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.

Apologies

That was a long time to go without posting. I aim for twice a week, but that's two weeks between the timestamps of the previous two posts. Oops. It's partly because work is slow these days - the only recent event worth mentioning was the doomed project meeting that was the subject of the last post - but also for personal reasons. Even so, I might not have mentioned the slow posting, if not for the fact that it's likely to continue. Several reasons.

• My personal life has been busy lately. For the past month or two, I've had several big things to deal with, and that's likely to continue for at least another month. It's not bad, except in the sense that change and big expenses are stressful, but it takes time and mental energy that I'd rather put into things like this.
• My home computer died this past Saturday. This doesn't have anything to do with the two-week gap, but who knows how long it'll take me to fix. I know what the problem is, but I've already checked the local Best Buy and they didn't have the part I needed on the shelf. Off to Amazon, waiting on the mail to arrive, hoping it's the right one...
• I've begun turning this into a book. Sort of, slowly, maybe... And that's at the mercy of my computer problems as well, of course. But if I find it as easy to continue as I did to start, I may put more time into offline writing and less into this.