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.

More broad, less deep

For a year or even more, about 80 percent has been on the doomed project, with the rest on two other projects. (I've called one "the blackmail project" and the other "the minor project," but really both were fairly minor.)

That seems to have changed, though. The doomed project doesn't demand so much from me now, while other projects have picked up. One, I was assigned to more than a year ago when the tech writer on it left, and then the project's document promptly left the building, so it's been mine according to the spreadsheet but there was nothing to do about it until it came back last month. And another project was similar. A tech writer left last month, and I was assigned a project of hers, and this past Wednesday the team met for the first time since May. All I've had to do so far was take minutes at that meeting and move a file around, but still, it's becoming more and more active.

This is a mixed blessing. I guess it's good for me. In theory, taking minutes at meetings is part of my job, but I haven't had to do it in a while, because on the doomed project that's what the other writer is for and my other two projects haven't had that kind of meeting in a while either. Stretching my thinking muscles in a lot of little ways - listening to the important stuff, figuring out meaning from context, concentrating on tasks even if they're boring.

That's a big part of the problem: buckling down and typing up my notes right away without getting distracted by things like this. Big surprise, I'm sure. Based on my typing speed in words per minute, I could turn my notes on a notepad into the official notes from a meeting in half an hour. Organizing it to make it logical and expanding on it beyond my personal shorthand would take another 10 or 20 minutes - still a very reasonable time for a minor task. But if I let myself go to reddit or do stuff like this, that could add four hours. I need to practice concentrating.

Beyond that, I've already been reminded of how much I depend on familiarity with a small number of projects. Just to type up those minutes I had to ask two different SMEs to explain things about which my notes were incomplete. This is part of the "listen closely" thing, and it's part of preparing myself in advance, but it's also partly inevitable. No way to be as familiar with new stuff as with old stuff.

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.

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?

I can't tell if I'm incompetent or everyone else is

Fairly often when SMEs give me text to put in a rulemaking document, I have half a dozen comments or questions per page about relatively basic issues: "I've changed this from passive voice to active voice." "This is unclear, do you mean that people are not allowed to use that equipment, or that they are not required to use it?" "These two paragraphs are almost completely redundant, so why not just combine them?" And, of course, "Stop using 'shall' when you mean 'must', you illiterate jackass! You're supposed to be writing a regulation for modern laymen in the general public, not a period piece set in Georgian England!"

Ahem. I don't actually say that last, of course. But I think it. And I do raise the issues or make the changes on my own. When the SMEs reply, the answer is usually (paraphrased) "Don't blame me, I just copied that from an international standard/a previously existing regulation/another current rulemaking."

Then I sit and feel nihilistic about inconsistency for about a minute before making my changes anyway.

Why? Well, wometimes the SMEs are wrong about where it's from to begin with - they copied and pasted more than they intended or less or from chapter 89 instead of 98. It's easy to pin the blame for mistakes like that. It's a harder to handle problems like using a vague advisory guideline as an iron-clad requirement or just plain bad writing, though.

For example, yesterday I got curious and actually read a document that the doomed project uses as a resource, and even considering how standards change over time, I was struck by how much I wanted to edit the document. Big chunks of it are outdated, because it was written 20 years ago about a technological issue, and vague even considering the age. The document in general is a non-binding guideline, and we want to make its guidance mandatory, and sometimes that's harder than just changing "should" or "shall" to "must". And it's mostly in the passive voice. I guess that might make sense for the writers of an advisory document, who don't care who is doing certain things as long as they're getting done, but our agency shouldn't be as unconcerned about it. Same for times SMEs have used our own previous regulations as a template - sometimes it should be smoother, and sometimes if I'm reading it correctly it just plain doesn't work as written.

It seems to me like most of the documents we use as resources either would be OK in some contexts but definitely not for us here and now, or make me wonder how the authors ever got away with it in the first place. Did style guides and plain language standards really change THAT much over the past few decades, or am I being too picky, or what?

Who's the boss?

One thing that has seemed weird to me over the past few days is responsibility and how it can be diffuse, or circular.

This probably happens to a lot of office jobs, in and out of government. At all previous jobs of mine the chain of responsibility was pretty clear: I had my boss, and he had his boss I probably knew of but interacted with little, and so on up depending on the size of the organization. There were no responsibilities outside that chain, except for basic human civility - I couldn't tell someone to fuck off if they asked me to put on overalls for a restaging of "American Gothic," but I could politely refuse if I felt like it, unless my boss decided it would be a good idea. Day-to-day work could get complicated, but in theory my responsibilities were very clear and direct.

That's not the case here, and probably isn't at most jobs in any Byzantine bureaucracy. The supervisor of tech writers assigns me to project teams. Each team has an RDM who sets the schedule and coordinates between all the other team members and is theoretically the only person on the team who tells me what to do. But RDMs aren't the experts, those are the SMEs, so when SMEs tell me what to do I usually just do it. And the RDMs aren't the SMEs' main bosses, their main bosses are in their own departments devoted to various subsets of this agency's regulatory mission. SMEs' responsibilities vary; one SME on the doomed project cared a great deal about how a certain phrase was worded and that phrase appears in almost every section of the document, but other than that, he only cares about two small sections that are all his own, about six pages out of 300. And finally there's the senior tech writer, who doesn't actually supervise me, but is supposedly the resident expert on the details of our job and works closely with my supervisor on who gets assigned to which project.

So SMEs shouldn't tell me what to do but often do so anyway but there are some things they still wouldn't get away with. The RDMs inform team members of deadlines and schedule meetings but can't actually do anything about it if people miss them. Every team member and their boss has an OCD-level attention to detail on certain topics and doesn't know or care about the rest. My supervisor keeps a close eye on what I'm doing but rarely actually tells me what to do.

The doomed project is a huge example of this fractal org chart, but something like it happens on every project because everyone on a team is responsible to their own boss more than they're responsible to anyone on the team.

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.

If I cared, I'd be offended

You know, I really can be far more optimistic and good-natured than is reasonable.

Sure, the fact that blog exists is disrespectful to my supervisors in a way, and its content is full of negativity of various kinds. And while I don't talk about politics much here I'm pretty cynical in that sphere of life as well. Interpersonally, though, I'm sympathetic to a fault. H. and other people have expressed surprise at how willing I am to give people the benefit of the doubt.

I bring all this up because I realized that I probably do that too much. Sometimes people just fuck up, and sometimes that makes my job harder, and it would probably be more normal and healthy for me to resent them and think less of them for it. Maybe they're a good person overall just handling work badly, maybe not, who knows, but so what? They're still making my life harder for no good reason.

To combine two ongoing plot threads of this blog, the "well-meaning-but-dumb" boss is what I generally call someone in the context of being a bad speaker at meetings, but that person also happens to be one of H.'s bosses. A lot of the mismanagement of the doomed project is either done by him, or a result of him not handling others better. So what if he phrases requests politely? So did Bill Lumbergh, and Lumbergh was an asshole.

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.

Long-windednessitude

Resolution: to be more concise. Succinct. Brief. Direct. (Oh, hell.)

I had my annual performance evaluation this morning. It went well overall - yay, three percent raise - but one criticism my supervisors had of me was in the "written communication" part of the matrix, for my tendency to elaborate too much or be candid beyond the bounds of my position. In formal e-mails to the entire team of the doomed project, apparently I shouldn't say things like, "let's hope it works out this time. Knock on wood." And I need to be more aware about getting to the point. If someone doesn't read all of an e-mail and screws things up because of that, I'm inclined to blame the reader on a personal level, but I have to admit I could have prevented the problem by not burying the main point of it in the first place.

On the whole, this criticism didn't surprise or bother me. H. has mentioned something like that before, and a lot of the e-mails I got dinged for were written in relatively harried and stressful situations so of course there would be some problem, and I got good reviews otherwise. So, hey, no one's perfect.

There were two reasons that it did get to me, though. First because I write in my free time right here and aspire to write even more, so written communication should ideally be one of my relative strengths, not weaknesses. And second, it just so happened that this afternoon I made exactly the same mistake in a personal e-mail as well. Making plans for this evening, my girlfriend said that she'd be getting off work early. I replied that that was cool, and in theory I could do the same based on hours worked so far this week, so it was too bad that I was so busy I'd probably have to work until the last minute. She missed the last part of that, requiring an e-mail to a third party and a call to her office interrupting her work. Heh, um, whoops.

Well, oversharing isn't a problem in a personal blog meant for reflecting about work. Practice writing is practice writing, and it gives future or hypothetical readers the idea of what my job is like. But it's funny that a post explaining my resolution to be more concise wound up being 429 words. So I'll really try to watch this in the future. As a writing exercise, maybe I should even do a more concise version of this post later just as a challenge to myself.

English-speakers are nihilists

"...all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large."
— H. P. Lovecraft

Sometimes I wish that the English language had an equivalent of L'Académie française. It's basically a regulatory body for the French language. Of course, it has no actual authority, and is sometimes comically out of step with the modern world in some cases, but still, there is a definitive, single, "correct" way of doing things in French, thanks to that group.

No such thing exists in English. Dictionaries and grammar guides cite regionalisms and common usage and stuff, but there's no definitive authority. This means that my job is sometimes a matter of picking which authority or rule seems more relevant, doing things one way in one part of a document and another way in another, splitting hairs, and sometimes just plain guessing.

For example, the doomed project contains about a dozen instances of a phrase like "must have leak proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". The problem is, the document was inconsistent about exactly how "leak proof" was formatted, sometimes with a hyphen between the words, sometimes with a space, and sometimes with no separation at all.

As I was searching throughout the document to identify instances of this, I found some in the names of technical standards we reference, so that seemed to be the easiest way to resolve it: conform with the existing standards already published and in use by the industry. Simple enough, right?

No. Because there's more than one technical standard with a version of "leak proof" in the name, and they don't all handle it the same way.

OK, so I e-mailed all my fellow tech writers asking for advice. They referred to the relevant rule in the office's style guide about compounding and modifiers, which I should have thought of on my own because this is hardly the first time I've dealt with this. Based on how the phrase is used, it should be hyphenated. Fine, I've gone through the document and hyphenated it.

That doesn't match how it appears in one of those standards' names, but there's nothing we can do about that. Got to keep names as they appear on the title page, or no one could ever find them. There'd be chaos. We have some documents with English vs. American spelling, and that kind of inconsistency is OK, so this should be OK too.

But wait, there's more! It's not just inconsistency between one standard's name and the rest of the document. It's inconsistency within the phrase. It's now "must have leak-proof, fireproof or fireproof-increased safety plumbing". Using "leak-proof, fireproof" side by that is ugly and confusing and looks wrong even though it's technically not. We do it about a dozen times.

If there was an Academy of the English Language, then this problem might not exist at all. And weird situations would still arise sooner or later just because complicated rules make complicated situations, but at least there would be one right answer to fall back on. But there's not. There's just me, and whatever rules I copy and paste together.

Vignette

The lead SME on the doomed project came in to talk to me for a few minutes just now. He's getting a bit pushy about dividing up work and is stressed about how things are going, but as I've said, he's been forbidden from seeing his family, so I guess I should give him a break.

After he left, my cubicle neighbor IMed me to commiserate about working with him. I thanked him and pointed out that while the lead SME is annoying, the unhelpful guy is definitely worse as far as helping me actually do my job goes. For example, as I told my neighbor:

I sent him an e-mail yesterday with four questions, numbered for convenience. He sent me a reply back with answers to three, and he misnumbered one of them. And the missing answer is not something mysterious or complicated, it's just "what should I name this table?"

I sent him another e-mail with that question but still haven't got an answer to that, even though I have to other things.

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.