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.