Taking pride in my work is bad.

Yesterday I thought I saw a good example of the importance of taking care, approaching problems with a fresh eye, and doing things right the first time. I should have known better.

One final rule has been stuck in one stage of clearance for a while. One TMBB got back to us over a month later than the other two. It was objectively harder to address her comments separately from the rest, and it was annoying that we had to. So we did as little as possible about them.

A week ago, we called it done and sent it back to the TMBBs. The only comment so far has been the WMBD boss asking for more clarity on two points. When I looked at that section again, one of the comments by the late TMBB jumped out at me. I remember resenting that comment. She suggested moving a certain sentence higher in the document. I thought that was dumb, because there was only one earlier section that it could have gone in and that was already too long, so we just replied that it was addressed by other edits. But yesterday morning it occurred to me that I could move it within the same section, which would also address part of the WMBD's comment. So I moved that sentence and added one more on the other point and asked what the team thought.

I was proud of this. I think it was clever to use one problem to solve another. It took a little creative wordsmithing to address the WMBD boss's second point clearly. At the same time, the problem is a good demonstration of "haste makes waste." If we had thought harder about the late TMBB's comments when we first got them, or if she had got them back to us when the other TMBBs did, we might have realized that earlier. Several different people made the same mistake. If I were a teacher or a manager I'd point to this as an example of how careful deliberation can matter.

Except that to some people, it didn't matter. All of the team got back to me promptly to say that they approved, except the lawyer. She'd need another day. This morning, she deleted the sentence I added about the second point because she felt it was redundant with the sentence before it. There are several problems with this.

1. Even if it is redundant, the WMBD guy asked us to add it. We don't have to do everything people should ask for, but should at least address it.
2. When I reread the section, I agreed with the WMBD guy. The previous version of the section could, in fact, have been clearer! Going into a bit more detail about the topic looks genuinely good!
3. If she doesn't like it, what's her alternative? She didn't say. Both the WMBD guy and I said specifically that there were two points to be discussed. She wanted to remove the discussion of one of them without doing anything in its place.

 In the end, the economist made a few edits to my phrasing, which apparently placated the lawyer, and it went back into clearance. But it was dumb of me to think that trying to do a thorough job would actually help.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Could I do a better job? ... Well, maybe not.

Now and then I get to wondering about whether I'm actually doing everything I can to help other people. I complain so much here about clueness people and unnecessary work, but every so often I find myself thinking things like, "You should already know that, it was sent out in an e-mail... three months ago, along with a bunch of other information, mostly on another topic." or "You should already know that, it was discussed at several meetings... not like most people on the team come to even half the meetings, though." or "The whole team knows that, we've been doing it all along... but you just joined a month ago."

Maybe I could be doing more. I could go into more detail in e-mails to the team or group discussions. Minutes of meetings are normally e-mailed to me and H., but maybe people would be better informed if they got regular reminders about that stuff. The team is big enough that new people show up relatively regularly for one reason or another, and we could brief them better. How much would that help things?

But I have my doubts that that would do much good, because it never takes too long for people to ask stupid questions that I'm absolutely certain have been adequately explained, but they still don't know.

For example, in a meeting last week, the unhelpful guy asked which spreadsheet was the economic review matrix. Not only has he been told that many times both in person and by e-mail, not only has the economic review matrix been in use for months so if he didn't know he should have asked before now, not only has he personally been to meetings where he, the economist and I worked on the economic review matrix... but a computer screen was projected for the entire meeting to see open to the relevant folder on the network, and the economic review matrix has "economic review matrix" in its name. (And yes, it's clear that he could see the screen from where he was sitting and all that.)

Basically, the answer to his question was literally in front of his face. But he couldn't figure that out - and the unhelpful guy may be a recent, perfect example of this, but he's far from the only one - so I don't think more complete briefings by me would make too much of a difference.

The management will continue until morale improves

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" - Source unknown, probably Narcotics Anonymous

There was a meeting of the doomed project. In addition to the usual problems, apparently we've attracted attention from on high. This is never a good sign.

In addition to the doomed project, there are also two other projects with related focuses. There is a lot of overlap in resources between the three projects - in plain English, a lot of people who are assigned to more than one of the teams. At today's meeting, we learned that team members' bosses' bosses have noticed that these projects are having problems. To address this, they have told us to start updating them weekly on status and activities via a spreadsheet, in hopes that they can better identify exactly what the problems are.

This spreadsheet has rows for each person on the team (at least 20) and columns for various types of input (six). (If we had nothing to do with a certain issue, leaving its column blank is acceptable, but everyone is expected to fill at least something in weekly.) It will probably be a bit confusing, because in some ways it resembles spreadsheets the team has already been using but not in other ways and is used very differently. There is going to be a new spreadsheet created every week, and everyone on the team will be responsible for reporting on their own activity that week.

When faced with the problem "People on this project are working too hard and being pulled in too many directions", I'm sure that adding a new, nearly pointless requirement isn't the absolute worst way possible to help, but I'm also sure it's not a good way.

I suppose I could take a positive view of this. The proposed spreadsheet originally had seven columns of various categories of activity, but in this morning's meeting the team decided that we could narrow that down to six. (We eliminated two or three columns as redundant, but also added a new one and split another column into two separate ones.) So that means we'll have to keep track of a little less and it'll be a little clearer than the original draft. So the meeting could have gone worse than it did. That's good, I suppose.

(More general update on the doomed project: it recently transitioned to a new phase. The ball is now mainly in the lawyers' court, to be followed by mine, and then the economists'. This means that the subject matter experts will have to do a bit less for the next few weeks than they did for the past few months, and the lawyer, me, and the economist each will have more during our respective phases. As slow and horrible as things have been, and as abjectly we're going to fail at the official deadline, and as much as I'll hate the period when the ball is in my court, we actually are making progress. I think.)

Confrontation

We had a meeting about part 12(c) of the minor project near the end of October. Verdict: we got to do the table our way. Victory. The meeting was more than a bit aggravating, though. The senior tech writer (sort of my manager but sort of not, the most experienced writer who is kept in the loop on all this stuff but he doesn't actually manage anyone) came along but left me to do most of the talking. Optimistically, maybe he would have jumped in if he thought I was screwing it up, but he doesn't seem much like the type. He's a very bad speaker. Bad in a public speaking sense, although he manages to ramble and trail off in one-on-one conversations too. It's just as well I kept things under control there.

In the end, I think I did OK. My arguments may have shifted a bit over the course of the meeting, going from "You can't use these previous rulemakings as a guideline because this one is different" to "Well, you can use these previous rulemakings as a guideline, because they actually mean something completely different than you thought." Underneath it all, of course, my real reason for it was "Do it our way because this is our choice, and our way is this way because my boss says so". My boss's way was probably the best way, but I could have made a good argument for my way if we weren't already behind schedule, and it wouldn't be too hard to come up with an endless variety of tweaks to the formatting of a table. The differences between them would have been almost trivial.

It was downright weird, maybe the most decisive I've had to be so far in this job. It's a pity it was over this. There are lots of problems that actually matter in this job, but the only significance to this problem was the internal turf thing.

Correction

Oops. I was way off in my "Alternate History" post, and probably in other posts about the doomed project as well.

Today in a meeting people referred to another requirement mentioned in the Congressional mandate that I hadn't thought of when I wrote Thursday's post. After hearing that, I dug out the actual mandate and read it. I had thought it only mentioned the size limit, but no, it clearly says a lot more than that. It says that we have to ensure the safety of individuals and the environment and specifically mentions certain staffing requirements. So I have to reevaluate that gray area. It's not as big as I thought, and it starts within the mandate. I thought a lot of the stuff in the rule was scope creep, but we really are required to do a lot of it. Which is kind of funny, because the meeting today began with H. complaining about scope creep and at the time I was thinking to myself "Of course it's scope creep. Limit this project to the mandatory size limit change and closing the standards loophole and it would be 30 pages, published six months ago. Oh, the mandate also mentioned staffing? Huh, I wonder what else it mentioned? OK, with staffing maybe it would be 50 or, hell, even 100 pages, published three months ago. The remaining 200-plus pages of the document and ongoing work is all scope creep."

That's obviously not the kind of thing anyone could say out loud, let alone me, but all these meetings about putting in just one more part or changing just one more thing get aggravating. But the staffing was brought up in the meeting, and that made me wonder just what else exactly fell under the mandate that I don't normally think of, and so I actually looked it up, and, wow, the mandate is actually fairly broad. And to be clear, there really is quite a bit of scope creep. Anything that's not truly essential for safety, rather than just being kind of nice, is scope creep. Anything that applies to things below the former size limit is scope creep, especially anything that only applies to things below the former size limit. Anything related to cross-platform compatibility is scope creep (I think). It's just that lots of stuff that I thought was scope creep probably isn't, and it's objectively harder to tell what is.

So anyways, what does all this mean? That the idea of meeting the deadline was always crazy to begin with.

Murphy's meeting

We had a meeting in the doomed project on Wednesday in which very nearly everything that could go wrong, did.

First of all, I wasn't prepared for it. That's only partially my fault - the meeting couldn't have been put off, and it's not like I forgot to do my stuff, it's just that I had started it but didn't have time to finish - but I should have pushed harder to get through it in time, and whether or not I could have done anything about it, it made the meeting go a little worse.

Also, it was in an unfamiliar building to me. I had only been in it once before so I don't know the layout, and big chunks of it are off-limits to people in my division so we have to sheepishly follow authorized people through the automatic security doors. It was held over there because it was scheduled on short notice and that was the only meeting room we could find. In fairness, I didn't have any problems with security this time, and some people on the team work over there so it's better for them, but still, I think my building would have been better overall.

It was also almost four hours long. That is never fun.

And despite all that time, we didn't get much done. We had 60 or so comments to discuss and resolve. We got through about 20, maybe 30. (And note that me preparing for it involves preparing more comments. So even 30 would be less than half of the real total.) People spend 10 minutes talking about things that I think could be yes or no questions, I wasn't the only person who came unprepared, our bosses were still discussing things that could lead to substantive changes, etc.

But all that is just usual unpleasantness of bad meetings. 15 minutes from the end, though, it grew into unusual unpleasantness. The unhelpful guy blew up at another team member. Now, the unhelpful guy's first language is not English, and he speaks with an accent and seems a bit sensitive about his command of the language in general. At the moment, we had just gone over some text of his and corrected errors in the process. This is my job, I do it without mentioning it except for really egregious examples, I had been doing the same thing a couple hours earlier with another team member's product while the team was talking about other things. But apparently someone else in the room was a bit too punchy about pointing out the typos in the unhelpful guy's product. He probably meant it as good-natured, old-boys-club teasing, but it had the opposite effect. The unhelpful guy just blew his stack. Got out of his seat, began pointing fingers, complaining that he shouldn't have to put up with this because he's so close to retirement, the whole deal. Wow.

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.

The meetings will continue until morale improves

There was a meeting this morning at 11 a.m., with 10 minutes of the usual office-management and achievement-recognition announcements, followed by literally an hour of discussion of workplace satisfaction surveys we took a few months ago. I've come to the conclusion that my department's head is a nice guy, and well-meaning - not a ladder-climbing schemer, not a petty feudal fiefdom type - but just plain kind of dumb. Part of the issue was feedback on harassment and discrimination issues. 9 out of 49 people, 18 percent, reported something. Now, I seem to remember that the survey questions were badly designed, but that's not the point of this post. The well meaning but dumb (WMBD) boss mentioned in passing that roughly 20 percent of people reporting discrimination problems was considered the target or something like that, according to the polling organization, but he said that even the current level of reported problems was unacceptable. He also seemed to be genuinely confused about the fact that he had personally heard of fewer problems than the survey indicated.

As for pursuing perfection, I think he misunderstood the meaning of the 20 percent figure. I very much doubt that the surveying organization is saying that that amount of discrimination is good, just that that's the amount beyond which improvement is impractical, unfeasible, more trouble than it's worth, the consequence of people being imperfect. So, sure, it's inspiring pablum to say "I'm never going to tolerate intolerance" or "We can always do better", but I'd actually be reassured if someone who says that kind of thing doesn't mean it. And as for whether he would have heard about problems before the survey, I may as well admit that I'm a straight white male so I have little or no personal experience with being on the receiving end of discrimination, but I find it easy to imagine reasons why a person might not want to deal with discrimination through official channels. The big, obvious, easy one is if the discrimination is less trouble than dealing with it would be. One sexist joke from one guy in one meeting, or even one regularly sexist guy you work with occasionally, would probably not be as much stress and frustration and trouble as reporting the guy and going through an adjudication process and worrying about how it looks in the long run. And the zero tolerance policy espoused in reaction to the first point actually seems counterproductive here. I'd have to really hate my harasser indeed, and/or really, really trust the WMBD guy, if every slightest allegation was going to result in a full investigation and all that. But WMBD apparently never thought of that, or if he did, apparently came up with no way to deal with the problem.

Other than that, though, most measures of workplace satisfaction were good. Less for contractors like me, of course, and WMBD went out of his way to say that we're all a team, a family, etc., and fair enough, I'm sure he means it, but there's only so much you can do when you're way down the totem pole.

That being said, there was one ironic thing about it. Guess what it was. Here's a hint: notice the timeline. Started at 11, 10 minutes of housekeeping, an hour of workplace satisfaction discussion. That's right, the workplace satisfaction discussion cut into lunchtime for most people. I know that impacted my workplace satisfaction, and not in a good way.

Sure, of course, maybe WMBD knows what's attainable and meant what he said as platitudes, like I'd prefer. Maybe he realizes the issues with reporting harassment and is still working on how to address them, or believes that what he said today helps, and maybe he's even right about that. It's just that (as I've said before), the best thing my supervisors high in the department can do for me is stop acting in ways that come across as stupid, and this morning's meeting was yet another example of that.