This is ridiculous. I have been trying for more than six months now to get my new security badge. I suppose it could be worse; at least they've been extending the old one, roughly a month at a time. It has been comical once or twice, when security guards at the entrance or a different person at the desk of the badge office tells me that it can't be extended for more than a month... and then it gets extended anyway. Because this is really, really, not the fault of anyone around here. It expired in December. I put in the request for the new badge a month before that. I should have put it in earlier than I did (I forgot until I got a reminder by someone else), and I happened to be the first person going through a new process (they've changed the contractor or something), but still, I can see no good reason at all why this should take this long.
I went into work today expecting it to be expired; as best as I can remember, it's been a month since the last time. When the badge is valid I just swipe it at an automatic gate and walk through; when it's not I have to go by a different gate, punch in my computer ID PIN, and go through a metal detector. This takes between three and 20 minutes longer depending on the line - usually there's no one or just one or two people, but if I get there right after a big group, I'm in trouble.
It let me in today, though. Either I counted wrong or last time they extended it for longer than usual. Who knows. Well, I'm told that we're past the one really time-consuming part of getting the new badge and the next step started last week, so I have some hope of getting it in the next week or so, but we'll see.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Fashion sucks
Formal dress standards for men are really terrible. Why did it have to be northern European cultures that happened to colonize the world, and to make matters worse, a particularly Puritanical one that happened to colonize North America? Being clothed from head to toe on workdays really sucks in the summer around here in DC. I get that the patriarchy overall is bad for women in thousands of ways both large and small, but it hurts men here and there as well, and dress standards is one: at least women can wear weather-appropriate clothes in the summer, like thin fabrics and loose clothing that leaves a little more skin exposed. The most comfortably men can dress for hot weather in business situations is a short-sleeved shirt with the collar unbuttoned, and even that is dressing down too much for some workplaces.
Personally, I probably dress a bit more formally than most people around here - I'm wearing a tie today and I think my direct supervisor isn't, I start wearing short-sleeved shirts later in the year than some - but I've only ever seen one guy wearing sandals and no men in shorts or even a shirt without a collar here as far as I can remember. I really need to spend quite a bit of time shopping and/or adapt my biochemistry for a Southern climate better.
Personally, I probably dress a bit more formally than most people around here - I'm wearing a tie today and I think my direct supervisor isn't, I start wearing short-sleeved shirts later in the year than some - but I've only ever seen one guy wearing sandals and no men in shorts or even a shirt without a collar here as far as I can remember. I really need to spend quite a bit of time shopping and/or adapt my biochemistry for a Southern climate better.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Public speaking
Improving workplace morale is a minor industry all by itself, what with management seminar guidance and stuff. Sure, in this economy labor is a seller's market, but still, people put a lot of time and energy into figuring out how to keep employees happy, or at least placated worker bees.
Here's my suggestion: public speaking education. I think I'm pretty good at public speaking, or at least better than average, due to a little experience and a lot of being exposed to it, although I'm well aware that I haven't actually put that to the test in years now. I also think I'm a better-than-average connoisseur of it for the same reasons. (Yes, I know I tend to use very long sentences here, and almost completely negate myself with exceptions and caveats. Just because I think I can speak and/or write well doesn't mean I choose to bother with it all the time.)
However, most people don't do it well at all. Speech in which the volume of the speaker's voice fades to nearly nothing at the end of every sentence is starting to seem normal to me. People stammer, they use verbal chaff and white noise like "um" and "ah" and "y'know" and "it is what it is", they change the subject of their sentence in the middle of the sentence, they go into digressions that take up more time than the actual topic, PowerPoint is justifiably infamous for its overuse and misuse in certain government agencies and could support a series of posts here all by itself... All this can be mitigated by conscious effort and/or education, but apparently most people can't, don't know about, or choose not to bother with those.
It's sad how undervalued the skill is. It's probably been on a decline in society since literacy reached the point where most people didn't need the newspaper read to them. These days the only people who speak before groups of unfamiliar people larger than college seminars are people in politics and media. And while those are both big industries (and some college seminars get pretty big) that still leaves lots and lots of people around the world being addressed in groups of a few dozen by speakers who are doing a very poor job of it.
I'll bet skill at this kind of thing makes a bigger difference than people think, sometimes even just at a subconscious level. When my boss's boss's boss called a meeting on short notice for no apparent reason with attendance mandatory in a too-small conference room, it left me wondering why. Was there something urgent going on? Was it bad news? But no, apparently he called the meeting mainly just to let us know about an upcoming survey on workplace satisfaction. There was also an update about his pursuit of a political appointment (which probably didn't sound self-aggrandizing at all to many people in the department who work closely with him or with the industry's community and would be affected by it, but it did to me), and there was a lot of verbal chaff and white noise and disjointed thinking, but the main point was asking us to fill out the survey we'd be getting in the mail in a couple days.
Personally, the biggest drain on my satisfaction at work is the doomed project. He could be handling it better, but the most basic problem with it, the deadline, is beyond his control as well. As for things he actually has control of, the best thing he could do to help my satisfaction is avoid holding boring, pointless meetings in rooms at double capacity that remind me how many people in management are incompetent at public speaking. It raises the question, what else are they incompetent at? It leaves me thinking of Dilbert and Office Space rather than feeling like we're in good hands here at work.
Here's my suggestion: public speaking education. I think I'm pretty good at public speaking, or at least better than average, due to a little experience and a lot of being exposed to it, although I'm well aware that I haven't actually put that to the test in years now. I also think I'm a better-than-average connoisseur of it for the same reasons. (Yes, I know I tend to use very long sentences here, and almost completely negate myself with exceptions and caveats. Just because I think I can speak and/or write well doesn't mean I choose to bother with it all the time.)
However, most people don't do it well at all. Speech in which the volume of the speaker's voice fades to nearly nothing at the end of every sentence is starting to seem normal to me. People stammer, they use verbal chaff and white noise like "um" and "ah" and "y'know" and "it is what it is", they change the subject of their sentence in the middle of the sentence, they go into digressions that take up more time than the actual topic, PowerPoint is justifiably infamous for its overuse and misuse in certain government agencies and could support a series of posts here all by itself... All this can be mitigated by conscious effort and/or education, but apparently most people can't, don't know about, or choose not to bother with those.
It's sad how undervalued the skill is. It's probably been on a decline in society since literacy reached the point where most people didn't need the newspaper read to them. These days the only people who speak before groups of unfamiliar people larger than college seminars are people in politics and media. And while those are both big industries (and some college seminars get pretty big) that still leaves lots and lots of people around the world being addressed in groups of a few dozen by speakers who are doing a very poor job of it.
I'll bet skill at this kind of thing makes a bigger difference than people think, sometimes even just at a subconscious level. When my boss's boss's boss called a meeting on short notice for no apparent reason with attendance mandatory in a too-small conference room, it left me wondering why. Was there something urgent going on? Was it bad news? But no, apparently he called the meeting mainly just to let us know about an upcoming survey on workplace satisfaction. There was also an update about his pursuit of a political appointment (which probably didn't sound self-aggrandizing at all to many people in the department who work closely with him or with the industry's community and would be affected by it, but it did to me), and there was a lot of verbal chaff and white noise and disjointed thinking, but the main point was asking us to fill out the survey we'd be getting in the mail in a couple days.
Personally, the biggest drain on my satisfaction at work is the doomed project. He could be handling it better, but the most basic problem with it, the deadline, is beyond his control as well. As for things he actually has control of, the best thing he could do to help my satisfaction is avoid holding boring, pointless meetings in rooms at double capacity that remind me how many people in management are incompetent at public speaking. It raises the question, what else are they incompetent at? It leaves me thinking of Dilbert and Office Space rather than feeling like we're in good hands here at work.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Know your place
Most people in this department has cubicles. All tech writers, and a lot of economists and RDMs, and at least some people whose positions I don't know. A few RDMs have offices of their own with doors and everything, as does the supervisor of tech writers and probably most subject matter experts.
We have name signs (you know, those things with someone's name on them, I'll edit this post if I can find a more specific name for them) on our cubicle walls, and they are as crappy as you can get and still be recognizable as such. They are the McDonald's Happy Meal toys of office accessories. Looking around the office right now I see four different fonts, six are made out of paper instead of anything more sturdy, and at least two names are held up by tape, so standardization and a sense of professionalism for tech writers are obviously not high priorities.
But this is on my mind because of yet another problem with them that just happened a few minutes ago when someone came into the office to talk to another writer. There are patches of adhesive on the back of the metal frames. If you were putting them up on a wall that would work fine. It would be a little less permanent than a real careerist would want, but it would be visually indistinguishable from something screwed directly into the wall, so who cares, right? The problem is, we don't have walls, we have cubicles. That adhesive does not stick to the loose-weave fabric of a cubicle well at all. So at least four of us use a row of thumbtacks under the frame to hold them up. Obviously, they fall down all the time, like happened five minutes ago to someone else.
It's a good thing that I realize this job is a position of no authority and don't particularly care about that, because if the shoddy facilities couldn't be a more calculated insult if it was intentional. And yes, of course I realize that any desk job is a great job by world-historical standards and my problems are trivial, but still, it's really obvious that we're just supposed to be temporary, which is kind of depressing. Even in industries which happen to have high turnover, wouldn't it be good for morale or something crazy like that to have the illusion of permanence and buy-in?
We have name signs (you know, those things with someone's name on them, I'll edit this post if I can find a more specific name for them) on our cubicle walls, and they are as crappy as you can get and still be recognizable as such. They are the McDonald's Happy Meal toys of office accessories. Looking around the office right now I see four different fonts, six are made out of paper instead of anything more sturdy, and at least two names are held up by tape, so standardization and a sense of professionalism for tech writers are obviously not high priorities.
But this is on my mind because of yet another problem with them that just happened a few minutes ago when someone came into the office to talk to another writer. There are patches of adhesive on the back of the metal frames. If you were putting them up on a wall that would work fine. It would be a little less permanent than a real careerist would want, but it would be visually indistinguishable from something screwed directly into the wall, so who cares, right? The problem is, we don't have walls, we have cubicles. That adhesive does not stick to the loose-weave fabric of a cubicle well at all. So at least four of us use a row of thumbtacks under the frame to hold them up. Obviously, they fall down all the time, like happened five minutes ago to someone else.
It's a good thing that I realize this job is a position of no authority and don't particularly care about that, because if the shoddy facilities couldn't be a more calculated insult if it was intentional. And yes, of course I realize that any desk job is a great job by world-historical standards and my problems are trivial, but still, it's really obvious that we're just supposed to be temporary, which is kind of depressing. Even in industries which happen to have high turnover, wouldn't it be good for morale or something crazy like that to have the illusion of permanence and buy-in?
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
I suck
H. had said that she wanted the second writer, J., to have someone to take minutes and record decisions made and action items, while I would continue doing what I've done in most meetings: editing the document itself on a computer with a projection screen everyone can see and making changes as the team agrees to them. While I'm doing that, H. has generally taken minutes herself. In that case, it sounds reasonable enough to have a second writer, so that H. can concentrate on actually running the meeting - keeping things on schedule, getting firm commitments from people - while I help the team do what it's actually doing and someone else keeps track of it all.
However, Thursday was the first meeting with J. It happened to be in a room without a working computer, because someone in tech support had not finished an update or something. So, lacking anything better to do, we both took notes. I take notes on important stuff, but rarely type things up unless specifically requested.
J. turns out to be more diligent. His notes were three pages long, finished within two hours of the end of the meeting.
I'm no longer feeling too guilty now that I'm back to working on the document again and getting down to business, and on Friday I was indeed productive in ways that someone unfamiliar with the project couldn't have been, but still, I'm under no illusions that I'm some exemplary employee here, let alone indispensable.
However, Thursday was the first meeting with J. It happened to be in a room without a working computer, because someone in tech support had not finished an update or something. So, lacking anything better to do, we both took notes. I take notes on important stuff, but rarely type things up unless specifically requested.
J. turns out to be more diligent. His notes were three pages long, finished within two hours of the end of the meeting.
I'm no longer feeling too guilty now that I'm back to working on the document again and getting down to business, and on Friday I was indeed productive in ways that someone unfamiliar with the project couldn't have been, but still, I'm under no illusions that I'm some exemplary employee here, let alone indispensable.
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