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.

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.

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.

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"