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"