Apoliticality

The political environment in my office is kind of weird.

At the simplest level, this is a government regulatory agency with a pretty broad mandate, so I imagine it would be very hard to work here without believing that at least sometimes, government regulation is necessary and good. That would seem to rule out the average right-wing nut. But the other extreme is no more likely. There are a lot of current or recently-former people in uniform in this particular regulatory organization, and I assume they tend to lean right-wing and conservative overall, despite normal individual variation of course. And more generally, I think most people don't realize just how much attention government agencies pay to the economic impact of what they're doing. Sometimes the economists won't support something unless we can show that Americans have already died because of a lack of the rulemaking we're working on. A nonlethal injury or theoretical risk isn't enough, damage to property isn't enough, deaths in a country with a different regulatory regime isn't enough, economists won't actively support any regulation except to directly prevent things that have directly killed American citizens. (I exaggerate a bit, of course.) Regulatory agencies are not, in general, proactive, and even those that are have to have the approval of some that aren't. Anyone who truly believed and was emotionally invested in progress on the regulatory mission of this agency would be depressed and/or not remain here long.

So you have to be pretty centrist and mainstream to work here. And officially, of course, it's intensely apolitical. Officially, we are deeply insulated from partisanship. Officially, we are an authority nearly beyond question within our mandate and it's always important, so things shouldn't change much as politicians come and go.

Officially, officially, officially. Really, though, I'm pretty sure almost anything federal is fair game for people in Congress and the White House to show off their tough-talking budget-cutting serious-leadchargetaking, and some leading Republicans openly express the wish to return to the regulatory regime of Teddy Roosevelt. So every so often we get a little reassurance that our office isn't on the chopping block despite what you see on the news, like at one of yesterday's meetings. Like so many things, it makes me chuckle to myself, in this case thinking something like "There's a fig leaf of bipartisanship coming up sooner or later, right? Right?"

Stranger than fiction

Wow. I happened to have two department-wide meetings today. (Or rather, the first was for the department and the second was for a sub-department, or maybe even sub-department and sub-sub-department.) There were several interesting bits, but the biggest came near the end of the second meeting.

Announcement: the picnic scheduled for Thursday is postponed.

Announcement: we hope to soon offer training sessions on better communication.

Seriously, there was a picnic scheduled for noon this coming Thursday. It was going to be a potluck picnic and bakeoff competition, a few miles from the office so people have been setting up car-pooling sign-up sheets. It's BYOB, the first office event with any kind of alcohol in my memory, not counting at a restaurant. It would have been more work for me personally than I like - normally I bring things like chips and dip to potlucks or just mooch, but I've dug up an interesting salad recipe - but it would have been fun, and a good excuse to leave the office early that day. Family were also invited, so probably at least a few spouses were taking a personal day or kids were getting pulled out of daycare.

Long story short, all in all, it's a fairly big event that takes a fair amount of planning. But late in this otherwise nearly pointless meeting less than two days in advance, the boss mentions that the picnic isn't happening. Apparently about half the department is committed to an event that conflicts with the picnic, a seminar or training session or something, and the same guy set the day and time for both, but forgot about it. It's being rescheduled for some time next week, but nothing definite was announced.

And as far as I could tell, the department head didn't even notice the irony of offering training in better communication immediately after that. I was struggling to keep from laughing about that afterwards. Sure, it screws with my schedule a bit, but next week is probably actually even better for me. I only really feel sorry for H. yet again, because she, of course, was doing a lot to organize the picnic. She only found out about the cancellation at the same time the rest of us did. Yeah, I want to listen to this guy's advice about effective communication, all right. What not to do.

People who want things from you are the enemy

I worry a bit about how adversarial I'm getting about the doomed project.

I'm putting passwords on documents and not giving them out to most people. Those documents were recently obsoleted. I don't want people ignoring the e-mail about that and editing them, in which case either their edits would be lost or I'd have to do extra unnecessary work to find them.

When someone asks me for something and it's not really totally clear, I ask for clarification and either do it my way or don't do it at all until I get it. In one sense, that's just conscientiousness. But I'm not doing it because I really care about getting everything proper right now, I'm doing it because I don't want to take the blame when it's not.

If I don't agree with or can't do all of what they're asking, I'm very careful to point out the parts I have problems with, and I might do that in ways that come across as snotty or missing the point. For example, when the unhelpful guy suggested substituting one paragraph in a document for another, and his version had one substantive change that looked reasonable but at least two formatting mistakes, I sent him back an e-mail saying basically "Why should I do this? Or that? But the other thing looks reasonable, so sure, I'll do it." But it feels important to point out how they're wrong. I've done something like that by e-mail at least twice over the past week, and more times in spreadsheets tracking status or similar documents.

Actually, no, I don't worry about getting adversarial. (I shouldn't be openly rude to people, of course, and I think or at least I hope I don't come across that way, but worrying about that isn't the same as worrying about adversarialness.) I do find it funny, and a sign of the sad state of the project and/or my job in general. But I'm pretty sure everything I mentioned above is rational in the circumstances and in some cases overdue.

Gone pear-shaped

My assessment of the doomed project as soon as I got back from that vacation may have been overly optimistic. (Part of the problem, by the way, is that several other people also had vacations or other periods outside the office overlapping with my own. So I had to piece together what was going on from third parties and e-mail.)

Remember everything I've said about version control problems, and team members who don't know what the active version of the document is? For about a week recently, I myself wasn't sure. It changed while I was away, which I hadn't expected. Something like that coming out of the blue on my first day back was annoying and tiring and worrying but by the end of the day I had determined that the change had been handled well and was done by someone I find reliable, so, you know, I'd just go with it.

But as people returned to the office one by one, no one else could tell me why it had been changed. (If I really needed to know I could probably find out, but at this point I think it would be counter-productive. I've narrowed it down to two suspects. One of them has been a life-saver for me and has done great work overall so even if he is responsible for this one mistake I wouldn't want to alienate him. The other guy has caused and/or had so many problems that laying one more at his feet would be a drop in the bucket. So all in all, it seems like pointing fingers would be a negative-sum game.)

A meeting last week made it clear that what had become the working document couldn't remain it. However, it couldn't be changed to something more reasonable right away. However, I wasn't sure when it would be possible. Also, naming conventions are restrictive: the name I would most like to use for the "correct" working document is the same as something we already have, or very similar to it. In the end, what I wound up doing was creating a new file with a weird name that I don't intend to be the working document for long and just not telling most people about it. I told the smart, reliable people who need to be in it all this and planned to tell everyone else once we had settled on a more long-term "correct" one.

Of course, unfortunately, more people need to be in it than the smart, reliable people who I think need to be in it. Or at least, more people think they need to be in it. I created it yesterday and I've already had to tell two more people about it than I intended. Argh. This is an insane mess.

Managing expectations

Influencing what people want from me is an important part of this job. I mean that partially in my usual I'm-a-lazy-bastard-I-suck self-deprecating way, but it really is legitimately more important to this job than to many. Compare this to my previous job, at which there was only one person between me and the owner of the company (a much smaller organization than this with a very different business model): I don't even know how many layers there are between me and the top, but it's six at the very least. And while at my previous job I just reported to my one supervisor about everything, here I'm responsible to at least four people in various ways. So I just have to put a fair amount of thought into not getting overcommitted.

For example, on Wednesday last week I was told by a team member on the doomed project that by the end of the day Thursday, he would give me something that I would have to add into the document on Friday. The addition was small when I saw an early draft of it but at the time we were getting pretty close to a relevant deadline and it wasn't the only thing I would have to do, so me, H. and my supervisor were worried about whether I'd have time to do it. The team member was pretty cavalier, though; he assured us that it would be a "less-than-20 minute job" for me.

Now, obviously, no one would want to be on the receiving end of that. Realistically, I rarely truly work nonstop, but even when I do, what if more had been added to the new stuff before I get it? What if I'm busy when I get it and can't get on it right that minute? What if I have computer problems? What if one of my other responsibilities takes up more time than expected? I figured I could definitely do it in a day and probably a couple hours, but not just 20 minutes. And to make matters worse, around 2 or 3 p.m. Thursday (so, about two hours before he said he'd have it for me), he said he was leaving the office for the day. His basement was flooded due to the recent crappy weather. So I wouldn't get the thing before Friday morning at the earliest. H. and my supervisor J. thought of all the issues I just mentioned and I made it clear to the guy as well, so H. got a one-day extension on the relevant deadline. I'm sure that was a Herculean labor all by itself, but she did. So I had a sort-of reasonable time to work.

Well, it turned out that the team member sent it to me before 9 a.m. Friday morning. There were no further problems worth mentioning. I decided to work nonstop and time myself just to see how accurate our respective time estimates were. Result: it took me 36 minutes. Add another 5 or even 10 minutes for checking my work, because it really was a complicated job relative to the length of the addition, involving putting multiple things in different places in multiple documents, and I'd say that the job took 45 minutes.

So on the one hand that's less than half my estimate ("probably a couple hours"). On the other hand, it's more than twice his. And any of a hundred potential problems could have come up. Had I been held to his estimate or if any of the potential problems had actually materialized, I would have been screwed. Fortunately, my supervisor and H. has a better idea of what's reasonable than some people I work with. And to be clear, this guy is not even on the list of problems with the doomed project. This guy is normal or even more reasonable than normal. But if a normal-or-even-more-reasonable-than-normal guy can cause this kind of thing, imagine the problems a co-worker with less reasonable expectations could cause.

Jet lag

Back from vacation and things are... OK. Very OK. Not better, not worse. I worried about the doomed project a fair amount over the vacation, partly rationally and partly not, but in the end it was in right around the state I would have hoped for: most of the instructions and related text are basically done. The one part of them still undone is something we knew for a while could become a problem and I genuinely did everything I could about it in advance. Outside my sphere of responsibility, other problems on the project continue to crop up at the usual pace, no worse than that.

Nothing came up out of the blue that completely derailed things. Team members' bosses seem no more unhappy with us than usual. No one seems angry at me and the state I left things in. There were problems with the blackmail project which might be worth a full post of its own, and today has gone by in a haze due to a steady caffeine supply due to both jet lag and little sleep, but all things considered, nothing came of the big doomed project that I worried about while I was gone.