We told them so

We signed off on the doomed project and sent it off to another agency almost two years ago, after I had cut back on posting here but before I had stopped entirely. It got passed back and forth for a while with other agencies and finally published about two months ago or so. Maybe I should stop calling it doomed. But its problems didn't end when it left the building. I'll try to go over a few of the problems it had while I wasn't posting here.

Things went normally with it for about eight months. Normal was still pretty bad, but there's nothing we can do about it while another agency is reviewing it, so normal was good enough. Then one day, a team member's bosses' boss asked for something. This guy was responsible for both XYZ and Operational L__ even though no one else wanted them and they made the project take months longer. Now he was asking to have them taken out of the project. Collectively they were over a quarter of the 400-page document spread out in a dozen chunks. In the meeting where he asked to have them removed, we pointed out as delicately as possible how big a job this would be, how much it would delay the already-late project, and how he could have prevented it a year before simply by not including them. His idea of an apology was a shrug and an "Oops."

Taking notes at that meeting, I slowly got the impression of a situation that would be amazingly miserable for someone, probably not for me, but I couldn't be sure. It was like sidling up to the Grand Canyon on a windy day, and then seeing that it was filled to five feet below the edge with black plastic trash bags. My eyes were bugged out during the meeting, but when I found H. right afterwards and briefed her, I couldn't keep from laughing. I was hysterical, choking out the explanation of the problem. What else could I do?

And then, a few months later, after that was dealt with, the lawyer offhandedly asked me where to find the final draft of a letter. Another requirement for the review that generally should be relatively easy, and done at the same time as everything else. But it wasn't. We just forgot. And the removal of XYZ and Operational L__ made it harder, because we had to go through multiple files in the archive to see what should be listed in this letter. And we had to do all that on a tight deadline, because the rule actually was sort of kind of close to ready.

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.

Being the smartest person around is scary

This document I'm editing is giving me a headache.

For some perspective, I'm sick at the moment. Much better than yesterday, in which I took a half-day and shouldn't have gone in at all, but still, I've gone through at least six cough drops today and blown my nose four times and it's not even noon. And yet I can still say that the editing is responsible for the headache, because recent edits to the document by the lawyer were just that bad.

Most of the annoying bits were relatively minor mistakes, but annoying because I expect better of lawyers. I guess I was spoiled by an unusually good lawyer on the doomed project.

Also, she didn't send me the document with her edits at all. To the other team members, and one of them thought to CC me, but she didn't. How she thought her concerns would have been addressed I have no idea.

But the thing that really made my head throb was one bit where she asked if it matched the current boilerplate. It was hard for me to figure out the answer to that. The templates are in the middle of being revised. Separately, the Web site with the old versions changed to a new URL, so I couldn't find those on my own. I had to get my supervisor's help. I wanted to be extra sure about what was wrong on a project at this stage, so I painstakingly compared the old template and the new one to each other and to the relevant bit of the FR. That took half an hour or more.

What did I find in the end? I found that no, it didn't match the new template. Or the old one. Or any template, because there's no template for this bit. This bit is explicitly up to the team. And more specifically, the lawyer. There is no template, and this area is primarily her responsibility, and she effectively blamed me for incompetence because she didn't know that.

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.

I covered my ass...

My TVMP project published our notice last month. Someone immediately noticed a problem with it and we're now working on a correction. At a meeting Tuesday we discussed final lingering issues, whether we needed a table entry or a seven-word phrase in a note to the table or both or neither. Very minor stuff.

Wednesday the RDM e-mailed out the correction out to the legal office for review. Two minutes later she went on vacation for the week.

When I opened the file, I noticed several changes since the last version I had seen. Now, to be clear, this is bad. Every team member should see  the document in its final form before it goes out, and the tech writer should theoretically be last of all. On a quick glance, I didn't see anything that would cause big problems, but it's inconsistent and messy and not how things are supposed to work. This offends the anal-retentive, punctilious side of my personality, to the extent that I have one. I didn't want to retract the notice over non-substantive issues, though, especially not on my own nonexistent authority, so I left it alone for now.

Half an hour after the file was mailed out, someone else mailed out another version and suggested using his version over the RDM's. His version had his changes tracked, and while that's better for internal use, reviewers should see a clean document. His edits were also, in technical terms, shitty. There were missing spaces between words, the same thing formatted two different ways in one paragraph, and misspellings in words like "Los Angeles" and "although." This guy who was trying to speak for the team was also not on the team to begin with.

I had to get someone with authority involved in this. I checked the RDM's away message. It said her boss was filling in for her. Her boss's away message, though, said he hadn't been in since yesterday, and it was now 10:30, so I assumed he wasn't around at all. His boss was in the office, but also unavailable at the moment. I tried the team lawyer - beneath them, but still above me. I told her that I needed to review the document, giving her one example of a minor problem with it, and someone definitely needed to do something with the versions already out there.

She sent out a third version. This version fixed just that one problem I mentioned and left all the rest alone.

In the end, I cleaned up the document and brought the right people into the loop and this project remained unimportant, but I spent more sweat on it Wednesday than I had over the previous six months. It's not that I deserve a medal over it, I was just doing my job, but everyone else on the project deserves an anti-medal.

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.

Rats from a sinking ship

The economist who was on the doomed project from the start has left. I think he's gone to grad school. He got out just in time. The doomed project just got back from the latest review, this time by the department head, and his comments seemed to indicate he wanted to use a different approach on the economic section, meaning throw out and start over from scratch. Obviously, that would be bad. We were hoping to persuade the department head that the economic section only needed tweaks rather than a complete overhaul, and I think we've succeeded. But I'm not sure, and I seem to remember one of the economist's last statements was that starting over would take four months.

I feel sorry for the new guy.

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.

Being positive sucks

I meant my previous post sincerely: getting to work was rough, but that e-mail seemed to say that the reviewer had made minor changes and they could be safely rejected if they weren't easy to handle, which would be purely good news. I was feeling good about the doomed project and today in general for a few minutes because of that.

But I began working on his changes, and most of them were as stupid and pointless as ever. There are two recurring issues that I want to ask the lawyer about, because I know what policy we've agreed on between me and her, but program offices just keep on doing it differently over and over and over again. And yet again, this guy was working in a seperate file rather than the main document, which means I had to work my version control magic, and calling it magic sounds totally fair considering how hard it is for these idiots to figure out working in a common document.

And then, one hour later, the lawyer sent an e-mail saying that she'd need input from other people to properly address the edits in that e-mail. She left for the day right after that. So for a while I thought I'd either have to make the judgement call myself to either delay things by a day or reject the recalcitrant office's edits, neither of which is in my job description.

It worked out OK in the end - I found an approach acceptable to everyone who mattered, and we got the project moving - but despite how optimistic I felt during those 15 minutes when I opened that e-mail and wrote the previous post, it turned out to be the only remotely fun time that morning.

Mondays

It was raining this morning, so I didn't bike.

After I'd left my apartment, my girlfriend called me back and asked me to sign something I'd forgotten about. Glad she remembered that; it might have been a real pain.

I tried to go to the ATM on my way to work this morning. My bank has two in my neighborhood, but neither of them worked for me. (I'm pretty sure the problem is the ATMs and not my card or account, but I can't help worrying a tiny bit.)

I might have missed the shuttle from the metro to work just because I wasn't paying attention. It wasn't where I expected it to be, so I just stood there waiting, but after a few minutes I noticed it was just a little ways down the street, like 20 yards. Unfortunately, that one was full, so I had to take the next one. And this isn't even new, they've been stopping down the street for a couple weeks now I think, I just didn't look around much this morning.

When I got to work I realized I'd forgotten my belt and wristwatch. The belt was because of a change in routine; normally I leave it at work, along with outfits for the week, but I'd worn my work clothes home Friday and forgot to bring the belt back this morning. The watch was just absent-mindedness.

So it was a rough morning, and especially rough to start the week with. But when I checked my e-mail, I found a message from a recalitrant office that said they had made minor edits to the doomed project but "I saw or made NO policy changes...  If ANY of my editorialial polishing tempts ANYONE to call for a schedule shift to the right DISREGARD them!!!", and that made it all worthwhile.

I annoy myself

Here's a habit I've been trying to break for a while now: I stay at work too late.

Not hours, just five to 15 minutes. Work isn't overtaking my life or cutting into stuff I care about much, I'd just like to have dinner ready a few minutes earlier or get other stuff done before I start cooking or commute when traffic is slightly better. But I can't, because I keep staying at work just a tiny bit longer than I'm obligated to.

I can think of three completely different reasons for this, and if it were just two, I probably wouldn't even mind.

1. It's hard to figure out exactly how long I'm obligated to stay, because my routine after getting to work takes quite a while. This is mostly because I bike, and therefore have to shower and change after getting to work. Add in a trip to the cafeteria for coffee, and all that takes over 15 minutes. In theory I could claim to be working as soon as I first get to my desk, and if I had to I would, but it would seem dishonest to do that regularly if I'm still wearing shorts and a t-shirt. 
2. My job doesn't ask much, so time is the least I can give it. Obviously, it's not very stressful or demanding. So I figure it would be kind of crappy of me to cut corners on my time.
3. If that was it, fair enough, working long hours might be just the price of getting exercise as I commute and keeping my conscience clean. However, I have to admit that the third reason is the real one, as often as not: I procrastinate. I put a task for work off until the last minute and it takes five, or I'm reading an article or blog and decide to finish the article before I go home. 

Now that is stupid. I think procrastinating on leaving work and going home for the day might be taking procrastination just a little bit too far.

Stages of surprise

1. Fear

• "What? I've never done this before! Can this guy tell me to do anything? Is this even in my job description? It is? He can? Fuck! What if I screw up? Why's he asking me about my schedule for the next two weeks - is it going to take that long?"

2. Hope

•  "You know, I spend a lot of time complaining about this job, I should be glad to have something new and challenging to do. It might be a bit tough, but I'll survive. I might learn something. This is for a presentation, and bad speakers annoy me, so I can make this a good presentation for once. I'll show them all how to do it! It will be elegant in its simplicity."

3. Disappointment

• "He sent me a Word document already organized into six slides and just wants me to copy and paste the text into PowerPoint. I asked about reorganizing it to make it a little bit more readable, or putting time and thought into it in general, but he told me not to. Nice to know there was nothing to worry about, but what did they need me for?"

Obstruction

I'm starting to think they're actually trying to delay the doomed project.

The latest review of the doomed project by TMBBs was asinine even by the usual half-assed standard of this place. It's fairly normal that a document might get reviewed more than once by the same level of management even if it shouldn't be needed, but this time two TMBB out of four had a lot to say, not just "oh yeah, one more thing," but "I need this and this and this and this or I'll make you start over from scratch."

That's bad enough. One of them, thank heavens for small favors, at least made his late unnecessary edits in a convenient format and limited himself to that. The other didn't. This TMBB used a format that's inconvenient for me for about a quarter of his edits. It's a really minor difference, but it's still annoying because (a) it's unnecessary, and (b) one such edit is minor, but a hundred add up to a fair amount of work.

Even that, though, would be par for the course on this project, but finally we get to the real problem: a lot of his edits were so pointless that I honestly think he's trying to keep us from publishing this.

In the economic analysis, where we said that this rule offers the option of many industry consensus standards, he said, "Sounds good but is probably a stretch." I wasn't even sure what part he was objecting to, but all I could think of was the use of the word "many." The thing is, when I read his comment I counted documents in the folder of consensus standards, and found 80 there. Some of them have probably been removed from the rule, and I'm sure many aren't relevant to this discussion, but even so, even if only a quarter of the consensus standards are relevant here, that's still 20 documents, almost every one as dry and vague as this. Does this TMBB think it's unfair to describe 20 different options as "many documents"? If he checked everyone one and found that even fewer than 20 were relevant, how many would he call "many?" Hah, trick questions, he doesn't know or care how many there actually are, he just had a feeling that the statement looked like it promised something good, and we can't have that.

Elsewhere, we said that the rule will ensure the existence of a certain fail-safe, and he said, "No, it doesn't. The primary def'n of 'ensure' is 'to secure or guarantee'. While our requirements are intended to provide a reasonable degree of system reliability via component redundancy, they cannot and will not 'ensure [the fail-safe]...'"

Here's the reply I actually wrote: "I'm OK with using 'ensure.' It appears in the [Congressional mandate] and about as dozen times throughout this document, and I think it's commonly used by other teams. I guess we could change this phrase to something like 'This is intended to ensure,' but I don't think we need to, and if we choose to, we should do so throughout the document, except where it directly quotes the [mandate]. Thoughts?"

Now, by the standards of blogging or conversation, that's perfectly civil, sure. But I think in an office, in writing, where the target can see it, especially from someone way down the totem pole to a TMBB, that's as undiplomatic as I have ever got, almost as rude as I can imagine without using synonyms for "penis." I just couldn't take it, and I'm not too worried about repercussions, because objecting to "ensure" really is that pointless.

Either this guy is trying to help us publish the rule and he thinks that parsing the meanings of "many" and "ensure" are really, really important to it, or he's trying to stop us from publishing the rule by any means possible, and at this point the latter seems more likely.

Asymptotic progress

This meeting went deceptively well. Of the four TMBB we needed to hear from, one didn't show up and didn't even send anyone in his place. That still left us with three TMBB, plus several support personnel like myself, and we made relatively good progress on the remaining issues. There were more than a dozen proposed edits to discuss, and all but three were approved without a problem, and it was equally easy for the people present to agree that those three were bad and should be rejected. One of the TMBB said he'd have someone get back to us the following week with yet more content about XYZ, but other than that, we thought we were nearly done.

The meeting was even encouraging in a way because I got to hear TMBB acknowledging the same kind of problems I write about here. "We have an internal schism," one said. "We agreed to this text four months ago, and now we've got [middle management] marking it up," another vented. The stuff I'm writing about is not fabricated, and if anything it's downplayed here because I'm too far down to notice some problems. My superiors' superiors are aware of the dysfunction. They just can't do anything about it.

But those three rejected edits were made by the office of the TMBB who didn't show up. And the following day we found that he wouldn't approve of the rule unless those edits were made. Of course! If it seems too good to be true, it's probably not true.

Well, we had another meeting today (almost two weeks, you'll note, after the meeting at which we thought we were nearly done) called by the guy who didn't bother to show up for the first one. We covered the basics. I had a little work to do after the meeting, and I'm still waiting for input on something, but I think we're nearly done.

A little thing like success won't stop us

Clearance officially started on the doomed project on Wednesday, May 9. That's good news: we're on the next stage. It's a bit bizarre because clearance is normally when TMBB get involved, but here they've been involved for months, but, whatever, a milestone's a milestone. Normally it would take two weeks or more, but due to the constant scheduling problems, only one week was allotted, so they're supposed to be done by close of business today.

May 10, the WMBD boss scheduled a meeting for May 18 to address issues raised in clearance. This confused both H. and I just because it seemed premature. What if clearance was easy and no changes were needed? Or, forgive that fanciful reverie - more realistically, what if clearance went late and TMBB weren't ready by the time of the meeting? Also, H. was scheduled to be out of the office that day, so she wasn't sure if she'd need someone to fill in for her, and if so, that would be a pain.

By noon Tuesday another problem had become apparent. TMBB have done nothing in the document. One team member has made a few edits - and he made them in an annoying, pointless way that makes more work for me, but whatever, it's easily fixed, it's just stupid - but as far as we can see in the document, TMBB have not even looked at it. Yesterday H. forwarded me an e-mail with a hint about why. At least one TMBB actually said he's going to address his comments at the meeting. So in addition to the problems with scheduling the meeting that were predicted by H. and I, there's one that we didn't see coming: it's an excuse for TMBB to miss the deadline. Thanks, WMBD, that was helpful.

Situation Normal...

A peer review should only be started after the team is completely and totally satisfied with the rule, a last-minute check before a document goes to TMBB. Despite the fact that a peer reviewer is well into his review of the doomed project, there is still work progressing on two other fronts. First of all, the lawyer and economist have been making a number of edits to the RA, things that were supposed to be caught before, but weren't, but they still have to be done. And second, SMEs want to change how we handle XYZ again.

The first issue is arguably understandable, considering that the lawyer's and economist's time was compressed like ours, but it's still inconvenient, unfair to us, and not how things are supposed to work.  The second issue is ridiculous. It is really, really not how things are supposed to work. In addition to the same problem of ongoing policy changes during a peer review, there's also the fact that as I've said XYZ is just a side issue, and the fact that their specific approach to it right now seems dumb to me.

I e-mailed my supervisors on Thursday to let them know the basics. I added that this shouldn't affect any of us in the tech writers' office "if it is resolved quickly," but I still needed to figure out exactly how to handle it. I was careful to include that caveat, because personally and off the record I think it's unlikely. Their replies by e-mail were simple and diplomatic - thanks for keeping us in the loop, we'll discuss this in the morning, and by the way there's good news on a related issue.

But by IM, the senior tech writer was much concise and direct. His only message to me was three letters: "wtf"

Deus ex machina

Google's policy change may have done what a week's worth of willpower couldn't: got me to stop blogging at work.

We use Internet Explorer at my office. Blogger stopped working properly for me today, and I haven't looked it up but I think that's because Google changed how Blogger works on IE. I might be able to post something from work, but it would be harder and uglier than it used to be, so I'm writing at home at the moment.

Still, I was busy today. My fourth project, long-inactive, became active, so I had to respond a bit to that. And I spent a lot more time this morning being industrious for the doomed project. After I did a fairly detailed edit of the new economic section, I set up the whole doomed project for a peer review. Luckily, I got all that done before afternoon ennui set in.

I also spent a while running in circles (well, "running in circles" in a desultory, all-by-e-mail sense of the phrase) about whether and how we would have to edit a related document - I had forgotten about it for the past month, and early this morning I thought a peer reviewer could do it, then I thought I'd have to, and the last word was that we didn't need to at all. Probably. Well, that's good news.

I've given the economist the benefit of the doubt more than SMEs, because in some ways he's been in the same predicament as me and because he hasn't been the cause of my problems. But after focusing as much as I can on his section, I'm feeling less friendly. His stuff was in a pretty rough shape, and while it's all my job, a lot of the edits were really basic stuff. More to the point, that whole "running in circles" bit was his fault. By now, the only people I can rely on are H., the lawyer, and my fellow tech writers. Us against the world.

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.