It never rains but it pours

For most of the past couple months, things have been relatively slow and easy. My projects haven't demanded much from me other than attending meetings. I have filled in for other writers or peer-reviewed their documents, but either way it's not as stressful and doesn't require as much careful attention as projects of my own do. I took a week-long vacation for Thanksgiving, and then on the first day back, had a medical emergency that kept me out of work for most of the following week. And right now it's the middle of the holiday season. There are holiday parties interrupting work and every project is slowing down because key people are on vacation or are about to be.

Except for those projects that are speeding up, in hopes of squeezing something out before the vacations. Like one of mine. A new project I was assigned to is trying to get things moving, and there's a kickoff meeting this afternoon.

And several projects of another writer's. Not only is he unusually busy at the moment, but he's going to be out for a while due to a medical problem of his own. My boss asked me yesterday if I could fill in for him on one of them. I said I wasn't sure, because of that kickoff project, but I was given the assignment anyway and told that things could be shuffled again afterwards if necessary. So I'm working on that now, and it needs quite a bit of work. It's not a huge rule, but it has a short deadline. I got started on that today, and it's been keeping me busy. Needs a fair amount of work, and it's a type of document for which guidance is lacking.

And then this morning, H. called to tell me about a meeting for the doomed project. It's been outside the building under the review of another agency for a couple months now, but someone just noticed overlap between the doomed project and another one. (I feel a bit guilty about this, because I had helped with the other project briefly, so maybe I could have called the problem to someone's attention earlier.) The two project teams are butting heads a bit about which one should change to accommodate the other. There was a meeting about it. It conflicted with the kickoff meeting for my other project. So I spent a lot of time today trying to figure out which meeting I should go to, and then preparing other writers for the other one.

So after a month of having nothing worth mentioning to do, I get a new project, do a lot of work on someone else's project, and have something go wrong on my most important project, all in one morning. How exciting.

I covered my ass...

My TVMP project published our notice last month. Someone immediately noticed a problem with it and we're now working on a correction. At a meeting Tuesday we discussed final lingering issues, whether we needed a table entry or a seven-word phrase in a note to the table or both or neither. Very minor stuff.

Wednesday the RDM e-mailed out the correction out to the legal office for review. Two minutes later she went on vacation for the week.

When I opened the file, I noticed several changes since the last version I had seen. Now, to be clear, this is bad. Every team member should see  the document in its final form before it goes out, and the tech writer should theoretically be last of all. On a quick glance, I didn't see anything that would cause big problems, but it's inconsistent and messy and not how things are supposed to work. This offends the anal-retentive, punctilious side of my personality, to the extent that I have one. I didn't want to retract the notice over non-substantive issues, though, especially not on my own nonexistent authority, so I left it alone for now.

Half an hour after the file was mailed out, someone else mailed out another version and suggested using his version over the RDM's. His version had his changes tracked, and while that's better for internal use, reviewers should see a clean document. His edits were also, in technical terms, shitty. There were missing spaces between words, the same thing formatted two different ways in one paragraph, and misspellings in words like "Los Angeles" and "although." This guy who was trying to speak for the team was also not on the team to begin with.

I had to get someone with authority involved in this. I checked the RDM's away message. It said her boss was filling in for her. Her boss's away message, though, said he hadn't been in since yesterday, and it was now 10:30, so I assumed he wasn't around at all. His boss was in the office, but also unavailable at the moment. I tried the team lawyer - beneath them, but still above me. I told her that I needed to review the document, giving her one example of a minor problem with it, and someone definitely needed to do something with the versions already out there.

She sent out a third version. This version fixed just that one problem I mentioned and left all the rest alone.

In the end, I cleaned up the document and brought the right people into the loop and this project remained unimportant, but I spent more sweat on it Wednesday than I had over the previous six months. It's not that I deserve a medal over it, I was just doing my job, but everyone else on the project deserves an anti-medal.

More broad, less deep

For a year or even more, about 80 percent has been on the doomed project, with the rest on two other projects. (I've called one "the blackmail project" and the other "the minor project," but really both were fairly minor.)

That seems to have changed, though. The doomed project doesn't demand so much from me now, while other projects have picked up. One, I was assigned to more than a year ago when the tech writer on it left, and then the project's document promptly left the building, so it's been mine according to the spreadsheet but there was nothing to do about it until it came back last month. And another project was similar. A tech writer left last month, and I was assigned a project of hers, and this past Wednesday the team met for the first time since May. All I've had to do so far was take minutes at that meeting and move a file around, but still, it's becoming more and more active.

This is a mixed blessing. I guess it's good for me. In theory, taking minutes at meetings is part of my job, but I haven't had to do it in a while, because on the doomed project that's what the other writer is for and my other two projects haven't had that kind of meeting in a while either. Stretching my thinking muscles in a lot of little ways - listening to the important stuff, figuring out meaning from context, concentrating on tasks even if they're boring.

That's a big part of the problem: buckling down and typing up my notes right away without getting distracted by things like this. Big surprise, I'm sure. Based on my typing speed in words per minute, I could turn my notes on a notepad into the official notes from a meeting in half an hour. Organizing it to make it logical and expanding on it beyond my personal shorthand would take another 10 or 20 minutes - still a very reasonable time for a minor task. But if I let myself go to reddit or do stuff like this, that could add four hours. I need to practice concentrating.

Beyond that, I've already been reminded of how much I depend on familiarity with a small number of projects. Just to type up those minutes I had to ask two different SMEs to explain things about which my notes were incomplete. This is part of the "listen closely" thing, and it's part of preparing myself in advance, but it's also partly inevitable. No way to be as familiar with new stuff as with old stuff.

Rats from a sinking ship

The economist who was on the doomed project from the start has left. I think he's gone to grad school. He got out just in time. The doomed project just got back from the latest review, this time by the department head, and his comments seemed to indicate he wanted to use a different approach on the economic section, meaning throw out and start over from scratch. Obviously, that would be bad. We were hoping to persuade the department head that the economic section only needed tweaks rather than a complete overhaul, and I think we've succeeded. But I'm not sure, and I seem to remember one of the economist's last statements was that starting over would take four months.

I feel sorry for the new guy.

Way, way, way down the totem pole

"Did you hear about the meeting?" H., the supervisor of the doomed project asked as soon as she saw me around 1 p.m., sounding even more harried than usual.

"What meeting?" I replied intelligently. A briefing was planned for tomorrow morning to explain the doomed project to a bigwig in our department, and I was annoyed about the early hour of the meeting but other than that thought it would be a routine matter of note-taking, and it had been on my calendar for about a week with no changes, so I didn't see why she'd be asking about that.

It turns out, that briefing had been changed to 3 p.m. today. No one had thought to invite me until now.

Oh well. I had work to do, but no meetings or anything specific that conflicted with it, so I went easily enough. I claimed the chair by the computer and logged in. No one had told me I'd be using it, but it's a habit. And it's a good thing I did, or at least it's a good thing someone did, because there was a PowerPoint presentation, and they figured they might as well put it up on the screen. But since no one had given it to me, it took 10 minutes and three people to find.

After the meeting was over, I was the last to leave because I had to collect my stuff and log off the computer. Someone turned the lights off behind them while I was still there. I objected, but no one noticed.

Overheard in the men's room

"This is not a rational decision. It is a decision that will be rationalized, with science and engineering, but let's not start with the science and engineering and see where that gets us. We know where we want to be."

Love-Hate relationship

When having a detail-oriented supervisor is good, it's very, very good. When it's bad, it's horrible.

This guy tends to be meticulous, detail-oriented, voluble and jovial. All that stuff combined makes him a treasure in some cases and an insufferable loon in others. I can switch from loving him to hating him several times per day.

He has a personal system for organizing projects that never changes, is logical and intuitive, and lines up perfectly with the "official" system when it matters. He also takes care of all that himself rather than leaving it up to me to fumble through. That might sound anal, but considering how closely it relates to what I do and how much of a mess some projects become and how much effort he puts into preventing that, it's awesome. Sometimes I have got lumps in my throat and choked up with gratitude by contrasting his style with other RDMs.

He's equally detail-oriented in conversation. This is how he starts to get annoying. I wish he wouldn't go over when and where and how and what if that doesn't work and what exactly to do if that doesn't work either for totally routine tasks.

For example, this is the guy who asked me to work on the PowerPoint presentation. My buildup and letdown could have been avoided had he made it clear how minor the work would be before asking me about my schedule for the next two weeks.

And more recently, last week, we worked on comments from DHS on a document. He happened to warn me about it a couple days before there was actually any work to do. He spent 20 minutes just explaining that in exhaustive detail. When I say that it takes him 20 minutes to say "heads up," that's not hyperbole.

Being positive sucks

I meant my previous post sincerely: getting to work was rough, but that e-mail seemed to say that the reviewer had made minor changes and they could be safely rejected if they weren't easy to handle, which would be purely good news. I was feeling good about the doomed project and today in general for a few minutes because of that.

But I began working on his changes, and most of them were as stupid and pointless as ever. There are two recurring issues that I want to ask the lawyer about, because I know what policy we've agreed on between me and her, but program offices just keep on doing it differently over and over and over again. And yet again, this guy was working in a seperate file rather than the main document, which means I had to work my version control magic, and calling it magic sounds totally fair considering how hard it is for these idiots to figure out working in a common document.

And then, one hour later, the lawyer sent an e-mail saying that she'd need input from other people to properly address the edits in that e-mail. She left for the day right after that. So for a while I thought I'd either have to make the judgement call myself to either delay things by a day or reject the recalcitrant office's edits, neither of which is in my job description.

It worked out OK in the end - I found an approach acceptable to everyone who mattered, and we got the project moving - but despite how optimistic I felt during those 15 minutes when I opened that e-mail and wrote the previous post, it turned out to be the only remotely fun time that morning.

Mondays

It was raining this morning, so I didn't bike.

After I'd left my apartment, my girlfriend called me back and asked me to sign something I'd forgotten about. Glad she remembered that; it might have been a real pain.

I tried to go to the ATM on my way to work this morning. My bank has two in my neighborhood, but neither of them worked for me. (I'm pretty sure the problem is the ATMs and not my card or account, but I can't help worrying a tiny bit.)

I might have missed the shuttle from the metro to work just because I wasn't paying attention. It wasn't where I expected it to be, so I just stood there waiting, but after a few minutes I noticed it was just a little ways down the street, like 20 yards. Unfortunately, that one was full, so I had to take the next one. And this isn't even new, they've been stopping down the street for a couple weeks now I think, I just didn't look around much this morning.

When I got to work I realized I'd forgotten my belt and wristwatch. The belt was because of a change in routine; normally I leave it at work, along with outfits for the week, but I'd worn my work clothes home Friday and forgot to bring the belt back this morning. The watch was just absent-mindedness.

So it was a rough morning, and especially rough to start the week with. But when I checked my e-mail, I found a message from a recalitrant office that said they had made minor edits to the doomed project but "I saw or made NO policy changes...  If ANY of my editorialial polishing tempts ANYONE to call for a schedule shift to the right DISREGARD them!!!", and that made it all worthwhile.

I annoy myself

Here's a habit I've been trying to break for a while now: I stay at work too late.

Not hours, just five to 15 minutes. Work isn't overtaking my life or cutting into stuff I care about much, I'd just like to have dinner ready a few minutes earlier or get other stuff done before I start cooking or commute when traffic is slightly better. But I can't, because I keep staying at work just a tiny bit longer than I'm obligated to.

I can think of three completely different reasons for this, and if it were just two, I probably wouldn't even mind.

1. It's hard to figure out exactly how long I'm obligated to stay, because my routine after getting to work takes quite a while. This is mostly because I bike, and therefore have to shower and change after getting to work. Add in a trip to the cafeteria for coffee, and all that takes over 15 minutes. In theory I could claim to be working as soon as I first get to my desk, and if I had to I would, but it would seem dishonest to do that regularly if I'm still wearing shorts and a t-shirt. 
2. My job doesn't ask much, so time is the least I can give it. Obviously, it's not very stressful or demanding. So I figure it would be kind of crappy of me to cut corners on my time.
3. If that was it, fair enough, working long hours might be just the price of getting exercise as I commute and keeping my conscience clean. However, I have to admit that the third reason is the real one, as often as not: I procrastinate. I put a task for work off until the last minute and it takes five, or I'm reading an article or blog and decide to finish the article before I go home. 

Now that is stupid. I think procrastinating on leaving work and going home for the day might be taking procrastination just a little bit too far.

Stages of surprise

1. Fear

• "What? I've never done this before! Can this guy tell me to do anything? Is this even in my job description? It is? He can? Fuck! What if I screw up? Why's he asking me about my schedule for the next two weeks - is it going to take that long?"

2. Hope

•  "You know, I spend a lot of time complaining about this job, I should be glad to have something new and challenging to do. It might be a bit tough, but I'll survive. I might learn something. This is for a presentation, and bad speakers annoy me, so I can make this a good presentation for once. I'll show them all how to do it! It will be elegant in its simplicity."

3. Disappointment

• "He sent me a Word document already organized into six slides and just wants me to copy and paste the text into PowerPoint. I asked about reorganizing it to make it a little bit more readable, or putting time and thought into it in general, but he told me not to. Nice to know there was nothing to worry about, but what did they need me for?"

Obstruction

I'm starting to think they're actually trying to delay the doomed project.

The latest review of the doomed project by TMBBs was asinine even by the usual half-assed standard of this place. It's fairly normal that a document might get reviewed more than once by the same level of management even if it shouldn't be needed, but this time two TMBB out of four had a lot to say, not just "oh yeah, one more thing," but "I need this and this and this and this or I'll make you start over from scratch."

That's bad enough. One of them, thank heavens for small favors, at least made his late unnecessary edits in a convenient format and limited himself to that. The other didn't. This TMBB used a format that's inconvenient for me for about a quarter of his edits. It's a really minor difference, but it's still annoying because (a) it's unnecessary, and (b) one such edit is minor, but a hundred add up to a fair amount of work.

Even that, though, would be par for the course on this project, but finally we get to the real problem: a lot of his edits were so pointless that I honestly think he's trying to keep us from publishing this.

In the economic analysis, where we said that this rule offers the option of many industry consensus standards, he said, "Sounds good but is probably a stretch." I wasn't even sure what part he was objecting to, but all I could think of was the use of the word "many." The thing is, when I read his comment I counted documents in the folder of consensus standards, and found 80 there. Some of them have probably been removed from the rule, and I'm sure many aren't relevant to this discussion, but even so, even if only a quarter of the consensus standards are relevant here, that's still 20 documents, almost every one as dry and vague as this. Does this TMBB think it's unfair to describe 20 different options as "many documents"? If he checked everyone one and found that even fewer than 20 were relevant, how many would he call "many?" Hah, trick questions, he doesn't know or care how many there actually are, he just had a feeling that the statement looked like it promised something good, and we can't have that.

Elsewhere, we said that the rule will ensure the existence of a certain fail-safe, and he said, "No, it doesn't. The primary def'n of 'ensure' is 'to secure or guarantee'. While our requirements are intended to provide a reasonable degree of system reliability via component redundancy, they cannot and will not 'ensure [the fail-safe]...'"

Here's the reply I actually wrote: "I'm OK with using 'ensure.' It appears in the [Congressional mandate] and about as dozen times throughout this document, and I think it's commonly used by other teams. I guess we could change this phrase to something like 'This is intended to ensure,' but I don't think we need to, and if we choose to, we should do so throughout the document, except where it directly quotes the [mandate]. Thoughts?"

Now, by the standards of blogging or conversation, that's perfectly civil, sure. But I think in an office, in writing, where the target can see it, especially from someone way down the totem pole to a TMBB, that's as undiplomatic as I have ever got, almost as rude as I can imagine without using synonyms for "penis." I just couldn't take it, and I'm not too worried about repercussions, because objecting to "ensure" really is that pointless.

Either this guy is trying to help us publish the rule and he thinks that parsing the meanings of "many" and "ensure" are really, really important to it, or he's trying to stop us from publishing the rule by any means possible, and at this point the latter seems more likely.

Apologies

That was a long time to go without posting. I aim for twice a week, but that's two weeks between the timestamps of the previous two posts. Oops. It's partly because work is slow these days - the only recent event worth mentioning was the doomed project meeting that was the subject of the last post - but also for personal reasons. Even so, I might not have mentioned the slow posting, if not for the fact that it's likely to continue. Several reasons.

• My personal life has been busy lately. For the past month or two, I've had several big things to deal with, and that's likely to continue for at least another month. It's not bad, except in the sense that change and big expenses are stressful, but it takes time and mental energy that I'd rather put into things like this.
• My home computer died this past Saturday. This doesn't have anything to do with the two-week gap, but who knows how long it'll take me to fix. I know what the problem is, but I've already checked the local Best Buy and they didn't have the part I needed on the shelf. Off to Amazon, waiting on the mail to arrive, hoping it's the right one...
• I've begun turning this into a book. Sort of, slowly, maybe... And that's at the mercy of my computer problems as well, of course. But if I find it as easy to continue as I did to start, I may put more time into offline writing and less into this.

Asymptotic progress

This meeting went deceptively well. Of the four TMBB we needed to hear from, one didn't show up and didn't even send anyone in his place. That still left us with three TMBB, plus several support personnel like myself, and we made relatively good progress on the remaining issues. There were more than a dozen proposed edits to discuss, and all but three were approved without a problem, and it was equally easy for the people present to agree that those three were bad and should be rejected. One of the TMBB said he'd have someone get back to us the following week with yet more content about XYZ, but other than that, we thought we were nearly done.

The meeting was even encouraging in a way because I got to hear TMBB acknowledging the same kind of problems I write about here. "We have an internal schism," one said. "We agreed to this text four months ago, and now we've got [middle management] marking it up," another vented. The stuff I'm writing about is not fabricated, and if anything it's downplayed here because I'm too far down to notice some problems. My superiors' superiors are aware of the dysfunction. They just can't do anything about it.

But those three rejected edits were made by the office of the TMBB who didn't show up. And the following day we found that he wouldn't approve of the rule unless those edits were made. Of course! If it seems too good to be true, it's probably not true.

Well, we had another meeting today (almost two weeks, you'll note, after the meeting at which we thought we were nearly done) called by the guy who didn't bother to show up for the first one. We covered the basics. I had a little work to do after the meeting, and I'm still waiting for input on something, but I think we're nearly done.

A little thing like success won't stop us

Clearance officially started on the doomed project on Wednesday, May 9. That's good news: we're on the next stage. It's a bit bizarre because clearance is normally when TMBB get involved, but here they've been involved for months, but, whatever, a milestone's a milestone. Normally it would take two weeks or more, but due to the constant scheduling problems, only one week was allotted, so they're supposed to be done by close of business today.

May 10, the WMBD boss scheduled a meeting for May 18 to address issues raised in clearance. This confused both H. and I just because it seemed premature. What if clearance was easy and no changes were needed? Or, forgive that fanciful reverie - more realistically, what if clearance went late and TMBB weren't ready by the time of the meeting? Also, H. was scheduled to be out of the office that day, so she wasn't sure if she'd need someone to fill in for her, and if so, that would be a pain.

By noon Tuesday another problem had become apparent. TMBB have done nothing in the document. One team member has made a few edits - and he made them in an annoying, pointless way that makes more work for me, but whatever, it's easily fixed, it's just stupid - but as far as we can see in the document, TMBB have not even looked at it. Yesterday H. forwarded me an e-mail with a hint about why. At least one TMBB actually said he's going to address his comments at the meeting. So in addition to the problems with scheduling the meeting that were predicted by H. and I, there's one that we didn't see coming: it's an excuse for TMBB to miss the deadline. Thanks, WMBD, that was helpful.

How not to talk

George Orwell is best known for fiction warning about totalitarian tomorrows, but he also had a lot to say about abuse of language itself. His essay "Politics and the English Language" should be required reading in every high school.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

It's relevant to political prevarication, but also to general communication. Sometimes they're deliberately hiding something, and other times people speak and don't want to be remembered so they unconsciously fill in buzzwords rather than anything memorable.

Sometimes, though, there are so many buzzwords that their density is memorable all by itself. In a department-wide meeting last month, I found it funny just how vacuous the WMBD boss was. Some choice examples follow.

• When describing some audits due to happen this summer, he said it was supposed to be "in the August timeframe." To quote another part of Orwell's essay, "The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details." In this case I'd give the WMBD guy the benefit of the doubt. I don't think he was trying to obfuscate, it was perfectly clear what he meant, it was just a ridiculous way to say it. I just think he so rarely he has to make himself clear that he isn't in the habit of it. So "in August," or "in four months," became that farcical phrase.
• "I view audits as a learning opportunity." It's very hard to imagine a real person who could say that and mean it. That's sunny optimism of maybe literally the most implausible type - I could imagine a person being sunnily optimistic about sickening mass murder, because Ted Bundy and Nazis and Karl Rove and depraved people in general exist, but who could possibly be so sunnily optimistic about being subject to an audit? Call me overly cynical if you want but I'm pretty sure that's not how human minds work. Much more likely, using that phrase is polishing a turd.
• On the subject of interdepartmental communication, "there is sometimes a limited viscosity" of understanding. Information flows slowly like... like... like molten gold! It's a valuable treasure we should share as much as possible, except for the fact that it would messily kill anyone who had it dumped on their head! OK, this is a problem with analogies, but there's a problem with how he said it too. Why not just say "Communication could be better," or "It's not always easy to get through to each other," or "They don't listen to us?" Possible rudeness aside, any of those would have been much better than saying that understanding flows like slow-flowing liquids.
• About two computer systems our department is trying to get started, which apparently aren't working well together, he said, "We've got a divided household." Again, in this case I don't think the use of the cliche was intentional, because he probably didn't mean to call to mind Abraham Lincoln's house divided speech or Luke 11:17, because they don't end well. It's just that his mouth was moving and he wasn't thinking hard or quickly enough about what was coming out of it.

Situation Normal...

A peer review should only be started after the team is completely and totally satisfied with the rule, a last-minute check before a document goes to TMBB. Despite the fact that a peer reviewer is well into his review of the doomed project, there is still work progressing on two other fronts. First of all, the lawyer and economist have been making a number of edits to the RA, things that were supposed to be caught before, but weren't, but they still have to be done. And second, SMEs want to change how we handle XYZ again.

The first issue is arguably understandable, considering that the lawyer's and economist's time was compressed like ours, but it's still inconvenient, unfair to us, and not how things are supposed to work.  The second issue is ridiculous. It is really, really not how things are supposed to work. In addition to the same problem of ongoing policy changes during a peer review, there's also the fact that as I've said XYZ is just a side issue, and the fact that their specific approach to it right now seems dumb to me.

I e-mailed my supervisors on Thursday to let them know the basics. I added that this shouldn't affect any of us in the tech writers' office "if it is resolved quickly," but I still needed to figure out exactly how to handle it. I was careful to include that caveat, because personally and off the record I think it's unlikely. Their replies by e-mail were simple and diplomatic - thanks for keeping us in the loop, we'll discuss this in the morning, and by the way there's good news on a related issue.

But by IM, the senior tech writer was much concise and direct. His only message to me was three letters: "wtf"

Deus ex machina

Google's policy change may have done what a week's worth of willpower couldn't: got me to stop blogging at work.

We use Internet Explorer at my office. Blogger stopped working properly for me today, and I haven't looked it up but I think that's because Google changed how Blogger works on IE. I might be able to post something from work, but it would be harder and uglier than it used to be, so I'm writing at home at the moment.

Still, I was busy today. My fourth project, long-inactive, became active, so I had to respond a bit to that. And I spent a lot more time this morning being industrious for the doomed project. After I did a fairly detailed edit of the new economic section, I set up the whole doomed project for a peer review. Luckily, I got all that done before afternoon ennui set in.

I also spent a while running in circles (well, "running in circles" in a desultory, all-by-e-mail sense of the phrase) about whether and how we would have to edit a related document - I had forgotten about it for the past month, and early this morning I thought a peer reviewer could do it, then I thought I'd have to, and the last word was that we didn't need to at all. Probably. Well, that's good news.

I've given the economist the benefit of the doubt more than SMEs, because in some ways he's been in the same predicament as me and because he hasn't been the cause of my problems. But after focusing as much as I can on his section, I'm feeling less friendly. His stuff was in a pretty rough shape, and while it's all my job, a lot of the edits were really basic stuff. More to the point, that whole "running in circles" bit was his fault. By now, the only people I can rely on are H., the lawyer, and my fellow tech writers. Us against the world.

Cold turkey

Another problem with my effort Thursday is that trying to go cold turkey is always hard. Yesterday I didn't make an absolute thing of it, but I was still trying to cut back, and I think I did better than Thursday. I'll bet I could stick to one or two designated blogs or Web sites - maybe even pick different ones some days - and it wouldn't be nearly as hard as Thursday was. If I do, that alone would be good for my procrastination and "unauthorized activity". So cutting back on the Internet is still a goal worth pursuing.

As for the writing, I think I will be more careful about it. I'm still not sure what to do about the fiction, but here, I'll start being a lot more circumspect, and probably rethink what I use it for as well. There's no use crying over spilled milk about what's out there - any incriminating posts are already in the tubes, nothing can be scrubbed completely - but this blog is probably due for a change.

The hundredth post seems like as good a time as any for that, doesn't it. Well, then. Here I am.

Bad timing

Part of the problem with my nothing-but-work experiment was the timing. Some days are just busier than others, and Thursday was a slow day. It's hard to be responsible when I have few responsibilities. On the doomed project, I got some editing done on my own and some done as requested by others but there wasn't four hours worth of work to do on that, let alone eight. My other two projects are both held up waiting on input from someone else, who I think might be on vacation. I guess I could have organized my desk even more, but I was going to have time to kill no matter what that day.

Staring at the wall

I resolved to do nothing but work while at the office today. I failed abjectly, and still was so bored that I was miserable.

Recently there was an e-mail to contractors about Internet security, not badmouthing the client, etc. It reminded us that all our e-mails and instant messages can be read by the government.

We all know that, but this wasn't the usual warning. It wasn't at the usual time, it wasn't phrased the usual way, it read like the sender had something specific in mind. And this was less than a week after this post, which was fairly critical of where I work, and an early draft of that post was even more critical. So the e-mail made me feel more than a little paranoid - oh, shit, I'm caught, I crossed the line! They're on to me! I'm going to get fired!

Between that worry, and my longstanding general sense that I procrastinate too much, I resolved to not do anything I wasn't supposed to with my computer on Thursday. No reading blogs, certainly no following interesting-looking links, no writing posts or getting into discussions on comment threads. I'd get caught up on my projects a bit, I'd respond to things more quickly, and I'd be beyond reproach.

Well, I wrote one post on my personal blog. Brief, to the point, and I didn't sit on it too long or revise too much. Good for me. And I got two personal e-mails, so I responded to them, and I kept those brief too so I'm sure no one could blame me for that. And, well, there's one blog I read that's basically a news Web site, and I often see one of my own supervisors reading it, so that must be safe. I followed one or two links from it, but I was careful to avoid any that looked either too distracting or even remotely potentially NSFW. That can't do too much harm, right? And then there's one more blog, that's not a news site so much as a community, and I got into discussions a little.

Oh hell.

I wound up spending at least a couple hours online on non-work stuff, but I really did reduce non-work stuff enough to make myself very, very bored. After I finished my light workload for the day, I wound up clicking around folders of projects that I couldn't do anything to advance, throwing out old papers and organizing my desk a bit (it's overdue), and almost literally staring at the wall.

My paranoia wasn't even too well-founded. The e-mail mentioned specific stuff, and didn't mention blogging, so if I was the problem they would have left me no doubt. They could have fired me and let word of mouth spread about why, not sent out a mass e-mail and done nothing else for the next few days.

But I wanted to see if I could avoid unauthorized conduct, and I only managed to reduce it, and even that was a real challenge. I tried to "be good" and I failed. Ouch.

I'd like to do more writing in my free time, both to keep in practice with different genres and maybe eventually to do it professionally again, and it seems like writing would be more productive than just reading the Internet from start to finish. The problem is, I have two big ideas, but neither of them are easy to do at work. One idea is a fictional story that's kind of fantasy/horror/fanfic/other stuff. I've been kicking it around in my head since college, and I still think it would be kind of fun to work on, and might even be worth publishing professionally someday. The problem is I haven't been able to get too into it. Maybe I need to try a different approach to writing, but I think it would really help to lock myself to a chair for several hours uninterrupted and write feverishly to get a good start on it, and I can't do that at work. All but the very slowest days have some work to do, and there are frequent interruptions of non-work stuff, and I'd be both self-conscious and legitimately worried about people seeing what I'm doing.

The other idea is the kind of writing I do here - musing and mostly true stories about my work environment. This is potentially Dilbert or Office Space or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy material here. What goes on in this office is often absurd. And it is easy to write about at work, because it's mostly brief anecdotes while they're fresh in my mind. The problem is, I really, really shouldn't write this stuff at work, especially not more critically than I already do, for fear of losing my job.

So maybe I can get started on the fiction stuff at home and bring it to work (even that is a challenge) to polish it, or maybe I can find a writing style on it that works for me at work, but the kind of writing that's easy to do at work is the last kind of thing I should do at work.

Playing it safe

I should probably be a bit more cautious about what I write here. Nothing definite yet, but it would be a good idea to keep in mind in general.

Purely pointless

"I am offended as a taxpayer," H. frequently says to me. She's talking about the doomed project and how it has probably cost the government over a million dollars. There are a lot of people involved with it, people at the TMBB level probably make six figures annually, and even if this project is no one's full-time job by itself, the person-hours add up. If it hasn't cost a million yet, it almost definitely will eventually. That's just the process of creating the regulation, not counting enforcement or other costs. And that's for a rulemaking which, as I've said, was probably a bad idea from the start and should definitely have been done differently.

And it's on my mind because a meeting this morning made me feel something similar about the blackmail project. It's not nearly as big a waste, and the problem is a different type as well, but still, it was a bit discouraging.

We exasperate ourselves

A recent story from H. has made me feel better about her job. I'm still worried about her mental health, because she's still in charge of the doomed project and it's still a mess, but the WMBD boss just saw an e-mail trail of a fuck-up that quite clearly wasn't her fault, so I'm pretty sure he knows she's not the main problem.

A round of review on the doomed project ended last week. We got even less helpful feedback than usual. We asked about eight people to approve the rule as is, or give us specific edits to be made in certain places by a definite date. By that date, we had heard from only two people, and one of them just gave us a long, rambling e-mail about the department's stance towards many issues, but even the team's lawyer couldn't tell if it had specific edits for our rule. That's all we got on time.

After the deadline, H. sent out an e-mail to all the people who hadn't answered. She complained to me about a certain reply. One guy was baffled. He said he thought he wasn't supposed to be doing something now, just waiting for other people to finish their part. He cited an e-mail from the WMBD boss on a certain date as his source for that. H. asked for details nervously, in case the WMBD boss had indeed gone behind her back and said that this guy didn't need to worry about it. But no, the baffled guy's source was simply the e-mail asking everyone for input itself. I've reread it, and I don't see a thing there that looks like saying anyone should hold off on anything. It seems he just didn't read it well.

What else could H. have done to avoid that problem? Should she really not use words of more than three syllables?

A bad day

Ugh. Today was rough.

I got into work and found two things to work on that had come in yesterday while I was out, because it was my RDO. They weren't actually late or high-pressure, but it's still not fun to get in first thing in the morning and still have stuff piled up because most other people were in the office yesterday and I wasn't. And even if they weren't huge problems, they both happened to be annoying in their own ways.

First there was the latest draft of the blackmail project's document. The RDM asked me to merge it with the main document, a version control issue. (That's never fun by itself.) Because he asked me to merge them, I assumed there had been changes made in the main document while the reviewer had been working, so there would be edits that had to be preserved in both of them. So I opened both documents side by side and went through them page by page and copy-pasted the reviewer's changes into the main document. However, I should have started by checking whether I needed to in the first place, because the only changes were the reviewer's. I could have just archived or deleted the old version and saved the new one with its name. So that was frustrating.

The other thing waiting for me was the economic analysis on the doomed project. The economist is a much better writer than some SMEs, but it's still daunting and depressing how much work I'll have to do with it. I had thought I was done with basic formatting and this kind of word choice work, but oops, no, here's another 50 pages of it.

And H. had an idea to help the doomed project along: for me to make a spreadsheet summarizing the remaining issues and assigning them to specific people who can actually do something about it. My attitude is that nothing can help the project (hence "doomed"), so regardless of outcome I'm leery of this just because it's unexpected work for me. But I can't ignore the assignment, and we should do something to look like we're trying to keep things moving, and I admit that this might actually help. So I started designing the spreadsheet.

In the process, I kept the "redesigning the axle" problem fully in mind and I was very careful about what we wanted and how to do it. I've run it by H. and the lawyer more than once. I wanted to do something I didn't know how to do, so I wound up using the help guide and asking two people before I found an approach I liked. I made most of the spreadsheet write-protected so there would be no ambiguity about exactly what we wanted. In previous spreadsheets we had multiple columns that were blank in most columns, which made them harder to read, so I'm putting everything relevant into one column and laboriously typing in explanations of what's going on. This spreadsheet covers all the bases. It is foolproof, or as close as anything can be in Microsoft Office. This spreadsheet is a fucking magnum opus.

And I guess I may ultimately take pride in my work today if it winds up making a difference, but that's unlikely, and it's still a lot of back-and-forth and dealing with knotty problems at the moment, and now that I've finished designing the spreadsheet I can look forward to filling it in. Again, not fun.

Fractal problems

There was a meeting yesterday. For whatever reason, the department head wanted to recognize every project team that has published something this quarter as part of a rulemaking project. Seeing a parade of present, active projects, one thing about them jumped out at me: there was quite a bit of overlap with the doomed project.

There were at least two projects with basic goals that overlapped heavily with the doomed project. And these are not trivial issues that the doomed project covers in a paragraph or two. Operational L__, the huge thing added from scratch relatively late, has a rulemaking project devoted to it. So does the general issue of closing the loophole. As for how big that is, it's the thing discussed here, the issue that contributes one phrase to every single section. I have the sense that there were even more overlapping projects than that, but I wasn't taking good notes.

I've mentioned that a "kitchen sink" approach for the doomed project has been one of the big problems with it from the very start. What surprised me yesterday was learning just how unnecessary a lot of it is. When SMEs claimed that certain things like XYZ really need to be done in the doomed project, I took them at face value. Apparently operational L__ and the loophole really don't need to be here, though. Which is funny, because the closing the loophole sounds like a no-brainer even to a non-expert like me, but if there's a whole other project to address it, we shouldn't have to do that here. I'm sure that the responsible department would argue that it needs to be in the doomed project because the doomed project is scheduled to be finished before the loophole project, and that might have been true if the loophole were the only other extra in the doomed project, but considering how fast it's going now...

Work-to-rule is tempting

Two days ago the WMBD boss declared that, as H. put it, it was "Time to stop the music." He asked that any more requests for revisions "or anything to this effect" to the doomed project be referred to him, instead of addressed by me or the lawyer directly.

This fits what I've been calling him. He hopes this will prevent unimportant changes from further delaying the project. He's even said he's "just trying to protect" me. I really doubt it will help overall, though. He has little authority over the substance of the rule himself, so he won't be telling anyone, "Sorry, there's no more time for that change, it'll have to wait until after publication." I'm pretty sure I'll eventually have to put in the document whatever SMEs ask me to put in, whether or not they run it by WMBD and their own boss first. Anything kept out of the document at this stage is going to be put into it at the next one. At best, if another "hamster wheel" situation arises, he might deal with it more directly, but he's not in a position to notice that before they've gone around twice anyway.

So the advantage is the possibility of preventing one type of problem. The disadvantage is the certainty that every edit now has at least one additional layer of review. Call me a pessimist, but I already have an opinion about how this will work out.

Fortunately, we're being intelligent about it so far and interpreting the instruction loosely. It first came up at all this morning. A SME e-mailed me a request for a correction. One number had been mistyped, literally only one character, and I checked that he really was just reverting it to the previous correct version. According to instructions, I should have forwarded that to WMBD or just told the SME to contact WMBD and not done anything else with it myself, but that seemed a bit too ridiculous even for me. Instead, I made the change, e-mailed WMBD to check on it, left the change tracked pending his reply, and accepted the change when I heard from him an hour later. The lawyer has said she expects more minor wording changes soon and suggested e-mailing WMBD once for all of them.

We'll be fine as long as we don't have to take him seriously.

The squeaky hamster wheel gets the grease

A couple months ago the senior tech writer asked me why the doomed project was going around in circles. About another project that question might make me defensive, but about this one I could unabashedly say I didn't know, the Program offices just keep doing more things. I then told him, unofficially and sotto voce, that I had two guesses: either the people who need more time don't dare stand up and take responsibility for the delay in front of everyone at a meeting, they instead do things late and screw up everyone else's schedule; or different offices aren't communicating with each other, so they each want different things and don't find out about the conflict until the project is at a stage where everyone is involved. Either way, problems that could have been simple become bigger and more time-consuming because they were mishandled.

Obviously, the previous post is an example of the second problem. I'll bet it's also part of the first too, though. I can't remember if the TMBB from the Training office said a word in the March 9 meeting. I guess he must have, because I can't think of where else the specific "one paragraph" comment would have come from. But if he had any opinions about that or anything else, I don't remember them. Maybe the problem is him not communicating with other offices, or maybe it's his own subordinates not communicating with him, I can't tell. And it's much harder to think about something that's not there but should be than it is to think about something that's there but shouldn't be, so it seems like no one else is noticing this. H. and I know that the lead SME and the Training SME mishandle things because we're get e-mails from them that make things worse, but the Training TMBB just sits back and lets things happen.

If the squeaky wheel gets the grease, that guy should have squeaked at that meeting.

What I call "doomed", the lawyer calls "the hamster project"

A constant problem with the doomed project is the dysfunctional relationships between the office in this agency that cares about the deadline and everyone else*. The latest big problem is similar to that: a dysfunctional relationship between two offices that want different things.

One requirement was relatively consistent from the start of the project: XYZ operators** had to take a training course from TI, an independent training organization. Around February 16, the Training office changed that to summarize the training course, but not explicitly mention TI. Both versions of that part happened to be about 10 pages total, including the discussion and stuff. That was one of the last changes before the latest review of the document by TMBB. That review ended February 29***, and in it, the Human Element in Design office changed the training requirements back and required TI again. On March 9 we met with TMBB to resolve that and other unclear issues. In that meeting the Training office asked to change one paragraph of the TI requirement and like almost everyone else they said they'd have it ready by the following Monday, just one business day.

In fact, we got it the Monday after that - two days ago, seven business days longer than they said. They reverted all 10 pages. And we still don't know what the Human Element in Design office thinks of this because the important people have been out so far this week.

After February 29 I had no real opinion on this. Hey, I'm not the expert, it's all the same to me as long as I get the time I need to do my work. But at that point there had only been the original version, the new version, and back to the original. By now there has been the original version, the new version, back to the original, back to the new, and potentially more, all taking longer than we were told it would. This is really, really stupid.

* For example, see here.

** "XY operators"? "XYOs"? Whatever.

*** Well, that was the deadline, but some responses came in late, of course.

I can't tell if I'm incompetent or everyone else is

Fairly often when SMEs give me text to put in a rulemaking document, I have half a dozen comments or questions per page about relatively basic issues: "I've changed this from passive voice to active voice." "This is unclear, do you mean that people are not allowed to use that equipment, or that they are not required to use it?" "These two paragraphs are almost completely redundant, so why not just combine them?" And, of course, "Stop using 'shall' when you mean 'must', you illiterate jackass! You're supposed to be writing a regulation for modern laymen in the general public, not a period piece set in Georgian England!"

Ahem. I don't actually say that last, of course. But I think it. And I do raise the issues or make the changes on my own. When the SMEs reply, the answer is usually (paraphrased) "Don't blame me, I just copied that from an international standard/a previously existing regulation/another current rulemaking."

Then I sit and feel nihilistic about inconsistency for about a minute before making my changes anyway.

Why? Well, wometimes the SMEs are wrong about where it's from to begin with - they copied and pasted more than they intended or less or from chapter 89 instead of 98. It's easy to pin the blame for mistakes like that. It's a harder to handle problems like using a vague advisory guideline as an iron-clad requirement or just plain bad writing, though.

For example, yesterday I got curious and actually read a document that the doomed project uses as a resource, and even considering how standards change over time, I was struck by how much I wanted to edit the document. Big chunks of it are outdated, because it was written 20 years ago about a technological issue, and vague even considering the age. The document in general is a non-binding guideline, and we want to make its guidance mandatory, and sometimes that's harder than just changing "should" or "shall" to "must". And it's mostly in the passive voice. I guess that might make sense for the writers of an advisory document, who don't care who is doing certain things as long as they're getting done, but our agency shouldn't be as unconcerned about it. Same for times SMEs have used our own previous regulations as a template - sometimes it should be smoother, and sometimes if I'm reading it correctly it just plain doesn't work as written.

It seems to me like most of the documents we use as resources either would be OK in some contexts but definitely not for us here and now, or make me wonder how the authors ever got away with it in the first place. Did style guides and plain language standards really change THAT much over the past few decades, or am I being too picky, or what?

The dumbest request of the day

A recent e-mail had three comments on the blackmail project. One was moderately interesting and helpful. Then there was this, and another one that was much simpler than this but roughly equally important.

recommend the tech writer double check spacing between sentences. Seems there may be places where there are 3 spaces vice 2. But hard to tell.

If I hadn't thought of the "find" tool in Microsoft Word, checking that could easily have taken an hour in a document like this. Fortunately, I did think of it. I found four places in the 50-page document with three spaces in a row. Two of them were intentional in legal jargon; that's just how that specific jargon is normally formatted. One more was at the end of a paragraph, so it doesn't affect things at all. I found one sentence which actually had three spaces between it and shouldn't have.

Yup, that was a good use of my time, all right.

Plenty of time to do it wrong

I remember a maxim from a poster in a school I saw once as a kid: "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" That principle doesn't seem to apply here.

Just before my vacation there was a flare-up in the minor project because one guy wanted to reconsider this yet again. As I mentally rehashed the rejected alternatives, I had second thoughts about one of them. I had said way back then that I'd like to handle the table a fourth way if only we had time, but it seemed like it was just days from being done. Doing the table the fourth way would take at least a couple days and probably more than a week - there might have been resistance to it, I just had a general idea of the fourth way and would still have to figure out details, and we definitely would have had to redo the discussion of the rule's changes. Considering that we thought the table was one of the last sticking points, I rejected the fourth way because we shouldn't hold everything up just to get this one thing just right.

Well, that was October. If I or my project team had been more realistic about how long things would actually take, we could have definitely got that table just right by now.

And even though this great example of a certain problem - can't do something quite right now because we think we're almost done, so we settle for a "close enough" approach, but then the project keeps going for months - has come from the minor project, something like this has happened probably literally dozens of times in the doomed project. Either that exact situation happens, or the reverse, where we just have to do something big just right even though we're supposed to be almost done. It's on my mind because several times this week I've seen the deletion of discussion or reg text in multiple pages at a time, and thought "I wish I hadn't worked so hard on that." Why did we make sure every i was dotted and every t was crossed and everyone on the team approved of that stuff if someone was going to throw it out with a shovel?

Dilbert is a documentary

I've been meaning to change the names I've given people here simply because I think it would improve my writing, but in one case I should do it because calling someone "the well-meaning-but-dumb boss" is becoming less and less accurate. Because he's getting more and more like Dilbert's pointy-haired boss with every day.

There was a meeting three weeks ago at which we set the current schedule for the doomed project. Among other things, we decided we need team members' bosses' bosses to review the document again soon, and the vague, noncommittal feedback we have often received is unhelpful. We wanted every proposed change to be in the form of text ready to use, not just comments saying "this should be stronger" or "a new definition of this would be helpful". Part of the reason for that is deadline pressure; the doomed project has never been leisurely, but sticking to schedule seems even more important right now than it used to. Now, WMBD was in the room and agreed with everyone else about all that. Those ideas might not have been his originally, but I'm completely sure he didn't disagree.

The review happened. J. the substitute tech writer started organizing feedback while I was away and I finished this morning. I would have finished earlier, but one copy didn't get to me until today. (We're still missing one more, in fact, but we had to stop waiting sometime.)

The WMBD boss included eight comments of his own, and not a single one of them was text ready to use. One of them, for example, tentatively suggests creating a table to go into detail about something instead of briefly summarizing it in the text, while another comment simply asks "Isn't this a big loophole?" about a certain requirement. He also had a bunch of updates directly in the text and it looks to me like every one of them is nonsubstantive. Nothing that changes what the document does or even how it does it, just how it looks. Now, I admit that that kind of thing wasn't specifically discussed in the meeting, but given the deadline, it seems obvious to me that any changes should be limited to what's absolutely necessary to keep things simpler.

This is, let's recall, H.'s boss. This is the person in the building who cares the most about the timeline. He agreed that the review should be kept simple and concrete feedback would be helpful, both of which would help the deadline. But apparently he either doesn't know what that meant or thought it doesn't apply to him. Christ, what an asshole.

Ever thought about what "SNAFU" means? I mean, really thought about it?

Back at work. Rested, relaxed, invigorated. On top of things. Taking charge and making progress. Tackling nitpicky problems with a fresh eye.

Hah.

While I was away the blackmail project moved more quickly than I expected and another writer had to review it a bit. Yesterday I spent more than half my time on the blackmail project and the minor project. The doomed project needed more work and is the higher priority, but I could catch up on those two relatively quickly before moving on to the big job, so I did - signed off on the peer review on the blackmail project, and went to a minor project meeting and made certain changes as requested.

Still working hard on the doomed project. Sure enough, it was a busy, important time for the project while I was away. As I predicted, though, the higher-ups reviewing the document didn't finish by Wednesday as planned, so that made things a bit easier for J., the backup tech writer. In fact, they still haven't finished. Of seven reviews, we have only six, one of those came in today and was still in a rougher state than we expected. So I've done all I can and am working on cleaning up side issues while we wait.

But what can you do about it when a higher-up doesn't do their job? I can't think of anything, other than making sure your own ass is covered and working around it as best you can.

(In fairness, no doubt the people in question wouldn't see these problems as not doing their jobs. No doubt they'd say some problems were unavoidable technical issues no one should be blamed for, and some weren't their jobs, they were just favors or not even issues they were aware of. But now I'm violating my resolutions against either extending too much goodwill or being too long-winded or both. So, hell with it, the latest problems with the doomed project are all the fault of the people whose reviews were late and/or incomplete and they should feel bad for it.)

Vacation

On vacation this week. I'm glad I scheduled it months in advance, because this week is a busy, important time on the doomed project and getting this time off approved would probably have been very hard under the current schedule. Of course, every week seems to be busy and important these days. But unlike previous vacations or simply long weekends, this time I feel relatively good about the state I left work in, so for now that can just be my someone else's problem.

Who's the boss?

One thing that has seemed weird to me over the past few days is responsibility and how it can be diffuse, or circular.

This probably happens to a lot of office jobs, in and out of government. At all previous jobs of mine the chain of responsibility was pretty clear: I had my boss, and he had his boss I probably knew of but interacted with little, and so on up depending on the size of the organization. There were no responsibilities outside that chain, except for basic human civility - I couldn't tell someone to fuck off if they asked me to put on overalls for a restaging of "American Gothic," but I could politely refuse if I felt like it, unless my boss decided it would be a good idea. Day-to-day work could get complicated, but in theory my responsibilities were very clear and direct.

That's not the case here, and probably isn't at most jobs in any Byzantine bureaucracy. The supervisor of tech writers assigns me to project teams. Each team has an RDM who sets the schedule and coordinates between all the other team members and is theoretically the only person on the team who tells me what to do. But RDMs aren't the experts, those are the SMEs, so when SMEs tell me what to do I usually just do it. And the RDMs aren't the SMEs' main bosses, their main bosses are in their own departments devoted to various subsets of this agency's regulatory mission. SMEs' responsibilities vary; one SME on the doomed project cared a great deal about how a certain phrase was worded and that phrase appears in almost every section of the document, but other than that, he only cares about two small sections that are all his own, about six pages out of 300. And finally there's the senior tech writer, who doesn't actually supervise me, but is supposedly the resident expert on the details of our job and works closely with my supervisor on who gets assigned to which project.

So SMEs shouldn't tell me what to do but often do so anyway but there are some things they still wouldn't get away with. The RDMs inform team members of deadlines and schedule meetings but can't actually do anything about it if people miss them. Every team member and their boss has an OCD-level attention to detail on certain topics and doesn't know or care about the rest. My supervisor keeps a close eye on what I'm doing but rarely actually tells me what to do.

The doomed project is a huge example of this fractal org chart, but something like it happens on every project because everyone on a team is responsible to their own boss more than they're responsible to anyone on the team.

Preaching to the choir

I spent most of yesterday morning in a plain language writing workshop, along with a couple dozen tech writers, lawyers, economists and other people. It was mostly a lecture and some focused exercises on improving prose qua prose, such as by avoiding pretentious Latin and using clearer wording. I also appreciated learning that I could use certain organizational techniques I hadn't thought of before in rulemaking documents. It was an example of a good speech, too: genuinely humerous anecdotes rather than forced jokes, PowerPoint used well, a little audience participation to keep people on their toes. It wasn't perfect - some verbal chaff, some mechanical glitches with videos - but much better than usual around here. So, good stuff overall.

I'm annoyed, though, that certain people weren't there. The unhelpful guy wasn't. Nor was the engineer who wouldn't let me simplify a requirement recently, saying that it would be fine as is because if I could understand it then anyone could. Nor were any SMEs, as far as I could tell.

That's misguided, because they need the help more than I do. Sure, I just got dinged for my writing recently, but I still manage to be up to professional caliber when I'm thinking about it. Some people here write badly enough that they'd probably get failing grades in college classes on the subjects they're experts in. It's a shame that their bosses didn't expect them to come to this the way mine did.

I'm not bringing this up just as a "writing well is really, really important, mmmkay?" PSA, not just because I parochially believe in the importance of my personal field, not just to regurgitate reassurances I heard for 10 years about how writing is actually a valuable skill even though the Computer Science majors and MBAs are the ones who made big bucks right out of college. The reason I wish SMEs had been at the meeting is because they do more of the writing than me, so it would save time in the long run if they did it better. This is inefficient. This is government waste.

As I've said, both on version control and way back in my second post here, a lot of the work I do could be done better or made unnecessary to start with by other people. The more time SMEs would spend thinking about putting things into their logical order and avoiding jargon, the fewer questions I'd have to ask them and meetings we'd have to have and rounds of review documents would have to go through. I know I can't complain too much about inefficiencies that keep me employed in a relatively easy job, but it's still annoying.

If I cared, I'd be offended

You know, I really can be far more optimistic and good-natured than is reasonable.

Sure, the fact that blog exists is disrespectful to my supervisors in a way, and its content is full of negativity of various kinds. And while I don't talk about politics much here I'm pretty cynical in that sphere of life as well. Interpersonally, though, I'm sympathetic to a fault. H. and other people have expressed surprise at how willing I am to give people the benefit of the doubt.

I bring all this up because I realized that I probably do that too much. Sometimes people just fuck up, and sometimes that makes my job harder, and it would probably be more normal and healthy for me to resent them and think less of them for it. Maybe they're a good person overall just handling work badly, maybe not, who knows, but so what? They're still making my life harder for no good reason.

To combine two ongoing plot threads of this blog, the "well-meaning-but-dumb" boss is what I generally call someone in the context of being a bad speaker at meetings, but that person also happens to be one of H.'s bosses. A lot of the mismanagement of the doomed project is either done by him, or a result of him not handling others better. So what if he phrases requests politely? So did Bill Lumbergh, and Lumbergh was an asshole.

Me and my big mouth

There was a sub-department meeting yesterday that seemed annoying and pointless to me. The bulk of the meeting was the WMBD boss talking about the roles and job descriptions of everyone in the sub-department. He got questions, so I guess there was some subtext or underlying issue that he had to clear up - and if so, see previous comments about him being a bad communicator; stuff like that shouldn't go unsaid - but from where I sat the meeting was just a discussion of what everyone in the room already knew.

Today, though, I've been tempted to ask my immediate supervisors questions like that. Because I'm getting caught in the middle of the latest round of problems with the doomed project. Background: officially, the only people on project teams I'm supposed to take orders from are H. and maybe R., the lawyer. Realistically, though, H. knows as little about substantive issues as me, and they both have other jobs to do, so when a SME asks me to do something relatively simple with the document, I don't bother running it by H. or the lawyer first.

So I didn't think twice when a SME asked to meet up with me so we could resolve a dozen or so relatively minor issues in the document. After the meeting was over she mentioned to me offhandedly that big changes to a certain section were in the pipeline. That sounded ominous. I asked if we should let H. know. The SME said no, because H. had this crazy idea that people were going around behind her back and cutting her out of the loop. So we shouldn't tell H. this because it would just encourage that.

The problem with that should be obvious.

Long-windednessitude

Resolution: to be more concise. Succinct. Brief. Direct. (Oh, hell.)

I had my annual performance evaluation this morning. It went well overall - yay, three percent raise - but one criticism my supervisors had of me was in the "written communication" part of the matrix, for my tendency to elaborate too much or be candid beyond the bounds of my position. In formal e-mails to the entire team of the doomed project, apparently I shouldn't say things like, "let's hope it works out this time. Knock on wood." And I need to be more aware about getting to the point. If someone doesn't read all of an e-mail and screws things up because of that, I'm inclined to blame the reader on a personal level, but I have to admit I could have prevented the problem by not burying the main point of it in the first place.

On the whole, this criticism didn't surprise or bother me. H. has mentioned something like that before, and a lot of the e-mails I got dinged for were written in relatively harried and stressful situations so of course there would be some problem, and I got good reviews otherwise. So, hey, no one's perfect.

There were two reasons that it did get to me, though. First because I write in my free time right here and aspire to write even more, so written communication should ideally be one of my relative strengths, not weaknesses. And second, it just so happened that this afternoon I made exactly the same mistake in a personal e-mail as well. Making plans for this evening, my girlfriend said that she'd be getting off work early. I replied that that was cool, and in theory I could do the same based on hours worked so far this week, so it was too bad that I was so busy I'd probably have to work until the last minute. She missed the last part of that, requiring an e-mail to a third party and a call to her office interrupting her work. Heh, um, whoops.

Well, oversharing isn't a problem in a personal blog meant for reflecting about work. Practice writing is practice writing, and it gives future or hypothetical readers the idea of what my job is like. But it's funny that a post explaining my resolution to be more concise wound up being 429 words. So I'll really try to watch this in the future. As a writing exercise, maybe I should even do a more concise version of this post later just as a challenge to myself.

Beating expectations

I just left a meeting about the doomed project in a good mood. Except for one paragraph the lawyer has to write, and half a dozen things the lead SME is still waiting for word on, we're around where we were supposed to be by last Friday.

That sounds very depressing when I summarize it, but considering that a meeting this morning went even worse, and considering that yesterday I thought we wouldn't be this far for another day, I still feel pretty good about it.

Also, "my" "official" review of the doomed project started this past Monday. I was dreading it, and so far that seems justified. Yesterday afternoon's post is the kind of thing I have to deal with on a big, rough project written by many different people. As for the messed-up scheduling of this one, yesterday morning's vignette was part of the problem. Happily, though, yesterday's vignette was talking about almost a third or so of the rule, and if - and I hesitate to even get my hopes up this much - if we really are down to one paragraph from the lawyer and half a dozen things for the lead SME to check, then that really is a big improvement.

English-speakers are nihilists

"...all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large."
— H. P. Lovecraft

Sometimes I wish that the English language had an equivalent of L'Académie française. It's basically a regulatory body for the French language. Of course, it has no actual authority, and is sometimes comically out of step with the modern world in some cases, but still, there is a definitive, single, "correct" way of doing things in French, thanks to that group.

No such thing exists in English. Dictionaries and grammar guides cite regionalisms and common usage and stuff, but there's no definitive authority. This means that my job is sometimes a matter of picking which authority or rule seems more relevant, doing things one way in one part of a document and another way in another, splitting hairs, and sometimes just plain guessing.

For example, the doomed project contains about a dozen instances of a phrase like "must have leak proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". The problem is, the document was inconsistent about exactly how "leak proof" was formatted, sometimes with a hyphen between the words, sometimes with a space, and sometimes with no separation at all.

As I was searching throughout the document to identify instances of this, I found some in the names of technical standards we reference, so that seemed to be the easiest way to resolve it: conform with the existing standards already published and in use by the industry. Simple enough, right?

No. Because there's more than one technical standard with a version of "leak proof" in the name, and they don't all handle it the same way.

OK, so I e-mailed all my fellow tech writers asking for advice. They referred to the relevant rule in the office's style guide about compounding and modifiers, which I should have thought of on my own because this is hardly the first time I've dealt with this. Based on how the phrase is used, it should be hyphenated. Fine, I've gone through the document and hyphenated it.

That doesn't match how it appears in one of those standards' names, but there's nothing we can do about that. Got to keep names as they appear on the title page, or no one could ever find them. There'd be chaos. We have some documents with English vs. American spelling, and that kind of inconsistency is OK, so this should be OK too.

But wait, there's more! It's not just inconsistency between one standard's name and the rest of the document. It's inconsistency within the phrase. It's now "must have leak-proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". Using "leak-proof, fireproof" side by that is ugly and confusing and looks wrong even though it's technically not. We do it about a dozen times.

If there was an Academy of the English Language, then this problem might not exist at all. And weird situations would still arise sooner or later just because complicated rules make complicated situations, but at least there would be one right answer to fall back on. But there's not. There's just me, and whatever rules I copy and paste together.

Vignette II

According to the schedule, the stuff he was talking about was supposed to be done Friday. On Monday, I found out it wasn't done, but was left with the impression that it would be done by today. It was hard to pin him down when I talked to him just now, but I got the impression it probably won't be done by Thursday.

Vignette

The lead SME on the doomed project came in to talk to me for a few minutes just now. He's getting a bit pushy about dividing up work and is stressed about how things are going, but as I've said, he's been forbidden from seeing his family, so I guess I should give him a break.

After he left, my cubicle neighbor IMed me to commiserate about working with him. I thanked him and pointed out that while the lead SME is annoying, the unhelpful guy is definitely worse as far as helping me actually do my job goes. For example, as I told my neighbor:

I sent him an e-mail yesterday with four questions, numbered for convenience. He sent me a reply back with answers to three, and he misnumbered one of them. And the missing answer is not something mysterious or complicated, it's just "what should I name this table?"

I sent him another e-mail with that question but still haven't got an answer to that, even though I have to other things.

Hostage situation

The lead subject matter expert on the doomed project has been forbidden from seeing his family until there's some kind of progress on the project*. Unfortunately, this means that he's going around trying to resolve lingering issues. Saying that it sounds good to clean up lingering issues would be banal, but this is not the time for it.

First of all, the lawyers have the document to review the changes made in this review. Someone else in the document working on something else introduces version control issues and just generally gets messy. And secondly, right now I'd estimate that at least half the comments in the document are not the kind of thing anyone needs to worry about. Some are repetitive: there's a question about how to format the name of something, the name is used a dozen different places, and there's a comment pointing it out at almost every instance. Others are notes to self: the lawyer or I thought of something but couldn't take care of it right that minute, so we put a note in so we wouldn't forget, but it's still something we can take care of ourselves and other people don't need to worry about it. The lawyer will clean up a lot of her notes to herself, and the first thing I'll do when the lawyer is done with it is clean up the repetitive comments and stuff like that. So the lead SME could save everyone a lot of trouble if he just waited until I'd done that.

Unfortunately, he can't, due to his boss's ultimatum. So he's sent out several e-mails about individual issues and this morning he asked me to send him a copy of the document so he can work on things while the lawyer has the document occupied for her own work. (I almost told him he didn't need my help for that, but at the last minute I realized the last thing I want to do is encourage a greater involvement and more hands-on approach by anyone.) I don't know exactly what specific goals the lead SME was given, if any, but I hope he can be satisfied by having comments resolved by next week, which has been the schedule for the past month and (so far) we're still on track to meet that.

As for me, things on the doomed project are slow for me this week, because like I said, the lawyer's in there. Just in time for people to try to get my other two projects moving**, but anyways.

* No, that is not hyperbole. His family lives about four states away. He apparently has been in the habit of taking frequent three- or four-day weekends to see them, using RDOs and/or time off as he accumulates it. His boss is not letting him do that at the moment. So it's not hyperbole, but it's not quite as tyrannical as it sounds either.

** I suppose I should be grateful they're doing it now instead of next week or last week. It's hard to appreciate, though. I am still doing some work on the doomed project these days and am anxious about what's coming up, so it's a bit annoying to have meetings on projects that really don't matter as much and, despite their own problems, are in much better shape overall.

PowerPoint sucks

Fun facts on PowerPoint:

• The "criticism" section of the Wikipedia page on it is more than 30 percent of the total length. (601 words out of 1,926, not counting footnotes, infoboxes not part of the actual article, etc.)


• Former members of the Army have praised PowerPoint for its ability avoid sharing information, like in press briefings where the speaker wants to avoid tough questions.


• PowerPoint has been cited as one of the causes of the Space Shuttle explosion in 2003.

Clearly, PowerPoint is a great threat to the Republic.

OK, clearly, not really. The problem is, just like lots of other computerized things, stupid people use it thoughtlessly, freely. If someone was going to do a presentation that would be 84 slides, if he had to create all the slides using transparencies or an actual slide projector by hand, before he had even started he'd say to himself, "Wait a minute, do I really need all this? I'm not even sure we have enough transparencies in the supply closet. Most of the text will be OK, but I'd have to do some of the graphs by hand, and that would be ugly. And anyways, this is a ton of information. Maybe I should summarize and condense it better. Or take out all the parts that aren't really, really important. Or just call in sick that day."

If you have PowerPoint, though, and you want to do a presentation that's 84 slides, well, fuck it, why not? There are no office supplies to run out of. Putting pictures on slides is as easy as text and using zany formatting is even easier than those. If a slide winds up unreadable with dense text, it's actually easier to split it onto a second slide than to edit the text to be more concise. The program makes visual aids for presentations so easy that you don't even have to think about it. So some people choose not to.

The well-meaning but dumb boss, for example. Last week's presentation was available for download on the department's Web site for some strange reason, so I got it and counted the slides. 84. The meeting was only scheduled to take an hour. If the meeting ended on time and if he had actually bothered to show us all the slides, that would have been more than one a minute, so we would have been rushed indeed. Unfortunately, the meeting took an hour and a half, and after I downloaded it I found that he still didn't get through all of them.

I intend to follow this post up later, with even more problems from last week's meeting and from other meetings in general, but that right there is a big, obvious one: if you have more than, say, one slide for every minute of expected speaking time, then you're probably doing something wrong.

What's the difference between a bad liar, bad salesman and bad manager?

Related to the previous post, the meeting two days ago to discuss the move was typically horrible. It ran half an hour late due to all the questions about how bad things would be, well into lunch. The well-meaning but dumb department head did almost all the talking, and he remains a bad speaker, unable to get to the point, unaware of where his microphone is, and seems to be going from bad to worse with PowerPoint. Seriously, I'll try to do a post about his presentation itself. It deserves the attention from a "what not to do" perspective.

I have to give him credit for at least one part of the meeting, though. We've known that the move was coming for a while now. It's unpopular, for all the reasons discussed in my previous post. We got some details at yesterday's meeting that only made things worse, couldn't get some details that we wanted, the good news was rare and trivial, and with every meeting on the subject the day gets a little closer and the lack of a reprieve gets more obvious. The WMBD guy never could have had a friendly crowd yesterday.

So I'll give him credit for grinning and bearing it. Even getting some hostile, arguably unprofessional questions, as far as I could tell he didn't do anything worse than try to put a positive spin on his next answer and maybe fumble his words even more. Still doesn't make me feel better about his competence, but at least it kept the meeting itself from being any worse.

Change is bad

There was a meeting yesterday about plans for the move of our department to a new, big, modernized, state-of-the-art facility. Everyone in the offices hates this and wishes there were some way out of it.

One big problem is that they designed the new place on the assumption that a lot of people in other departments would move there in addition to just us, but it now looks like the other departments will join us years later, if ever. (Why? Because of funding cuts, somehow.) And the design called for sharing certain facilities among all departments, but most shared facilities will not be completed or at least not available until and unless the other departments join us. Since one of those shared facilities is the cafeteria, this is a problem. Until they open that up, we will only have a "snack bar" with seating for 50. I'd estimate that's less than a quarter of our current cafeteria's capacity, and of course, a snack bar probably won't have much cooked food. I'm sure that refrigerators, microwaves, and break rooms will be available somewhere, but we couldn't get straight answers at yesterday's meeting about how many there will be or our close to workspaces they will be. Likewise for the credit union. That doesn't affect me, but it'll probably be even worse for most people.

Beyond that, it's inconvenient to get to. Our current location isn't all that great, but there's a shuttle from a major metro hub and we're just five minutes from major highways. For those who drive, there's quite a bit of parking around here, although not enough for everyone. So there are options. At the future location, there's no on-street parking. There will still be a shuttle, but as of the meeting yesterday they don't know where it will go from, and that major metro hub seems unlikely to me. Not only that, but the whole complex is big. If the shuttle only goes to the main gate (no straight answer on that either), then it would be a 10-minute walk to our office. As for parking, there is no on-street parking in the complex. There is a parking garage, and we might be able to use the space meant for people from other departments before they're there, which would actually be an advantage to being there alone... but we can't get a straight answer on that either. There's one entrance and exit from the complex, which will probably be very crowded at rush hour.

Now that I write it down, a little of the negative reaction to the move is probably reflexive distrust of unheaval, even though the negative reaction is universal. Because a lot the problems are the result of the fact that our department will be there alone for years before anyone joins us, if they ever do - but half the problems are mitigated by that. No cafeteria or credit union really sucks, but we might wind up having enough parking for everyone, traffic won't be bad, and there will be plenty of storage space.

However, there's no help for the location. It'll almost double my commute.