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?"

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"

Red-faced

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

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

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