Some of it would be a good idea, but if we had to wait a few more years to do it, the delay probably wouldn't cause a disaster. Some of it probably isn't a good idea at all. There is a lot of stuff in this gray area; like I've said, the mandate applies to a category that this agency was already working on broad revision of, so there's a long list of things they have been waiting to do. I can make educated guesses about what falls where in the gray area, but I'm not an expert and it's not my decision.

But the thing is, if you put anything from the gray area into the rulemaking, the idea of meeting the deadline is crazy. If we thought that the deadline was seriously important, we should have identified the really most essential bits in the gray area and planned on going over the deadline by just a month or two. On the other hand, if we want to say that the deadline doesn't matter and we're doing this rulemaking "right" regardless of how long it takes, we should have had an aggressive but otherwise normal timeline. Due in part to competing priorities in different offices, our current approach to the deadline seems to be the worst of both worlds.

Objectivability

I'm ambivalent about the unhelpful guy's fight with his critic. Obviously, picking on someone because English isn't his first language is unfair. And for the record, the unhelpful guy speaks with an accent but his command of the language seems fine. I can always understand what he says and vice versa as far as I can tell. His typos are within the range of normal English speakers. His formatting is a mess, but that's not a native-speaker-versus-non-native-speaker thing. There's basically no good reason to complain about his language. On the other hand, if the criticism of his language was meant as just good-natured ribbing, then him blowing up wasn't really fair either. Understandable, maybe, at the end of a tiring meeting especially if it's something he's sensitive about, but still, not exactly fair.

However, I have plenty of other problems with him. In this morning's post, and the previous posts I link to, I point some of them out.

It's hard to get a straight answer from him about anything. Someone asks him a yes or no question, choose right or left, one option or the other, but instead of saying yes or no he gives an example or explanation that seems to imply "sometimes", and it's only apparent that he really meant "yes" after five minutes of talking about it.

Version control problems seem to mysteriously follow him around. In addition to the usual basic unnecessary work, I also don't like it because it's confusing when he asks me to fix for something that has already been fixed and he just didn't realize it because he doesn't work in the same document as everyone else. Worse yet, version A was a month ago, the team has since decided on version B, and then the unhelpful guy asks me to do C. It's up to me to figure out whether he disagrees with the team about B or just thinks we're still on A, and it's usually the latter.

More generally, he seems pretty technically inept. Admittedly, sometimes in an absent-mindedly innocent "what's the shortcut to copy and paste again?" way, but also sometimes in a "can't be bothered" way. When a spreadsheet has a column for peoples' names and another column for inputs and he fills in his input in the name column, for example, that's just plain carelessness. Trivial, sure, but annoying.

He's often out of the office, gives us little notice of it, and is apparently the only expert we have on certain things so we just have to wait for him to get back.

Every two weeks or so I get an e-mail from him asking for apparently random changes in the document. This is a mix of him catching unambiguous errors by me, him catching errors by me that I'd say were caused by miscommunication (see above) so it's sometimes technically my mistake but I can't make myself feel guilty about it, and him asking for new substantive changes. As for the first type, fair enough, but it's still hardly fun. As for the second, obviously no one would appreciate being in my position. And as for the third, it's his right and his job, but why is he doing it now, and in a way that makes more work for me and other people? Everyone else manages to do their job without adding that extra step of more work for me, but he can't, apparently.

And this part isn't my business, but I have the sense that a lot of what he's doing in the doomed project is outside its mandate. As I've said, one problem with the project is people putting in a lot of things that aren't strictly required by the mandate. It's a gray area, a continuum - some stuff even a layman can tell is a good idea, some stuff the experts can make good arguments about why it's necessary, and some stuff still doesn't seem like that good an idea even after I've heard the arguments. And it seems like a lot of the unhelpful guy's work falls on the far side of that gray area. Like I said, this isn't my business, but whenever someone brings up deadlines I wonder how much better we would be doing without the parts that really just don't look justified... many of which belong to the unhelpful guy.

So I feel completely incapable of being objective about whether the unhelpful guy is being mistreated due to his language, when I have a whole bunch of other reasons to dislike him.

Reinventing the wheel, axle, camshaft, and stereo system

Every project has a certain amount of flexibility in it. Different people have their own personal preferences, different projects have different needs, etc. So certain parts of the process get reinvented by every single team, but there's nothing wrong with that.

But the doomed project is such a mess that we've had to reinvent the process itself from scratch, and it has been, obviously, a mess. In particular, there are two different Microsoft Excel spreadsheets we've used. They're keeping track of the same kind of data - input on the document from at least some of the same people - for use by the same team members, in the same ways. And yet the two spreadsheets have different colors in them, for a while they had different numbers of colors in them, the colors mean different things, they have different numbers of columns.

That's partly my mistake: I should have been better prepared, because it's not like being asked to make them was a surprise. I should have sat down and thought, maybe asked for help or looked for other examples, and come up with one layout that would work fine for both of them. And it's partly me just being adaptable: the first one worked less than perfectly, so I made changes in hopes of improving it. Good for me.

Partly, though, it's because the spreadsheets need to be used by different people in different ways. Personally, I'm not an Excel guru. When I saw the economist use the formula tool in it in a certain way a few weeks ago, I marveled at the elegance of what he had done, and I'm still picking up minor tricks with it that I wouldn't have known a year ago. But still, I'm capable of copying and pasting things, and if coloring a cell or row is a useful way to store information then I can handle that and keep it straight just fine. So I do.

Some people, though, clearly either aren't capable of that much attention to detail and command of Excel, or just don't care. One of the changes I made to the spreadsheet in the second version was dropping a color. In the first version, one problem was that people would make cells the wrong color. Maybe they misunderstood what the colors meant, maybe they just added a new row and Excel automatically gave it the color of the neighboring row and they didn't think about that. Either way, too many colors was apparently a confusing variable that I thought we could do without on the second spreadsheet, so I tried to keep it to just two. I feel pretty justified about that because even with two colors some people still made cells the wrong color, but I don't think I can simplify it much more than this.

But in the first meeting using it, we got stuck on how to show a certain change in status. Someone suggested turning it yellow. I didn't have a better alternative in mind right away (wish I'd thought of something better on the spot, but I didn't), so that's what we went with. Unfortunately though, it doesn't quite match the meaning that yellow had in the previous spreadsheet. So now we have three colors again.

This is a specific instance of a common general problem: in any given instance, better planning could have made things better. But considering how much we're making things up as we go, anticipating everything would be impossible.

Murphy's meeting

We had a meeting in the doomed project on Wednesday in which very nearly everything that could go wrong, did.

First of all, I wasn't prepared for it. That's only partially my fault - the meeting couldn't have been put off, and it's not like I forgot to do my stuff, it's just that I had started it but didn't have time to finish - but I should have pushed harder to get through it in time, and whether or not I could have done anything about it, it made the meeting go a little worse.

Also, it was in an unfamiliar building to me. I had only been in it once before so I don't know the layout, and big chunks of it are off-limits to people in my division so we have to sheepishly follow authorized people through the automatic security doors. It was held over there because it was scheduled on short notice and that was the only meeting room we could find. In fairness, I didn't have any problems with security this time, and some people on the team work over there so it's better for them, but still, I think my building would have been better overall.

It was also almost four hours long. That is never fun.

And despite all that time, we didn't get much done. We had 60 or so comments to discuss and resolve. We got through about 20, maybe 30. (And note that me preparing for it involves preparing more comments. So even 30 would be less than half of the real total.) People spend 10 minutes talking about things that I think could be yes or no questions, I wasn't the only person who came unprepared, our bosses were still discussing things that could lead to substantive changes, etc.

But all that is just usual unpleasantness of bad meetings. 15 minutes from the end, though, it grew into unusual unpleasantness. The unhelpful guy blew up at another team member. Now, the unhelpful guy's first language is not English, and he speaks with an accent and seems a bit sensitive about his command of the language in general. At the moment, we had just gone over some text of his and corrected errors in the process. This is my job, I do it without mentioning it except for really egregious examples, I had been doing the same thing a couple hours earlier with another team member's product while the team was talking about other things. But apparently someone else in the room was a bit too punchy about pointing out the typos in the unhelpful guy's product. He probably meant it as good-natured, old-boys-club teasing, but it had the opposite effect. The unhelpful guy just blew his stack. Got out of his seat, began pointing fingers, complaining that he shouldn't have to put up with this because he's so close to retirement, the whole deal. Wow.

Managing expectations on a grand scale

When the doomed project started about 11 months ago, we had a very tight, very optimistic schedule that had us publishing an interim rule some time this past summer and the final rule on the deadline of January 1, 2012. After a couple months, we had missed a major deadline and it was clear that we were still nowhere near meeting its goal, so we got a revised schedule that had us publishing the interim rule by January 1, 2012 - not the original intent, but still within the letter of the Congressional mandate. Based on what we had done at that point, the revised schedule was still very tight and very optimistic. As the project went on we missed deadlines by a few days here and there and had new bits added in, so multiple slips in the schedule led to us hoping to have the interim rule out of our building by January 1, at which point it would start review by other departments of government - not meeting the Congressional mandate, but at least we would be able to prove that there was a tangible product and say that it was out of our hands. The ball would be in someone else's court.

That was the case as of two weeks ago or so. After enough such delays, H. is now working on a new schedule. And of course, now the holidays are coming up and people will be out of the office for vacations and stuff. By now I will be surprised if we even get it out of the building in time.

This was mostly inevitable. As I said, everyone knew from the start that a one-year deadline was much shorter than usual.

However, every time we go over a deadline by too much, the team has to explain why and have a meeting and H. has to send several e-mails and put together a new schedule. So I have to assume we would be a little bit closer to done if the schedule had been more realistic to begin with.

IMs between myself and a co-worker with a funny name

John:
This is great. I have a question for someone on [the doomed project] about why someone in his department made a bunch of big changes to the rulemaking, and why he did it in a completely separate document that I now have to merge. The team member is away. His away message refers to someone who retired last week.
Funny name:
bahaha
welcome to the [agency], John
-_-
John:
Heh, thanks.
The merge looks like no problem at all, actually - I think I can just make the version with the new stuff, the main version. But that's sheer luck. It's still bad practice. I just think all of it together is funny.
Funny name:
hahah
yep
it's like a parody of itself

The problem with asking for advice is that you might get it

I've been on three active projects for the past year or so: the doomed project, the blackmail project, and a third, minor project, which was relatively functional and smooth-running, as you may be able to tell simply by the lack of an ominous epithet.

Of course, you'll notice the use of the past tense. The current stage of the minor project has been taking longer than it should for the past several weeks. No big deal, there's little pressure on this rulemaking, but there's a schedule and we're behind it. This is partly my fault - in addition to normal minor mistakes, I changed the formatting of part 12(c) in a pretty big way, but when my supervisors looked at it they pointed out it should be changed back for good reasons, so that's two stages of review right there - but partly other peoples' fault and partly no one's fault as new information has come in.

And then the project manager made a big mistake: she had it reviewed by someone outside the normal process. Whether the idea was hers or someone else's, it was a dumb idea. The reviewer had a few dozen critiques. Most of it was trivial errors. Should be fixed, probably would have been eventually, no big deal even if not. A few were good points; we should be grateful for him catching them. The problem is that he disagreed with my bosses on part 12(c). Now, as the name of the blog says, we writers are low on the totem pole, but still, if we have any domain, proper formatting is it. And besides protecting our turf, there is also an objective reason to handle 12(c) our way. We put time into the "right" and the "wrong" way to underline text, but that's just because there are "right" and "wrong" ways. If we screw that up, and even if it gets by everyone else, it's still very, very unlikely to actually effect what regulations do. The formatting in 12(c), though, really could change the meaning of the regulations.

After explaining the reasons to the reviewer, he suggested doing 12(c) in a third way. The first and second ways were disagreements about how we should print the notice, but the third way would also reformat the table as published in regulations. That would fix some of the substantive problems but create others, my supervisor said. I don't really agree with her. In fact, I've come up with a fourth way to do it that I think would be best of all. It would also change how the table looks in regulations, but I think it would avoid all these issues. The only problem is that it would be more work for me, so I've been describing it as something to do in a future rulemaking rather than here, but even so my boss doesn't seem very positive about it.

However, I do agree with her that this kind of thing is our domain. And agree with her or not, she's my actual boss. So next week I'll probably have to persuade the project manager and the unexpected reviewer to please let us do 12(c) our way, pretty please, and put off any other methods for later. That probably won't be fun. Especially since I accidentally misspelled the unexpected reviewer's name in an e-mail. Twice.

Catching up

My bosses have said that the doomed project is my top priority, but I'm not really sure what I'm can be doing there right now. I think we're getting "close" to big "deadlines", but not as close to them as we were a week ago, since something else was added in. But no one has asked or told me to do anything about that yet.

So without any specific assignment, I spent a lot of my time yesterday cleaning up a spreadsheet, and I plan to do the same today. We created it to collect comments left by reviewers in four different Word documents. (Yes, this was a messy process full of unnecessary work, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time. See previous comments about version control.) I entered all the comments from one document before starting on the next, and didn't worry about any sensible order for them at the time, so that the first comment in the second document I happened to work on was in the row below the last comment of the first document.

But there is a logical way to organize this, so I've been going through and putting them in it. And no, I can't think of a way to use the Excel "sort" function here. So it's pretty mindless work, but it should be a bit useful in a couple weeks. Next time I do one of these I'll be more careful about how I create the spreadsheet, I guess.

This seems familiar

So H. told me this morning that the doomed project might be delayed again. Apparently someone just noticed that something needed to be added to it. When she described the problem to me, it seemed like such a no-brainer. I mean, I don't personally care about this, and I don't have the technical expertise to know how important it is, but given both the general area and other things already in the project, adding this morning's content seems like such an incredibly obvious thing that it's hard to believe it hasn't been discussed before.

The previous paragraph could have been written half a dozen times over the past six months. If I look back at this post in a year I won't have a clue which one it's talking about. And, in fact, last I heard, H. wasn't sure yet whether this morning's issue really will need to be included. So I'll describe it as "operational l__" just in case.

Boundaries

One problem I have is being too open with my supervisors. It's complicated because they all happen to be pretty nice, approachable people, and, as always, the oddities of this job put them in positions much like my own often.

But I still need to remember that they're my bosses. I can't go around saying that I'm deliberately doing something in a way that makes it more likely for other people to make mistakes, or reject proposed options based on the incompetence or lack of care of higher-ups. I've done each of those within the past month. The latter was in an e-mail, and hindsight being 20/20 I'm really lucky she didn't simply hastily forward it by accident.

More generally, though, I've got to remember it because presumably my bosses don't want me to be thinking like Wally in Dilbert. Or at least, they don't want to know that I do.

Apoliticality

The political environment in my office is kind of weird.

At the simplest level, this is a government regulatory agency with a pretty broad mandate, so I imagine it would be very hard to work here without believing that at least sometimes, government regulation is necessary and good. That would seem to rule out the average right-wing nut. But the other extreme is no more likely. There are a lot of current or recently-former people in uniform in this particular regulatory organization, and I assume they tend to lean right-wing and conservative overall, despite normal individual variation of course. And more generally, I think most people don't realize just how much attention government agencies pay to the economic impact of what they're doing. Sometimes the economists won't support something unless we can show that Americans have already died because of a lack of the rulemaking we're working on. A nonlethal injury or theoretical risk isn't enough, damage to property isn't enough, deaths in a country with a different regulatory regime isn't enough, economists won't actively support any regulation except to directly prevent things that have directly killed American citizens. (I exaggerate a bit, of course.) Regulatory agencies are not, in general, proactive, and even those that are have to have the approval of some that aren't. Anyone who truly believed and was emotionally invested in progress on the regulatory mission of this agency would be depressed and/or not remain here long.

So you have to be pretty centrist and mainstream to work here. And officially, of course, it's intensely apolitical. Officially, we are deeply insulated from partisanship. Officially, we are an authority nearly beyond question within our mandate and it's always important, so things shouldn't change much as politicians come and go.

Officially, officially, officially. Really, though, I'm pretty sure almost anything federal is fair game for people in Congress and the White House to show off their tough-talking budget-cutting serious-leadchargetaking, and some leading Republicans openly express the wish to return to the regulatory regime of Teddy Roosevelt. So every so often we get a little reassurance that our office isn't on the chopping block despite what you see on the news, like at one of yesterday's meetings. Like so many things, it makes me chuckle to myself, in this case thinking something like "There's a fig leaf of bipartisanship coming up sooner or later, right? Right?"

Stranger than fiction

Wow. I happened to have two department-wide meetings today. (Or rather, the first was for the department and the second was for a sub-department, or maybe even sub-department and sub-sub-department.) There were several interesting bits, but the biggest came near the end of the second meeting.

Announcement: the picnic scheduled for Thursday is postponed.

Announcement: we hope to soon offer training sessions on better communication.

Seriously, there was a picnic scheduled for noon this coming Thursday. It was going to be a potluck picnic and bakeoff competition, a few miles from the office so people have been setting up car-pooling sign-up sheets. It's BYOB, the first office event with any kind of alcohol in my memory, not counting at a restaurant. It would have been more work for me personally than I like - normally I bring things like chips and dip to potlucks or just mooch, but I've dug up an interesting salad recipe - but it would have been fun, and a good excuse to leave the office early that day. Family were also invited, so probably at least a few spouses were taking a personal day or kids were getting pulled out of daycare.

Long story short, all in all, it's a fairly big event that takes a fair amount of planning. But late in this otherwise nearly pointless meeting less than two days in advance, the boss mentions that the picnic isn't happening. Apparently about half the department is committed to an event that conflicts with the picnic, a seminar or training session or something, and the same guy set the day and time for both, but forgot about it. It's being rescheduled for some time next week, but nothing definite was announced.

And as far as I could tell, the department head didn't even notice the irony of offering training in better communication immediately after that. I was struggling to keep from laughing about that afterwards. Sure, it screws with my schedule a bit, but next week is probably actually even better for me. I only really feel sorry for H. yet again, because she, of course, was doing a lot to organize the picnic. She only found out about the cancellation at the same time the rest of us did. Yeah, I want to listen to this guy's advice about effective communication, all right. What not to do.

People who want things from you are the enemy

I worry a bit about how adversarial I'm getting about the doomed project.

I'm putting passwords on documents and not giving them out to most people. Those documents were recently obsoleted. I don't want people ignoring the e-mail about that and editing them, in which case either their edits would be lost or I'd have to do extra unnecessary work to find them.

When someone asks me for something and it's not really totally clear, I ask for clarification and either do it my way or don't do it at all until I get it. In one sense, that's just conscientiousness. But I'm not doing it because I really care about getting everything proper right now, I'm doing it because I don't want to take the blame when it's not.

If I don't agree with or can't do all of what they're asking, I'm very careful to point out the parts I have problems with, and I might do that in ways that come across as snotty or missing the point. For example, when the unhelpful guy suggested substituting one paragraph in a document for another, and his version had one substantive change that looked reasonable but at least two formatting mistakes, I sent him back an e-mail saying basically "Why should I do this? Or that? But the other thing looks reasonable, so sure, I'll do it." But it feels important to point out how they're wrong. I've done something like that by e-mail at least twice over the past week, and more times in spreadsheets tracking status or similar documents.

Actually, no, I don't worry about getting adversarial. (I shouldn't be openly rude to people, of course, and I think or at least I hope I don't come across that way, but worrying about that isn't the same as worrying about adversarialness.) I do find it funny, and a sign of the sad state of the project and/or my job in general. But I'm pretty sure everything I mentioned above is rational in the circumstances and in some cases overdue.

Gone pear-shaped

My assessment of the doomed project as soon as I got back from that vacation may have been overly optimistic. (Part of the problem, by the way, is that several other people also had vacations or other periods outside the office overlapping with my own. So I had to piece together what was going on from third parties and e-mail.)

Remember everything I've said about version control problems, and team members who don't know what the active version of the document is? For about a week recently, I myself wasn't sure. It changed while I was away, which I hadn't expected. Something like that coming out of the blue on my first day back was annoying and tiring and worrying but by the end of the day I had determined that the change had been handled well and was done by someone I find reliable, so, you know, I'd just go with it.

But as people returned to the office one by one, no one else could tell me why it had been changed. (If I really needed to know I could probably find out, but at this point I think it would be counter-productive. I've narrowed it down to two suspects. One of them has been a life-saver for me and has done great work overall so even if he is responsible for this one mistake I wouldn't want to alienate him. The other guy has caused and/or had so many problems that laying one more at his feet would be a drop in the bucket. So all in all, it seems like pointing fingers would be a negative-sum game.)

A meeting last week made it clear that what had become the working document couldn't remain it. However, it couldn't be changed to something more reasonable right away. However, I wasn't sure when it would be possible. Also, naming conventions are restrictive: the name I would most like to use for the "correct" working document is the same as something we already have, or very similar to it. In the end, what I wound up doing was creating a new file with a weird name that I don't intend to be the working document for long and just not telling most people about it. I told the smart, reliable people who need to be in it all this and planned to tell everyone else once we had settled on a more long-term "correct" one.

Of course, unfortunately, more people need to be in it than the smart, reliable people who I think need to be in it. Or at least, more people think they need to be in it. I created it yesterday and I've already had to tell two more people about it than I intended. Argh. This is an insane mess.

Managing expectations

Influencing what people want from me is an important part of this job. I mean that partially in my usual I'm-a-lazy-bastard-I-suck self-deprecating way, but it really is legitimately more important to this job than to many. Compare this to my previous job, at which there was only one person between me and the owner of the company (a much smaller organization than this with a very different business model): I don't even know how many layers there are between me and the top, but it's six at the very least. And while at my previous job I just reported to my one supervisor about everything, here I'm responsible to at least four people in various ways. So I just have to put a fair amount of thought into not getting overcommitted.

For example, on Wednesday last week I was told by a team member on the doomed project that by the end of the day Thursday, he would give me something that I would have to add into the document on Friday. The addition was small when I saw an early draft of it but at the time we were getting pretty close to a relevant deadline and it wasn't the only thing I would have to do, so me, H. and my supervisor were worried about whether I'd have time to do it. The team member was pretty cavalier, though; he assured us that it would be a "less-than-20 minute job" for me.

Now, obviously, no one would want to be on the receiving end of that. Realistically, I rarely truly work nonstop, but even when I do, what if more had been added to the new stuff before I get it? What if I'm busy when I get it and can't get on it right that minute? What if I have computer problems? What if one of my other responsibilities takes up more time than expected? I figured I could definitely do it in a day and probably a couple hours, but not just 20 minutes. And to make matters worse, around 2 or 3 p.m. Thursday (so, about two hours before he said he'd have it for me), he said he was leaving the office for the day. His basement was flooded due to the recent crappy weather. So I wouldn't get the thing before Friday morning at the earliest. H. and my supervisor J. thought of all the issues I just mentioned and I made it clear to the guy as well, so H. got a one-day extension on the relevant deadline. I'm sure that was a Herculean labor all by itself, but she did. So I had a sort-of reasonable time to work.

Well, it turned out that the team member sent it to me before 9 a.m. Friday morning. There were no further problems worth mentioning. I decided to work nonstop and time myself just to see how accurate our respective time estimates were. Result: it took me 36 minutes. Add another 5 or even 10 minutes for checking my work, because it really was a complicated job relative to the length of the addition, involving putting multiple things in different places in multiple documents, and I'd say that the job took 45 minutes.

So on the one hand that's less than half my estimate ("probably a couple hours"). On the other hand, it's more than twice his. And any of a hundred potential problems could have come up. Had I been held to his estimate or if any of the potential problems had actually materialized, I would have been screwed. Fortunately, my supervisor and H. has a better idea of what's reasonable than some people I work with. And to be clear, this guy is not even on the list of problems with the doomed project. This guy is normal or even more reasonable than normal. But if a normal-or-even-more-reasonable-than-normal guy can cause this kind of thing, imagine the problems a co-worker with less reasonable expectations could cause.

Jet lag

Back from vacation and things are... OK. Very OK. Not better, not worse. I worried about the doomed project a fair amount over the vacation, partly rationally and partly not, but in the end it was in right around the state I would have hoped for: most of the instructions and related text are basically done. The one part of them still undone is something we knew for a while could become a problem and I genuinely did everything I could about it in advance. Outside my sphere of responsibility, other problems on the project continue to crop up at the usual pace, no worse than that.

Nothing came up out of the blue that completely derailed things. Team members' bosses seem no more unhappy with us than usual. No one seems angry at me and the state I left things in. There were problems with the blackmail project which might be worth a full post of its own, and today has gone by in a haze due to a steady caffeine supply due to both jet lag and little sleep, but all things considered, nothing came of the big doomed project that I worried about while I was gone.

Alea Jacta Est

Well, I'm on vacation, and the doomed project is out of my hands. It's a mess in general, but let's hope that's not my fault too much, and if it is let's hope no one notices.

Earthquake

So, the earthquake. That was fun.

Conveniently, we had had a fire drill recently, so even the new people knew where to go. In fact, it was so recently that it was probably a mixed blessing. I might have brought more stuff with me when I left the building, and therefore been better prepared for it, if not for the fact that I had just been primed for a brief interruption.

But anyways, at around 1:50 yesterday afternoon, the office shook. At first we thought it was just unusually hard renovation on another floor or something, but obviously not, so the place evacuated. Due to a quirk of fate yesterday, my housekeys and metro card were in my messenger bag rather than my pocket like usual, and I didn't take that with me when I left for the quake. Oops. It was at least 15 minutes and probably more like 30 before they announced that the building was closed for the day, to make sure there was no hidden structural damage. They were letting people back in in relatively small groups by floor to get stuff, and it's just my luck - my floor was second-to-last. So I was stuck outside for over an hour in my trousers, button-down shirt and black leather shoes. (To be clear, I have been in the habit of changing into shorts, a t-shirt and sneakers to bike home as part of my commute. Standing outside in DC on a summer afternoon in formal attire, or even just business casual, is really not fun.)

But after I finally got back into the building, I changed shoes, picked up my stuff and walked off. Changed into shorts and t-shirt at nearby supermarket bathroom. Traffic looked like a nightmare. I've probably never been more glad I don't use a car. As annoying as my situation was, my girlfriend had it worse. I joined her and four of her co-workers at a restaurant near her office. She works on Capitol Hill, and people weren't allowed back into her office until around 6:30 or later. By that time we had already had drinks (well, those of us whose drivers' licenses weren't stuck inside our offices... which was me and just one more person. ouch), water and appetizers, and had given up on waiting and went our separate ways for the day. So she had to borrow my metro pass while I biked home last night and to work this morning.

Doesn't seem like DC handled things well. Like I said, traffic was horrible, worse than rush hour right after the quake, although by the time the usual rush hour came along it was better. In fairness, though, this is not something people expect. I don't know the geological science, but until 1:50 p.m. yesterday I would have said the East Coast doesn't get earthquakes at all. When things shake here in DC in particular, people think "terrorism" before "earthquake". And "safety first" is probably one of those things that government is much better about than either individuals or private corporations. (Sure, there are screw-ups, famous failures that make the news, etc., but speaking generally.) Everyone knows individuals are irrational all the time, and corporations don't like getting sued but they don't like employees not being productive either. Government bureaucracies, though, aren't going to send people back to their desks until they're really, really sure the building hasn't taken structural damage. Indeed, half a dozen government buildings weren't open today, although my building itself wasn't one of them.

As for a personal impact, it made the deadline on the doomed project even harder. I know that's a short-sighted way of thinking about something like this, but as long as we're talking about my view of things, well, there it is. The quake resulted in about three hours less work this week, so I'll just have to work a bit harder to make up for it. Never mind that losing three hours close to a deadline, and particularly close to my part of it, could really throw things off.

The busy part

Yesterday was productive and yet still bad.

Like I said, I shouldn't have got too optimistic about making that one deadline on the doomed project, because however annoying the previous phase was, it wasn't really my problem. Last week some time I was given an assignment, compiling a list of certain things in the document, as part of the current phase. I said I'd get started on it, but didn't; I got distracted by easy-and-quick-but-less-important minutiae on this project, I got distracted by another project, etc. Tuesday H. asked for a status update on several things, including the list. Mentally, I said "oh shit, I probably should have started that", and in my e-mail reply I said I could "have it done by tomorrow". As it turns out, that estimate was off, I finished a list about two hours after I got to work yesterday, but I'd say I was close enough and no one complained. Of course, a list is just the first step; after that I or someone has to fix numerous problems I found while compiling the list, and find a document corresponding to each item on the list.

But my supervisor and I agree that I should be working on the more immediate deadline, the amendatory instructions and getting the document itself closer to being a publishable rule, than on the list. So we persuaded H. of that. The backup tech writer, who's doing part of this, had already got it set up on Wednesday. Before I could get started on it, though, I had to catch up on other stuff for the doomed project. Changes suggested by e-mail that were too vague or I had to run by someone else or I just hadn't got around to them, etc. A number of e-mails were required there and some instructions were more complicated than others. It was all necessary and productive, but based on e-mail timestamps it kept me busy until 2:26 p.m. yesterday. After that I was able to work on the amendatory instructions for about an hour, when they asked me to do something as a result of a meeting that had happened without me, and that took a while to figure out.

Put it all together and I had only about three hours to work uninterrupted on the part I was actually supposed to be working on. And that's at the end of the day, after my eyes are tired of staring at a computer screen and my brain is so tired of ambiguously-phrased instructions that I've stopped using pronouns. All told I'd say I got about half as much done on the amendatory instructions as I should have if we want to make the "official" deadline for this phase. So today I'd have to work half again as hard as the schedule calls for just to get back on track. And today has also had a few changes introduced late, and e-mail requests to respond to, and of course it's a quiet Friday and I'm writing all this, do you think I'm getting caught up?

What was I thinking?

What was I thinking, getting so enthusiastic about meeting that stage's deadline? I really should have known better. Partly just out of broad cynicism about this project, my job, and life in general. But I also should have known better because the next stage of the project is no better for me. I mean, what we were doing was still part of the "informal review", which means that it was annoying and tough to keep track of, particularly with version control issues, but in the end, for me, nine times out of 10 there were simple instructions and it was just a matter of doing them.

I should have remembered that the part of the project after that is my actual job, editing the document, and I would now need to get started on it. On a document that is very messy because of how we've been doing things, plus all the other problems with the doomed project. The next week and a half will not be fun, and after that period I'm going on vacation, and coming back from vacation will really, really not be fun.

The meetings will continue until morale improves

There was a meeting this morning at 11 a.m., with 10 minutes of the usual office-management and achievement-recognition announcements, followed by literally an hour of discussion of workplace satisfaction surveys we took a few months ago. I've come to the conclusion that my department's head is a nice guy, and well-meaning - not a ladder-climbing schemer, not a petty feudal fiefdom type - but just plain kind of dumb. Part of the issue was feedback on harassment and discrimination issues. 9 out of 49 people, 18 percent, reported something. Now, I seem to remember that the survey questions were badly designed, but that's not the point of this post. The well meaning but dumb (WMBD) boss mentioned in passing that roughly 20 percent of people reporting discrimination problems was considered the target or something like that, according to the polling organization, but he said that even the current level of reported problems was unacceptable. He also seemed to be genuinely confused about the fact that he had personally heard of fewer problems than the survey indicated.

As for pursuing perfection, I think he misunderstood the meaning of the 20 percent figure. I very much doubt that the surveying organization is saying that that amount of discrimination is good, just that that's the amount beyond which improvement is impractical, unfeasible, more trouble than it's worth, the consequence of people being imperfect. So, sure, it's inspiring pablum to say "I'm never going to tolerate intolerance" or "We can always do better", but I'd actually be reassured if someone who says that kind of thing doesn't mean it. And as for whether he would have heard about problems before the survey, I may as well admit that I'm a straight white male so I have little or no personal experience with being on the receiving end of discrimination, but I find it easy to imagine reasons why a person might not want to deal with discrimination through official channels. The big, obvious, easy one is if the discrimination is less trouble than dealing with it would be. One sexist joke from one guy in one meeting, or even one regularly sexist guy you work with occasionally, would probably not be as much stress and frustration and trouble as reporting the guy and going through an adjudication process and worrying about how it looks in the long run. And the zero tolerance policy espoused in reaction to the first point actually seems counterproductive here. I'd have to really hate my harasser indeed, and/or really, really trust the WMBD guy, if every slightest allegation was going to result in a full investigation and all that. But WMBD apparently never thought of that, or if he did, apparently came up with no way to deal with the problem.

Other than that, though, most measures of workplace satisfaction were good. Less for contractors like me, of course, and WMBD went out of his way to say that we're all a team, a family, etc., and fair enough, I'm sure he means it, but there's only so much you can do when you're way down the totem pole.

That being said, there was one ironic thing about it. Guess what it was. Here's a hint: notice the timeline. Started at 11, 10 minutes of housekeeping, an hour of workplace satisfaction discussion. That's right, the workplace satisfaction discussion cut into lunchtime for most people. I know that impacted my workplace satisfaction, and not in a good way.

Sure, of course, maybe WMBD knows what's attainable and meant what he said as platitudes, like I'd prefer. Maybe he realizes the issues with reporting harassment and is still working on how to address them, or believes that what he said today helps, and maybe he's even right about that. It's just that (as I've said before), the best thing my supervisors high in the department can do for me is stop acting in ways that come across as stupid, and this morning's meeting was yet another example of that.

It's a first

Well, we made the deadline on that stage of the doomed project, barring four isolated issues. On one, I went to a presentation yesterday about how ridiculously complicated the issue is, and the team member responsible for the issue has said he can "take [his] lumps" for not having it resolved yet, so that seems fair enough to me. Two more are legal issues and I'm pretty sure that the legal department is allowed however much time they need for things like this. Finally there's one more issue that was assigned to me, but when I tried to solve it I found I needed help from someone who wasn't around at the time.

Technically it's my fault and responsibility, but you know, I'll take the blame for that ONE problem if it means I can spread a little of it onto him, probably the most unhelpful team member. That's partly just general frustration with the project, since the last part of the assignment before the deadline was mostly mine. And it's probably unfair to rate his helpfulness or lack thereof against a few people who have had less total involvement with the project, but to the extent that they were involved they seemed even more useless than the unhelpful guy.

But now that I've got fairness out of the way, getting useful contributions out of the unhelpful guy has been like pulling my own teeth. He's frequently absent from the office on short notice. Taking vacations during summer is understandable, of course, but this week he took two days off, and he didn't let the team know about it until just half an hour in advance, and even that was only because of a reminder that went out to the team that people still had things to resolve. And that's another thing: he breezily offers to take care of lots and lots of stuff, and doesn't. I wound up talking to him on his cell phone while he was in the airport on the deadline day. There are a lot more things he had taken care of in some sense, or thought he had, but it wasn't taken care of in any way that matters. Which brings up yet another problem: this guy is the biggest cause of version control problems, and was unashamed of it as far as I can tell. I mean, sure, in the grand scheme of things, screwing up version control is a minor problem, but one guy apologized for it and it wasn't the unhelpful guy even though he did it much more.

Well, we're over with that phase of things. Now for the next part, which should be easier. For me. For a little while. Probably.

God of punctuation

My job sometimes has a weird blend of the incredibly momentous and the most trivial minutiae.

For example, the doomed project makes frequent reference to something which I'll call "XYZ" here. Last week I was told that this is the first reference ever in regulation, or at least this agency's kind of regulations, to XYZ. I guess that's just because it's a relatively new thing, I don't know. But it's important where it appears, and it appears on big and valuable and dangerous things. If we don't handle it just right, that could cost people lots and lots of money and cause environmental damage and maybe loss of life. That's not certain, or we would be taking XYZ even more seriously than we are, but it definitely seems possible. And, as I've said, parts of the approval process for the doomed project are going to be expedited to help with the "deadline", so XYZ will be covered sooner than it would otherwise.

So how am I handling it? Well, first of all, I'm annoyed that we're doing anything with it at all. As I've said, the doomed project should be a narrow, limited thing to have any chance at all of meeting the deadline. To my non-expert eyes, XYZ, while it might be important, looks like the kind of thing that's outside the "correct" scope of the project. So it bugs me that it's in the rulemaking at all instead of having one all to itself.

But that's just my general attitude to this and many other things about this project. What have I personally, recently been doing about it? Answer: trying to figure out when and if variations on the acronym are acceptable. That is, can we use phrases like "XY computers" or "XY sensors" or "XY facility"? The answer from the team was no; we should say "XYZ" where appropriate, and if that really doesn't make sense, we should spell out the first two words. Variations are not acceptable, I was told. But I have googled some uses of it and apparently the industry actually does use them. At the moment I'd taking refuge in the exact words of what the team agreed upon and I was told to do, but if this project wasn't on such a short deadline I'd probably try to figure out when and if and how we should be using variations.

So: this is a ground-breaking problem with wide implications for industry and the public, fast-tracked to gain the full force of law as soon as possible, but I personally doubt we should even be doing anything about here at all. My role in it is making sure that an acronym is used consistently, and I have doubts about that too.

What's a deadline?

Apparently, deadlines now matter around here. Who knew?

The current phase of work on the doomed project has been harried and busy for the past few days, because suddenly, we have a deadline that we really, really can't miss. I'm not sure why. Either our bosses just got tired of putting it off, or someone further up changed their minds about their priorities, or there's just an unwritten rule that being five months behind schedule is fine but behind six months behind is beyond the pale and really, really heinous. (And, remember, that schedule was highly optimistic from the start. And calling it "highly optimistic" is the diplomatic phrasing; more accurate descriptions include "crazy" and "a joke". The original schedule was based on compressing three years of work, much of which is out of our control, into one. The point is, we are and have always been working relatively fast given reasonable expectations.)

We actually are getting through this part faster than most, both because of general pressure on us and because we're getting more support. (Which is a polite way to say that people are actually showing up for meetings.) I still doubt we'll be completely finished by the alleged deadline of tomorrow, though. Partly because the only remaining points are sticky things that people have to recheck or run by third parties, but also partly because people aren't around. At least two key team members have been unavailable for most if not all this week because of vacations, and I myself am taking a four-day weekend. So one thing on my agenda today is getting another tech writer to help me with this.

Waiting is the hardest part

I finished the project that's both annoying and reassuring yesterday. The deadline was Monday, but I just plain didn't have the data I needed and that was clear to my supervisors and the guy in charge of the project, so they were all pretty understanding about it. It helped overall that I was doing things by e-mail as much as possible, so it's not just my word that the source took longer than expected.

Now I'll be a bit worried for the next few days about whether someone's going to read me the riot act for how I did a bad job on it. (OK, "read me the riot act" is putting it too strongly. The worst repercussions I've had for doing a bad job around here are getting asked pointed questions that I have to fumble and stammer to answer. Either I'm better at covering my ass than I give myself credit for, or my work isn't as bad as I think, or my supervisors are really lenient and understanding. Or some combination. However, I do tend to worry about this kind of thing, even if it's not entirely rational.)

Why expect negative consequences if people are being understanding about the missed deadline? Because of all the other problems. The other guy took a while to get back to me, but I should have got in touch with him earlier than I did, and I don't have a good excuse for that. I reused a lot of estimates from the previous application. Ideally I shouldn't have, but I only worked with the information I was given. I pressed for more data, but I didn't press hard at all. And who knows what kind of mistakes I might have made that I haven't thought of. Half-assedness in general.

Still, though, I'm glad to have the project in the hands of the guy in charge. Now that I think of it, if I could make a career out of doing those things and get them down to a science, they might actually be preferable to my usual type of work. But as long as these are just a once-every-few-months thing, they'll probably always be an annoying, stressful, impossible-to-get-right hassle.

Positive thinking

I do a lot of complaining here. That's partly due to my personality, and it's partly because that's what the blog is for, and it's partly because this job is by its nature boring, so the interesting things are the problems. However, this job isn't all bad. As I have said, I do enjoy certain aspects of the work itself. Another nice thing about it is the people. I have my complaints (here, for example) but the worst interpersonal conduct I encounter here at all regularly is aimiable incompetence. Not malice or backstabbing or insanity or petty office politics like I hear about from friends or in customer service or like at my previous job (and even there, 90 percent of the problems weren't within the office), just people not thinking things through. People get along. Other tech writers share my cynicism. Our bosses understand the problems we deal with. Comparing one type of work environment to another is apples to oranges, and I know some of my co-workers, like H., have more difficulties in their niches than I do in mine, but still, I'd say that one of the best things about this place is the people.

Half-assed

Most of the work we tech writers do is on rulemakings. Not all of it, though. There are occasional miscellaneous projects, chief among them being applications to continue doing certain things. It's a "don't burden the public too much" thing; certain kinds of regulatory requirements have to be reviewed every few years to see how much time and/or money people are spending meeting those requirements.

I find working on these applications to be both annoying and reassuring at the same time, as odd as that might sound. How is that possible? Because, you may have noticed, I sometimes (often) tend to do some things (many things) in a half-assed way around here. I mean, I have my excuses, and working hard often just genuinely doesn't matter, but I have to admit that I'm not the most diligent person here. Well, part of the annoyance is that it's harder to get away with that on these applications. Only one person works on an application at a time and they're simple in theory - take the previous one and update the numbers - but require attention to detail. So I actually need to pay attention here.

Another part of the annoyance is that there's often just no right answer. I go to the people in charge of the data and they often give me results that are half the numbers used in the last renewal just a few years ago. Or twice the numbers, or four times. We'd expect some natural change, but that degree of difference is very unlikely. It's much more likely that either I'm doing something wrong now or the person who did it last time did something wrong then. And this is where the reassuring part of these projects comes up, because you know, sometimes it looks very likely that the mistake was by the person before me. Maybe they didn't keep track of their sources well, maybe they didn't count something they should have, maybe they did something they thought was more complete than the person before them but it wasn't. But whatever the case, as annoying as it makes the application I'm working on, it's perversely reassuring when I realize that the hardest part of it is probably because someone else screwed up.