Occam’s Razor

Taking Care of Business

It’s one thing to go to work to work. It’s another thing to go to work to work.

This week was a week where my team and I had to put our noses to the grindstone. Separated by geography (I have three employees here in Reston, one in Alaska, one in Oregon and one in Montana) we needed to come together in the same room at the same time and work. I wish it could have been interesting work, like designing a cool new web interface. Instead it was hard grunt work: putting together detailed project schedules that we could commit to for our projects for the remainder of the year.

It was work that we should have done about the time I arrived in February. I had no idea at the time this kind of detail was either expected or required. So we are playing catch up. It meant inhabiting a conference room from 8:30 AM until 5 PM. Everyone brought their laptop computers. We borrowed a big computer projector and threw up Microsoft Project on the big screen. And then we hashed through in laborious detail how we were going to finish our work.

Of course we had an agenda, but it was a bit too ambitious to put together plans for all our projects. So we concentrated on the ones that we had to finish or at least start this year. None of us are Microsoft Project gurus, which made the exercise frustrating at times. Meanwhile since we were all of course plugged in we were all reading our email too. The usual stream of requests kept coming in and we kept answering email and troubleshooting problems even while we hammered away at our schedules.

The pace gave us headaches. But the real headaches came when we reached those fuzzy areas that were hard to define. For example we needed to clarify a lot of requirements in a fairly short time frame with another team that likes to procrastinate. How to get them off their duffs when from their perspective we had been sitting on our duffs? Well, we had not been sitting on our duffs. We were working on things at the time that seemed a lot more important. We sent out exploratory emails wordsmithed by committee. We pondered whether we should CC certain people or not. There are lots of unwritten rules in our organization. There are lots of potential landmines. Sometimes we are criticized for not keeping people informed about what we are doing. Other times we get criticized for keeping people too well informed. We pondered the egos of various personalities who act as gatekeepers for getting our work done and tried to figure strategies that would move us forward. Only time will tell whether we read the tea leaves correctly.

The pace was frantic, the typing furious and the stress level was high. But there were other tensions. Generally my team gets along great, but there are occasional personality issues between members. I am not the most tactful person but I had to find tactful ways to move the conversation along and soothe feelings. Meanwhile I learn one of my team members is not happy in their position. The member is crucial to the success of the team so it’s not like I can just let him go. I can’t keep him and hire someone to replace him. The headache reaches the acute phase. I pop two Tylenol at lunch but the headache doesn’t recede.

I try to find some solace in the evening at home. But the headache is still there. I still feel the frantic pace of the day. The news that one of the members of my team is unhappy in their job weighs heavily on my mind because I feel in an unwinnable situation yet I am still responsible, since I am a manager. I have to figure it out. Then the phone rings.

My wife is across the Potomac River in Silver Spring, Maryland with my parents fixing their computer. My mother, age 84, has fallen in the bathroom and has hit her head. She is conscious. They call an emergency medical technician who recommends a trip to the emergency room. My wife, bless her soul, goes with them. I take my daughter to and from choir practice and fret about my Mom. I phone my sister. I send out emails to the family on the situation. I stay up late waiting for my wife to deliver more news and come home. At 10 PM she is still in the emergency room. Don’t wait up she says. Eventually I go to bed but don’t sleep well. At 1:30 I wake up and my wife is not in bed. I get worried. I can’t get back to sleep. I call her cell phone. I get voice mail. I try not to worry and to sleep but I can’t. At 3 AM she arrives home. I get the update: Mom is okay and they are back home. I manage a couple more hours of sleep but am up at 6 AM to send my daughter to school. Then it is back to the conference room for another day of schedule planning, mine-laden emails, and breaks of humor between my team to relieve the tension.

Wednesday is the night for my team to go out for dinner. Some members of the team bring family to the Italian restaurant we chose. We are very good for business: there are more than a dozen of us altogether. I order a glass of house wine. The persistent headache recedes. I am tired but the company is good. Two of my employees bring their young children with them. The babies move from lap to lap. Everyone laughs. Everyone eats a bit too much. As their leader I feel I need to say a few words so I do. I tell them truthfully that I am blessed to have such a wonderful and dedicated team. In spite of their own periodic personality quirks they are a terrific bunch of people. While few in number they are top notch. My words must have been good because they were heartfelt. I think they like me. But I beg off their plans to play pool. I head home, do my chores, crawl into bed and quickly drift off into a narcotic-like sleep.

Today at noon it was over. We put everything away. I was glad to leave early. Many on my team had a long day of flights ahead of them. I felt sorriest for poor Joe, who had to make it home all the way to Anchorage before he could crawl into bed.

But before we leave I am still not satisfied. We did a lot of work but I wished we could have done more. We are still behind the eight ball. We have our twice-weekly conference calls but this face-to-face time is very valuable and infinitely more productive. We must do this more often. We must get ahead of the planning curve. We are supposed to have plans ready by mid February for the work we want to do in 2006. So we must meet again. At least we have the freedom to choose the location. After some discussion we choose Denver. We’ll meet again there in mid January.

At home my weekend plans to be full of activities. In addition to teaching tomorrow, today was my wife’s last day at work. She is inviting her slash friends over for a party tomorrow evening, and two of them will camp out here for the weekend. It’s going to be a noisy place full of talk about the homoerotic fan fiction universe my wife inhabits. I won’t get much downtime. A long bike ride may provide some stress relief if the weather cooperates. I contemplate the mundanity of a few hours at the local Starbucks with a laptop and a wireless connection. Perhaps that is where I will find my escape … if I can squeeze in the time.

October 29th, 2004 at 08:03pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments

This and that

So much happening in my life these days that it is hard for me to even catch my breath, let alone find time to blog. But blogging has been preying on my mind. I’ve wanted to blog but couldn’t because there was all this more important stuff! So this entry will be a bunch of random thoughts and concerns running around my brain at the moment.

First, my wife’s job with the Software Productivity Consortium will be ending in October. Has the Software Productivity Consortium, whose mission it is to improve the practices of the software community (or at least its members) stopped using computers? Hardly. Has she been fired for some sort of malfeasance? Not at all. She’s being outsourced. Yes the pointy haired bosses are firmly in control at SPC and have been for about a year now. Someone apparently had the “clever” idea to outsource the help desk. The mind reels. SPC is not some huge conglomerate; it has about 100 employees, most of them in Herndon, Virginia. People are intimately attached to their computers and their laptops. They depend on the help desk staff to keep all the infrastructure working and to get their computers fixed pronto. After the outsourcing is complete only a token contractor will actually be in the building. Most of the work will be done offsite, adding delay and frustration to SPC employees. It’s hard to imagine how SPC can save any money; it’s not like my wife is bringing home the big bucks. Anyhow the few remaining IT Help Desk staff were largely shown the door midweek. My wife gets to stay and try to do the work of four people until October 8th, which is her last day (if she stays there that long).

Meanwhile on Monday a contractor arrives to try to learn their business. My wife is a highly skilled IT troubleshooter. This is a woman puts together computers in her spare time for friends because she thinks it is fun. She can fix the most obscure Windows errors. So I’m not worried in the least about her job prospects. In fact I think we are both glad her job is coming to an end. Some company around the Reston area with savvy apparently lacking at SPC will likely snatch her up pretty quickly. In the event the economy is worse than I thought my GS-14 salary could carry us forward indefinitely. So the only real losers here are the people who work at SPC. They get to watch a stream of likely underpaid and largely offsite contractors cycle through their organization. Not one of them will do a lick more work than called for by the contract. I should know. I’ve seen many a contracting debacle in my years as a federal employee. I figure the SPC CEO must have marbles for brains or be a big George W. Bush supporter. It’s the only thing that explains such a complete lack of common sense. My wife is not alone. The employees, tired of working 80-hour weeks because their CEO wants them too, are leaving right and left. It used to be a great place to work. It’s hard on SPC employees to see dysfunctional management take over and drive a great organization into the ground.

Second, medical issues with my Mom are not getting any easier. It’s not appropriate to get into too much detail here but my poor 77-year-old Dad is being run ragged. It is good that they are in Riderwood and their life is somewhat simpler. Unfortunately my Mom pretty much cannot even boil water at this point. They really depend on that gratis daily meal in one of Riderwood’s many restaurants. My 84-year-old Mom seems increasing scared and paranoid. I hope my Dad will start getting some adult day care for her so he can get away from it for a while. I help when I can but I have my own family to take care of. In fact I see my mother as very close to needing a nursing home. Fortunately Riderwood has an excellent nursing home called Renaissance Gardens. I’m hoping her visit next week to see a shrink will help her get a grip. But with all the medications she’s on I’m not sure if antianxiety medicine or even an antidepressant would do her much good.

Third, school has restarted for my daughter Rosie, now in 10th grade. My wife and I have been dealing with all those school startup issues: new clothes, books, raids on Staples, endless forms that need to be filled out and checks that must be written. Her teachers increasingly require onerous “contracts” with students that we parents must sign. One small sign of improvement: the information form with all the relevant names and phone numbers is now actually entered into a computer. We got a preprinted form with last year’s information on it and all we had to do was correct it. It’s a small step but one of these obvious steps that should have been done years ago. All this contact information could be submitted and updated over the web.

Fourth, I’m getting a new computer! The parts arrived today. I just need my wife to assemble them. My current computer is about 3 years old and arrived with (shudder) Windows Me on it. The new one is nothing fancy because I don’t need fancy. What I do need is something that doesn’t take three minutes to boot, so my excellent wife worked hard to meet my requirements. The result: my computer will have a fast motherboard and disk drive. My computer will also have a writeable DVD drive. I don’t need a fast CPU. I have learned that fast CPUs mean little: it’s the memory, motherboard and disk drive that are the pokes. So I’m getting a 1.8GHZ Athlon XP AMD chip, which is still 2.5 times faster than what I am using now and likely overkill for my modest needs.

We’ve been feeling very geeky lately. August was our flush month for cash since we each got three paychecks. We budgeted about $1200 for new computer stuff. By buying parts we’ve gotten some amazing values. My computer will cost about $600. Rosie gets a 17-inch flat panel monitor (about $350 after rebate). Terri gets the computer toolkit she wants. And we purchased another printer because the old Epson C82 died almost immediately after the warranty expired. The new one is an Epson C84. Since our first Epson experience wasn’t good we bought this model somewhat reluctantly, and only because it got a Consumer Reports Best Buy recommendation. It had better last longer! Look for a rant on our disposable society coming up in my blog in the weeks ahead.

I also now have a 128MB USB flash drive. Boy, these little suckers are great and so cheap. (Mine was $25!) They are sort of like what PDA’s were in the 1990s: you don’t know you need one until you’ve got one. What’s on mine? Not much yet, but I have 14MB allocated as a backup for my Quicken data going back to 1992. I am looking forward to doing geeky things like installing the Firefox browser on my flash drive. I can take it with me wherever I go and have my browser of choice and all my bookmarks available! The possibilities of flash drives is yet another topic for a blog entry in the weeks ahead.

I’m still deeply involved in political blogging. I’m trying to make sense of these polls showing Bush getting a double-digit bounce coming out of the Republican convention. I’m torn between feelings of despair if these are real and my gut feeling that these polls are meaningless when other polls are showing perhaps the weakest bounce from any political convention in history for Bush. I actually woke up at 5 a.m. this morning worrying about this stuff.

It is so obvious to me that Bush is bad for the country on all levels. He has succeeded in nothing. Yet I have to wonder if our electorate likes to elect morons. Or maybe it’s the moron vote that Bush is counting on. My hope is that Gadflyer is correct and that the vast majority of people made up their minds months ago. If so it may be a nail biter of an election, but it still favors Kerry. Anyhow it’s no time for us Democrats to be complacent. If you don’t like Bush and you aren’t registered to vote please get registered if you still can. Dig into your pocket and support liberal 527s organizations like ACT. Spend some time if you can possibly find it to work in a precinct, make cold calls and go door to door. The election won’t be handed to Democrats on a silver platter. We’re going to have to work for it with every last ounce of our strength. But when victory arrives it will be all the sweeter.

September 11th, 2004 at 08:21pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | one comment

Emotional Sophisticates

Lately I’ve been feeling really dumb. I have this advanced degree in Software System Engineering but in some really important areas I feel like I am in first grade. Maybe this is a consequence of having a really good and female boss. I have only had one other female boss in my life, and that was a short-term thing. It didn’t last three months. I was her employee only long enough to find another job. But now I have a really successful female for a boss and her people skills are daunting at times.

First let me say that Susan (my boss) is terrific. She is everyone’s dream boss. She’s funny, she’s cute, she’s snarky and she laughs a lot. Every day is an adventure from her perspective. She loves everyone and everyone loves her. In the five months I’ve worked at USGS no one has said anything that could be remotely interpreted as negative about her. She is also very, very smart. She has brains of a magnitude that are daunting to us lesser mortals. She remembers everything including the tiniest details from years ago. You can’t dislike her. She so very much believes in and honestly appreciates anyone who works for her. She treats everyone as peers. She’s like a big mother hen (although she has no children herself) and she just loves all of us. She will bend the rules and go out of her way to give you what you need to succeed. If you have family problems she will support you 100%.

She is also what I would refer to as an emotional sophisticate. I cannot be disingenuous with her. She sees right through me. I don’t know how I know this but I do. She has me all figured out. She knows just the right combination of buttons to press to inspire me and get me moving in the way she wants me to move. And that makes me feel, well, both empowered and at times inadequate. I don’t know what to call her gift, but “leadership” doesn’t describe it.

Like most of us men I suspect I can be pretty emotionally clueless. I can be sensitive to other people and their feelings but I have to deliberately turn on that part of me. Most of the time I have that side turned off since I am used to having it turned off. But since I have become a supervisor I’ve made it a point to turn on that side of me with my own employees. I ask them regularly how they are feeling and how various members of their family are doing. I try to get to know them as people, to respect who they are and not to be condescending. So far I think I am doing pretty well. At least with my own employees I’m pretty sure I’ve earned their respect, though it may be qualified.

Still I am often clueless on how my behavior may be impacting other people. I will relate an all too typical example that happened recently. I had some concerns that there were multiple groups of people inside my office working on solving essentially the same problem. (If curious the problem was how to present our data in various XML formats.) It didn’t seem that the right people were talking to each other. So as I usually do when I see a problem I tried to bring everyone together to reach consensus. Except of course one of the other unit chiefs had someone who had this issue as one of his areas of responsibility. From his perspective I was stepping on his turf. But he didn’t seem to be talking to someone in this other team because they were both charging forward on separate and redundant paths. And really I wasn’t that aware that his role was as broad as he and his boss envisioned. If it was that broad I figured these problems wouldn’t be happening. Anyhow I was at least a grade above him. I figured this was the sort of problem people at my grade level were supposed to solve.

This would be a typical male left-brain response. But it was the wrong emotional response. Because you see I neglected to consider that someone’s feelings might be hurt. In this case my fellow peer unit chief, also an emotional sophisticate, knew this man had this work and more importantly that he felt he owned the issue. So I was asked to run a conference call where it was on the agenda. I took an action item to set up a meeting and put it on my electronic To Do list. I probably did hear once, maybe even twice, that he and his boss wanted him to take leadership of the issue. But I didn’t retain it. I just saw the action item and started working on it.

So it generated some consternation. Email flew around. People’s feelings were getting hurt. I really didn’t want to manage the issue. I just wanted to make sure it was addressed and that my needs would get considered in the meeting. I saw myself as starting a process that needed to happen. I think I have it straightened out now. It was too late for me to let this guy set up the meeting since I had sent out the invitations. However I did shoot him an email saying I’m glad to let him run it from now on. Case closed I hope. But I had inadvertently or perhaps stupidly caused some minor damage to the effectiveness of the larger team. Bad me!

Granted my boss and my fellow peer unit chief have twenty years or more working in the same office as these people. They know them inside and out. They know their hot spots, what makes them happy and their eccentricities. I am still trying to associate names with faces, let alone names with roles. But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was I lacked the emotional sophistication (or perhaps the innate patience) to work through these issues so that no feelings were hurt. I was operating as usual at full throttle when I should have thought through the issue and done the necessary networking.

I know how my boss would have worked the issue. She would have stopped by the guy’s cubicle on some pretext but mainly to sound out his feelings on the issue. She’d talk to his boss and get her opinion. Then she’d talk to me and suggest an approach. No nicks. No cuts. No bruises. No hard feelings.

My solution? That approach seemed very time consuming and old fashioned. Email was much faster. Besides I’ve got a million things on my To Do list. It seemed like they are all due immediately. I needed some shortcuts. It’s not clear to me if I choose to ignore the proper way to do things because I am hasty by default, or because I was more concerned about being fast and efficient than with dealing with all the human relations issues. The downside of my approach is now clear: I may be making enemies, or at least be giving the impression to people that I am a bit inconsiderate. Naturally I don’t think of myself that way. But that may be how I am being perceived. That’s not a great long-term strategy. So my boss’s solution is much more logical and would solve the underlying emotional issues.

Anyhow a couple issues like this rear their heads during the course of my workweek. I hope I am the type that can adapt my behavior. But issues like this have dogged my otherwise pretty successful career. It is now past time for me to develop the sophisticated emotional skills that I need. In fact as a result of episodes like this my boss has already suggested I need some training in this area. And it sounds like I may need it sooner rather than later.

I just hope this old dog can learn just one more new trick.

July 30th, 2004 at 07:59pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | one comment

Life in the Courtyard

In sitting here in my hotel room. It happens to be at a Courtyard Inn on the north side of Raleigh, North Carolina. I am here on business of course, and I won’t wend my way home until Thursday. During the day I head a few blocks north and hang out with three hundred or so party hearty hydrologists. Yes, hydrologists from across the eastern United States have come to Raleigh to trade notes, listen and have a good time. I’m here mainly to listen and observe. I am no hydrologist but I have to learn their lingo and have an appreciation for the work they do. “From the gage to the page,” is what I have to learn. My business is to serve the data collected from thousands of points across the United States, much of it in real time, to the public over the Internet. The Internet part I understand pretty well. But how the data gets from a gage stuck in a well or in the middle of a stream and makes it within minutes to the World Wide Web is something of a mystery to be explored in intricate detail. So that’s why I’m here.

Part of the good time of this conference was a barbeque and Bluegrass party tonight. I was okay with the barbeque, but nix on the Bluegrass. No offense to my good neighbor Steve (who loves Bluegrass) but Bluegrass music makes me itchy. I’m not a huge country music fan anyhow, but all that banjo picking, high-pitched male voices and endless songs about Jesus is about as welcome as a couple hours of rap music. So I wisely opted out. It was perhaps not the politically correct thing to do since my boss, her boss, her boss’s boss, and one of my employees were all going. But we all have limits. We’ll all do dinner tomorrow night.

So tonight I revel in the mundanity of my hotel room, Room 268 at the Courtyard Inn. It’s not a bad experience. I got out for a little food and spent some time loafing at a Borders bookstore down the block. After listening to presentations and chilling with Susan (my terrific boss) all day I don’t really mind spending the evening by myself.

I stayed at this very hotel back once before in 1998. Then I was here on business too, but for another employer. I’m beginning to feel my way around this city a bit. Raleigh like many cities in North Carolina is growing by leaps and bounds. However, the growth is not downtown. It is in the northern and western suburbs. I got a little lost finding my hotel because I got on the Raleigh beltway only to discover they had added an outer beltway since the last time I was here. My atlas is a bit old.

Raleigh is both a city and a state capital. But it doesn’t strike me as much of a city. It’s five miles or so from the inner beltway to the center of town. There are a couple buildings that look like they are twenty stories or more, but that’s about it. I drove into downtown tonight just to look around. It is one of these downtowns that must close up promptly at 5 p.m. Actually I doubt the place ever gets crowded, unless the legislature is in town. There’s not much there there in Raleigh. Much of the action seems to be in nearby Durham, or on U.S. 70 that connects the two cities.

One thing that is new this trip is that my hotel room now has a high-speed Internet connection. That was the reason I chose the hotel. I hope it is not much longer before this feature is universally available everywhere, including all the Motel 6s out there. I’m sorry but a dialup connection just doesn’t cut it anymore. I need high-speed Internet wherever I spend a night. And although I’ve gone through some annoying connection hassles it was worth it. So really I don’t need an evening social life: the laptop is my social life. I am virtually at home here in my soon to be forgotten hotel room, doing pretty much what I would do if I were at actually at home, like reading my personal email, checking my favorite political sites and blogging.

There are admittedly some dubious side effects to having high-speed Internet access while on a business trip. For one I feel I have to read my work email. I don’t really want to do it. But I get such a volume of email that I feel like I can’t let it wait. Otherwise when I get back to work on Friday I’ll be inundated, and I need to do real work on Friday, not read email. So I’ll spend an hour or so hurriedly going through it and sending most of it into the bit bucket.

While I like the high speed Internet, I can see why Marriott needs to offer it. That’s because there are choicer lodgings just down the street. There is a Hampton Inn next door, and two extended stay suite hotels just past it. Here I just have a plain room. Granted it is a nice and clean room, but it’s just a room. Courtyard Inns are a ubiquitous way station for the business traveler. You know exactly what you are going to get. I do find it curious though that when I look out into the swimming pool I never see anyone in it. We are the business class and the business class doesn’t take evening dips in the pool. We work on our laptops in our rooms, we make calls, and we may watch a movie on HBO if we have the time. In the mornings we pay $7.95 for the hotel breakfast bar and studiously ignore each other. Instead we feign interest in the McPaper (USA Today) placed outside our door every morning.

I am glad I am not boarding at a Motel 6. I love the high-speed Internet access in my room. But really there should be more to business travel than this. Yet this is more fun than the known alternatives. Crabtree Mall is only a few miles away. I could kill some time there. But it is nothing special. It has all the same stores I have 250 miles away at home. From sea to shining sea, America seems eternally bland to this business traveler.

I’ll be glad to get home.

June 15th, 2004 at 09:18pm Posted by Mark | Travel | one comment

The Pluses and Minuses of Business Travel

I can already see that one of the aspects of my new job that will become something of a grind after a while is the traveling.

One thing we do at the U.S. Geological Survey a lot is travel. Sometimes it seems like I work with a bunch of constantly migrating gypsies who only occasionally arrive back at the office. USGS is a very spread out agency with multiple offices in most states. This is necessary since scientists have to get out into the field and do the mapping, biological, geological and hydrological work of the nation.

During my first week in the job this February I met Colleen. She is someone with a position similar to mine and has an office right down the hall. Silly me, I assumed because she had an office she must live in the area. It wasn’t until the week ended that I learned this was one of many places she hung out. A typical month will find her on the road two to three weeks. She routinely spends a week a month at my office in Reston. Colleen’s case is pretty extreme, but the travel requirements for USGS employees are not. If you are a scientist you are likely on the go at least every other month or so.

Colleen’s team, like mine, is geographically spread out. But she has a lot more people on her team than I have on mine. She feels that to really be effective she has to constantly migrate from one worksite to the other. If keeping up with her employees weren’t enough, there are weeks of user and acceptance testing and numerous conferences to attend. There are also various side trips to remote offices to do things like make sure a server farms is configured correctly. She lives largely out of a suitcase, but she calls Tucson home. She told me she has gotten to the point in her 36 years of federal service where she doesn’t even notice the jet lag anymore.

My boss is not quite as bad but is typically gone for at least a week a month. More often she is gone for two weeks a month. As for me I can pretty much decide how much traveling I want to do. And there’s the rub. I don’t necessarily want to do all that much traveling. I understood it was a part of the job when I accepted it. But it’s not likely that I will be visiting exotic destinations. Indeed usually I go some place where there are groups of other USGS employees. And wherever I go there are usually social obligations. After six o’clock though I’d usually rather crash in my hotel room and get online.

So I’m trying to minimize my travel without giving offense or appearing ineffective. This is amazing to my 14-year old daughter Rosie. “Let me get this straight Dad. You can go anywhere you want on business at any time, and you don’t want to go anywhere?” That’s how she hears it. She is right in that my boss is very liberal with the travel budget. I’m a chief and have new powers. She told me I could pretty much go anywhere I feel I have a need to go. But I suspect my boss won’t approve a trip to Hawaii just so I can watch hydrologists at work. It must serve some reasonable business function. So I won’t likely be jetting off to Paris to attend some important conference and tour the Louvre in the evenings. Instead I will be meeting the same groups of hydrologists and scientists over and over again at various places in the Continental United States. Next week, for example, it will be an Eastern Region Data Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. It’s close enough that I will drive instead of fly.

Traveling on someone else’s dime can be a lot of fun or mind expanding. Early in my federal career I was selected for a two-week tour overseas. I had to install some customized software we wrote and to help people learn the system. I spent a week at the Atsugi Naval Air Station near Tokyo and another week at Subic Bay in the Philippines. This was in 1987 when our Navy still had military facilities in the Philippines. The week in the Philippines was particularly a real eye opener. The Philippines showed me a side of reality I probably needed to see but really left me appalled and disheartened. I found plenty of readily available prostitution just outside the gates. Our sailors seemed to have no scruples about banging anonymous women without even using protection. I found most of the kids there didn’t go to school because only those of privilege could afford schooling. Instead they roamed the streets, smoked cigarettes and often were involved in petty crime. I found horrendous air pollution in Manila. And I learned that if I had no scruples I could have had sex with a minor, no questions asked, for about twenty bucks. So this trip in particular was a very mind expanding experience. Even my time in Japan was noteworthy. I didn’t know that air could be so polluted you always had a bad taste in your mouth. I didn’t know a city could be denser and more expensive that New York City. Overall I learned to appreciate the United States as something of an oasis in the world. Much of the world is mired in poverty and filth. I am lucky to be an American.

This kind of business travel, when it doesn’t happen too often, is actually welcome. It happened exactly once and is unlikely to happen again in my federal career.

Today though business travel is mostly just a hassle and rarely a mind opening experience. The cities I go to in the continental United States all look the same after a while. Each city has pretty much the same restaurants, malls and hotels. The hotels have a bland, uniform familiarity about them. The hassle of getting in and out of airports gets old quickly. The airlines … well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about them. It is never a good experience. At best a flight is a neutral experience. I hate the way the airlines treat us like morons. Yes, I know they have to say and go through all that stuff because it’s required. But thank you I think I can figure out how to put an oxygen mask over my face by now. I know where the exit doors are and I’ve only buckled a seatbelt a few million times by now. I’ve learned the tradeoffs of sitting in an exit row. And I’ve learned when possible to travel with my carryon luggage alone.

It’s often the case that now there is usually someone I know on the other end. We USGSers are one big happy extended family. But I’m not the most sociable of critters. I am working hard on that aspect of myself. When my business day is over I’m not necessarily in the mood for happy hour or a long meal with colleagues at a local fern bar. I just want some downtime, some privacy and a nutritious but quick meal somewhere. I often feel itchy because I need to exercise but haven’t found the time. Coming back late to my hotel room in a semi-alcoholic haze stuffed with steaks and fried potato skins is hardly conducive to exercise.

So I find business travel to be a mixed blessing. I’m trying hard to limit my travel to a week or less a month and so far I’ve succeeded. I figure someone has to help keep down the travel expenses. For me the best business trips are often the ones where I don’t know anyone at the other end. Then I am usually free of the social obligations in the evening. I often have a rental car at my disposal, and may actually go see some of the local attractions. Or I might prefer to hole up in my room and watch a movie on the DVD player built into the laptop computer. But those trips are few and far between. Business travel is really more like working a twelve-hour day and getting paid for eight.

Still I probably need to get out more. I am the more restless spouse. Going for years at a time without traveling anywhere on my employer’s dime gets old too. So mostly I don’t grumble about the travel and try to think of the travel as a job perk. After all I am not some trucker constantly on the move up driving all night. I am not sleeping at a Motel 6 and selling grub out of a suitcase. And the best part of business travel? Someone else is paying!

June 11th, 2004 at 09:49am Posted by Mark | Travel | one comment

The Good (Work) Life

I thought I’d take a moment out from my usual ramblings on things major and minute and just talk about me for a change. Right now I find myself in a strange and largely happy space. In a way I feel like my whole life had been one long troubling train trip and I’ve arrived at my final destination. I was meant to arrive here. In some sense I have come home.

This won’t be my final destination, of course. There is still too much of life ahead of me. But I do feel that for the first time in my life I am where I should be. I feel like I’ve slipped into a life situation that feels like a comfortable, well-worn glove. Things just fit. I have arrived. I feel respected. I feel empowered. I feel necessary. I feel optimized. I feel above all else useful.

I don’t wish to give the impression that all of life is coming up roses at the moment. I speak today primarily about my career. I have the usual festering family problems that have been part of the dynamic of my marriage and family. They won’t be going away anytime soon, if ever. In addition I have rapidly aging parents with medical issues and two geriatric cats, one of whom has taken upon herself the mission of driving me bananas. But perhaps because I feel so positive about my career these other burdens are markedly easier to bear. I am grateful.

I look around this world and see lots chaos and suffering. So I feel almost guilty that while all this is going on I am so much at peace with myself. The impetus turned out to be of all things: 9/11. I was one of hundreds of thousands of civil servants caught up in the madness of that day. I watched the Pentagon burn that day as I struggled toward the safety of home. Since then every day I worked in the Washington I felt like I was in someone’s bulls eye. I felt vulnerable. I wonder (and still do) how long before some terrorist acquires enough fissionable material to blow a good part of the capital into subatomic bits. I knew I did not want to be another victim of 9/11. So I looked with more earnestness at jobs closer to home. And as many of you long time blog readers know, I finally realized this dream.

But it couldn’t be just any job. With 20 years in the civil service I was not going to give up my career for a job in private industry where I was the new kid on the block. Civil service jobs out here in western Fairfax County are hard to find and the competition from us weary commuters is stiff. Yet somehow I got lucky. When I was offered my latest job at the U.S. Geological Survey not only did I turn an hour plus commute into a ten-minute commute but I also felt I wasn’t a likely future victim of terrorism.

What I did not expect was to find that I would enjoy my new job so much. The U.S. Geological Survey is nirvana for a civil servant. In all my other jobs there was a political context to the job that could not be ignored. At ACF we were a social welfare organization. Consequently we were subject to bizarre political mandates such as the healthy marriage initiative. But there were other weird things, like the bizarre President’s Management Agenda, the inability of our managers to proactively manage, niggardly budgets that got more niggardly every year, pointless and counterproductive outsourcing agreements and other issues too numerous to mention. While in the Department of Defense there was this odd military mindset that was pervasive and bizarre. There were cadres of officers and enlisted coming and going trying to make some fast mark for a performance report. There were bizarre and stupefying processes. For example, it took months to order supplies that could be purchased in an hour at the local Staples. You had to go through so many layers of management that there was no guarantee you would get anything you needed. And there was a demoralized civil service that felt ignored, unappreciated and hassled.

Surviving in this environment required adopting a skewed outlook to work. It was its own peculiar Darwinian struggle and I adapted. But it often felt soul sucking. It often seemed pointless and futile. For example I should have felt rage last year. I had spent a year doing a comprehensive analysis of enterprise reporting solutions for our agency. When it came down to choose a product, I was not in the meeting room. It came down to picking one over the others because we had an enterprise agreement a particular vendor (Oracle), not because it was a superior product. I should have been enraged but I just shrugged my shoulders. That’s the way things worked in the government I knew. A lot of what I did was ultimately wasted and pointless. I hoped that occasionally something I did would effect real and meaningful change. But mostly my work felt ultimately pointless.

But at the U.S. Geological Survey we don’t serve a political agenda. It’s a scientific institution. Unlike other places I worked that pretended to be professional, it actually is a professional place. We don’t just say we value someone’s work and opinions. We actually do value their work and opinions. We value it enough to listen to other people’s opinions and take them seriously.

I find my own management style is evolving. I don’t make unilateral decisions. Instead I bring them up to my team and we discuss the direction I would like to go and come to consensus. After all I am the new person on the team. They have the experience. If an idea of mine is not sound they will know and I need to hear it from them. In return by having their opinions truly count they feel like they can have confidence in me. We are all vested in the solution. I provide general direction. I don’t tell them what to do so much as ask their consent to move in certain directions. I think this is called leadership. It’s exciting, empowering and really a lot of fun to manage this way. The bonus is that it has a multiplicative effect. It also allows for greater productivity and it opens up new areas for exploration.

So I am no longer spending half my time at work spinning my wheels on exercises that eventually prove futile. The lines of authority are very clear but respect flows in both directions. My team is not half multitasked elsewhere. I just have to give direction and focus. A silly example happened this week when I started using electronic To-Do lists to task routine ad hoc assignments. I had tried this before in other jobs and they never worked. Why? Because everyone was multitasked by various managers so there was no guarantee a task would ever get done in a particular time frame. Now I have the authority I need. My staff works from my lists and respects my deadlines. Maybe this happens by default in private industry. But this is the first time I have seen it work in a governmental organization.

I have a terrific boss always willing to provide guidance but who refuses to micromanage. I have numerous travel opportunities that broaden my perspective. I can basically choose to travel to any place I want provided it is business related. I have a team that is geographically disbursed but still works as well together as if we were all sitting in the same office. Biweekly teleconferences and web pages with meeting minutes that are continuously updated work great! If I feel the need to go to a professional conference the money is there. I can bring the team together in person whenever I need to. (We all met here in Reston about a week ago). I never worry that my team is bored or unmotivated because I am confident they like what they do.

Together we are changing our little corner of the universe for the better. Our work is meaningful. It means something to the whitewater rafting community to know if the streams are high enough or flowing fast enough. It means something to scientists to have a way to analyze ground water levels, or to know if their local water quality is getting better or worse. And because the information we provide is meaningful, my work feels meaningful. And I don’t mind so much going to a conference and listening to users. In the process I find out from them what they need that our system is not providing. I can then subsequently direct resources to make our information more useful to the public.

And I can do all this while balancing the needs of my family, without adding the stress and hassle of two hours or more in commuting every day, with more than adequate leave and at a level of pay commensurate with my skills and knowledge.

It’s a good place in which to be. I keep wondering when the other shoe will drop. But I don’t think it’s going to. I’ve been swimming upstream for too many years. Hopefully that struggle is behind me and now I can do the real work that I was meant to do.

May 9th, 2004 at 11:10am Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments

My Hum Drum but Remarkable Workweek

Something amazing happened last week at work. On the surface it was just another workweek. I came into the office every day, did my duty and went home. In that respect it was no different than any other workweek in my federal career.

The amazing thing was what didn’t happen getting to and from work. I wasn’t up before the crack of dawn, as I have been for the last 23 years of my employment. I wasn’t trying to get my sleepy headed daughter out of bed, pushing her to get her to eat a piece or two of toast, then running her out the door so she could meet her 6:45 a.m. bus. I wasn’t tearing out the door at 5:53 a.m. as I did for most of 1999-2003 to meet at some cold commuter lot in a predawn bleakness. I did not jump in a passenger van and end up at my office at 6:45 a.m., bleary eyed, still half asleep and trying to focus my mind on the day ahead.

Similarly in the afternoon I was not waiting to be picked up by my vanpool. I was not crammed into a tight seat and elbowed by my fellow commuters. We were not fighting traffic on Constitution Avenue. Where the van would normally unload, I was not there. I was not waiting three minutes for the light to let me out of the commuter parking lot. I was not navigating the back roads to avoid the crushing press of traffic on the Fairfax County Parkway. I did not arrive home drained of all energy and wanting to curl up somewhere and go to sleep.

Instead it was Spring Break week. My daughter had no school and got to sleep in. So I didn’t have to hassle with her in the morning. And since I now work three miles from my home this meant that I could choose to get up when I wanted to. I could choose to go into the office when I wanted, without the mad morning constraint of trying to beat the overwhelming Washington area rush/gridlock hours.

I slept in until 6:40 a.m. every day of last week! I arose then because that’s when my wife gets up. I could have slept in later but her up and moving around would have been enough to get me up anyhow. But it didn’t matter. Rising at 6:40 a.m. on a weekday seemed decadent — almost sinful. So I dressed, ate an unhurried breakfast, drove leisurely to work and was fully awake and at my desk at 7:30 a.m. I left work around 5 p.m. and was home ten minutes later.

In the evenings I was not getting the yawns about 8:30 p.m. I was not half into bed reading by 9:30. Instead - oh the decadence - but I stayed didn’t bother to get ready for bed until 10 or 10:30 p.m.

Each morning I woke up feeling well rested. Each evening I had plenty of time to relax and putter.

I don’t know how many of you have jobs close to home. I think long commutes during rush hour tend to be more the norm now than not. This is a circus I have spent my adult life trying to escape. My new job at the U.S. Geological Survey let me escape this madness, at least partially. Rising at 6:05 a.m. was a huge improvement over rising at 5:15 a.m.

But last week I rose at an hour that accommodated my natural body clock, instead of at a time dictated by the demands of a modern urban society. It was not quite as good as my Dad’s work life, which consisted of being at the office at 8:30 after a three mile commute to work.

But perhaps I will sample that life this summer and see what it is like.

It is wonderful to do things at a time of my choosing. Life is good.

April 11th, 2004 at 12:55pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments

Boxed in by my computer

My office came together this week. On Tuesday I had it repainted and on Thursday I had the furniture people come in. They removed the 70s furniture and assembled modular furniture. I can now sit at my desk without my thighs touching the bottom of my desk drawer. I don’t have to elevate my arms to use the computer keyboard. All this is good and I appreciate the improved ergonomics. Clearly the computer is the means by which most of my work is accomplished so I have to be comfortable. I’m fortunate to have a boss more than willing to outlay a couple grand to make sure I can be productive. This would have never happened in my old agency.

But for someone whose job it is to be a web chief I find that in many ways a computer is a seriously inadequate tool for doing my work. Despite 25 years or so trying to perfect the personal computer using it is still a tedious, difficult and frequently frustrating means for accomplishing my work.

Nowhere is this more obvious to me than with my computer monitor. I have a 17-inch monitor, which is standard these days. But it’s not nearly enough space. What I really need is for one whole wall of my office to be a gigantic computer monitor with 600 dots per inch resolution. That’s because like most people in the management business I multitask a lot. I have way more things on my plate that I have to manage than can fit on a 17-inch monitor or can be managed using an Outlook Task list. I can, of course, ALT-TAB to numerous other screens to get the same information. But what I need is a big picture of all my work and literally hundreds of tasks I must coordinate. And I can’t get that from a computer.

So instead I’m ordering the biggest whiteboard I can find and having that installed on one wall instead. It’s low tech, but it works. People can come into my office and we can discuss things and we can doodle on the white board until we come to a common understanding. But even this is not quite sufficient. And that is because my team is geographically disbursed. I have three employees working for me in Reston, but I have two other full time employees working out west (Montana and Alaska), and a number of part time employees scattered across the continental United States. It’s not often that I will be able to get them into my office. So instead they fly into Reston a couple times a year where we work from large whiteboards with periodic forays to our networked PCs.

It’s not that industry is not trying to respond. We’re a Lotus Notes shop (not a good thing) and part of the Notes suite is this Sametime collaborative software. It lets us have a virtual workspace. It includes a whiteboard and a chat window. We can display PowerPoint slides to each other in real time. I can also share a program and they can see what I am typing into an application. It’s a pretty cool technology and a step in the right direction.

But what I really have to do is manage a lot of disparate ad-hoc requests from all sorts of people. Right now I simply write them down on a piece of paper and cross things out as I do them, but I am reaching the point after four weeks on the job where it’s not enough. Hence I need a white board. I need one huge mother of a white board. I need to scribble my tasks on the white board, erase them, rearrange them, prioritize them and basically see things from a high level macro and a detailed perspective at the same time. I can’t do that on a 17-inch monitor, at least not very easily. I need to be able to glance from one set of tasks to another set of tasks and see the relationships between them. I can’t do that with current computer technology either. And most likely I’ll be retired before that happens.

In Neal Stephenson’s novel “The Diamond Age” he talks about electronic billboards that are floor to ceiling. You can see them emerge today in places like Times Square, but these are still very primitive and lack the resolution I need. In the 2002 movie “Minority Report” actor Tom Cruise plays detective John Anderton who interacts with a computer by standing up and stretching his hands out into space. This is more like what I have in mind. But even this is not ideal. It still requires a lot of physical movement that is time consuming.

Instead I have to live with what the current technology permits. It increasingly feels constraining. While I am not a big fan of Windows technology at least it is reasonably consistent. That’s why it drives me nuts when I have to use a product like Lotus Notes that completely ignores Windows graphical user interface design principles. Something as simple as selecting a block of messages using Shift-Click then pressing a Trash Can icon doesn’t exist. I average at least 200 emails per day. But right now I have to manually delete each message. (Naturally the messages aren’t deleted immediately. They are marked for deletion. If you actually want to get rid of them you have to hit the refresh button (F9) and say “Yes” to a message asking you if you really want to delete them. More of my time is needlessly wasted by a bunch of designers who never envisioned how I would have to use their product.)

And that’s just Lotus Notes. Every software package has its own peculiar and annoying quirks. The Lotus Notes Sametime program, for example, does not start automatically when I start Notes, even after I configure it to do just that. I have to remember to turn it on after I start Lotus Notes. Computer viruses and new security mandates have made it impossible for me to shut down my workstation, or even install a new software package without someone from the help desk coming to my machine. At home my new and improved Quicken software keeps asking me every time I start it if I want to learn more about their bill-paying feature. I never do and tell it to remember this fact. But it never learns. I took the time to talk to their technical support people who shrug their shoulders and say it will be fixed in a future release. Meanwhile: deal with it. My antispam software (ChoiceMail) occasionally sends me duplicates of the same email. Pretty much every program I own, no matter how much I like it, has annoying quirks. They have the effect of continually interrupting my concentration. Instead of focusing on a larger task, I am down in the computer weeds trying to make my software behave like a human would want it to.

Increasingly the whole Windows graphical user interface feels annoying. Why does it have to be so hierarchical? I can understand the logic of putting programs in a Programs folder and my data and settings in a Documents folder but I so often find myself drilling up and down folders to where I want to. Why is it so stupid? With hard drives holding ten gigabytes or more routinely these days, does an old fashioned hierarchical folder based system make any sense at all?

A computer should be like a screwdriver. Using it should be instinctive. I am grateful that my Windows 2000 operating system at least doesn’t crash on my several times day like Windows ME did. But you shouldn’t have to be your own software mechanic to continue to use a PC. Security should just work. Viruses should be automatically detected and squashed. Hardware firewalls should be built into a card on the back of the PC. Software upgrades should be tested by a certification service and installed automatically. I shouldn’t have to know what file extension things are stored in. I shouldn’t have to traverse folders or have the computer spend minutes using a Find function to locate a file. I should give the computer itself no more thought than I give my car’s dashboard. When I am driving I never think, “Gosh, I should press the accelerator” or “Maybe I should press the brake to avoid crashing into the car ahead of me”. My computer should let me manipulate it instinctively.

Clearly we have a very long way to go. Meanwhile, I will have my old fashioned whiteboard. I will continually erase it manually and rewrite it. It will require me to periodically buy new dry erase markers from the supply store. But I will be able to at least track my work, prioritize it in a way that makes sense to me, and meet my deadlines. I doubt many of us can truly do that with our computers alone.

March 20th, 2004 at 10:07am Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

Thrown into the deep end of the job pool

Monday I began my new job at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. It’s been a very fast first week for me. I moved from a lackluster GS-14 job with the Administration for Children and Families, which is headquartered near L’Enfant Plaza in Washington D.C. ACF is an agency where even “casual Friday” meant dressing up like the rest of the week (but it was okay to leave off the tie). I always wore dress pants, dress shoes, a nice shirt and tie working at ACF. I kept a sport coat in my cube for those times when I needed it. One of our contractors required their women to wear dresses and hose. We called their men the “Men in Black” from their dreary utterly black business suits, white shirts and dark ties.

In retrospect ACF was a very dressy government place. At USGS though every day is business casual. My boss, a GS-15, shows up in cords, sandals and an earth mother shirt. Everyone knew I was new because for the first couple days I wore a shirt, tie, my best dress pants, patent leather shoes and my sport coat. In other words I was a fish out of water. It wasn’t until yesterday that my boss told me I could dress down. This will be a big change. I might need a whole new wardrobe –I don’t have enough business casual clothes to get through a workweek!

In this respect the USGS seems a much more relaxed sort of place. But the underlying tensions seem to be pretty much the same as I’ve encountered elsewhere in Club Fed. My new job is three miles from home but my pay is the same. However my responsibilities are much greater than those I had at ACF. I don’t know whether if at ACF we suffered from civil service grade inflation or whether USGS suffers from grade deflation. Being a GS-14 at ACF was no big thing. It’s a big thing at USGS. For one thing, I get an office. But not just an office: an office with a view. And a door that locks. My boss says I can have my office repainted if I want. The furniture in it is rather 70ish and was not meant for personal computers, so she is encouraging me to purchase some computer furniture. This is quite a contrast from ACF where we lived lives of cubicle gypsies. In my last two years I had relocated three times. Sometimes at ACF your cubicle was near a window, and while it was almost always larger than those given to contractors it was nothing special. I feel a bit spoiled at USGS.

Heck I feel catered to. I arrived in my new office to find my name already on the door and the help desk configuring my computer. My speakerphone arrived shortly thereafter. Next was the lady to help me configure my voice mail. Everyone is pleasant and low key. When I looked out my fifth floor window with a southwest exposure it seemed if I could extend my hands far enough out the windows they would touch the Shenandoah Mountains.

But make no mistake: this job demands a lot more responsibility. I am now officially a supervisor and what a strange team I lead. I have two employees who work locally, but also one in Montana, one in Alaska and a number of half time employees working for me in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Oregon. Since Alaska is 4 time zones away we have biweekly conference calls starting at 2 PM. This helps a lot, but a couple times a year the team must get together face-to-face, and that means agreeing on a city to meet. And as boss I guess I can pick the city. My boss said I could basically travel anywhere I need to pretty much anytime I wanted. I am sure our travel budget is not unlimited but it’s a weird and empowering feeling.

It’s also a strange feeling being a supervisor. There is a deference that comes from your employees by default when you hold power over them. It’s hard to tell sometimes when they are being sincere and when they are sucking up. And yet my boss doesn’t seem the least bit like my supervisor. She makes working there feel more like a social club and gossip hall. And if there is no time during work hours to gossip there is lunch hour club (in which I am already a charter member). I won’t be reading the paper much during lunch anymore; it has become that part of my job that seems to involve necessary social networking.

My commuting almost doesn’t exist. My 60-75 minutes commutes in each direction now are 10-15 minutes in rush hour. I haven’t parked at work in more than a dozen years. I’ve forgotten how cold it can be to walk into the office at 7 AM from a distant parking lot. But this is about the only part of my new job that is a detraction. The USGS campus is gorgeous, still looks modern (for being 30 years old) and is surrounded by woods. It is arguably the prettiest federal campus in the nation. Perhaps I am in federal worker paradise. The National Science Foundation has prettier workspace but their space is leased. At USGS in Reston we inhabit real federal office buildings.

Starting any job is at first a little like being thrown into the deep end of a very cold pool. You wonder if you will sink or swim. If you start swimming you wonder how long you can keep going. And it’s been that sort of week. It felt overwhelming at times because the data dump came fast and furious. It was difficult for me to associate names with faces and roles. At the same time I had to learn a new information system and come up on all the jargon and acronyms that were tossed around so freely. But by the end of the week I was not just swimming, I was doing a great backstroke. Thanks in part to my boss who gave me the things I needed to read in the order I needed to read them, and who made herself freely available to answer questions I feel, if not up to speed, at least a good part of the way there.

My job is to be the chief of the National Internet Data Systems Unit. Basically we are the folks that provide the real time water information for the USGS web site. If you have a hankering to know the number of thousands of cubic feet of water moving across a local stream per second we likely have the latest real time data and can serve it up to you in a variety of formats from the convenience of your web browser. (Surprisingly this is a lot of people; you should see our web site statistics!) I am blessed with a talented staff, half programmers, half hydrologists who can aggregate and format vast volumes of real time satellite fed data into something for public consumption. It’s an amazing feat of engineering that inspires something like awe in me. It’s an honor and a bit humbling to be selected as the person who has responsibility for this system.

It is a challenge but one I needed. This job also feels very much like a gift. It feels like the gods decided to smile on me and fulfill my heart’s desire. I hope I continue to feel this way. I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed and scared, but mostly I feel energized and excited by the job. I hope I can continue to feel this way when the inevitable plain of disillusionment sets in. I hope I have the wisdom to make sound choices. I hope I can demonstrate people skills I sometimes have lacked in the past. I hope I live up to the trust that others have placed in me. I believe I will.

February 27th, 2004 at 09:24pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments

The Long Goodbye

I came home Thursday to find a welcome packet from my new employer, the U.S. Geological Survey. Inside was my official job offer letter, lots of forms to be filled out, and a CD about USGS from a human resources perspective. The CD was put together with good intentions. But it was obviously created by somebody with way too much time on his hands. It’s a multimedia CD. It is full of nautical “ports of call” that you must visit, or rather navigate to with your mouse. In the background are the sound of seagulls mourning and waves crashing on a beach. Umm, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I would have preferred a manual with the pertinent information. This is just dumb.

But there is no point in watching the CD right away, or even filling out the forms. Because although I gave noticed weeks ago I still have two weeks to go before I can begin my new job. Yes, I have to endure two more weeks of rising at 5:15 AM. Yes, two more weeks of working in some sort of limbo land. Two more weeks of being there and not being there.

Can’t I just leave already? Apparently not. I don’t start at USGS until February 23rd. My new boss is traveling so an earlier date wouldn’t work for her. So I have plenty of time to wind up and transition projects. And I have lots of opportunities to say goodbye over and over again.

Maybe it is just coincidence, but it seems all of a sudden I can get people to work on my projects. Typically when I want others to do work for me, my work drifts to the bottom of a long queue. But since I’m leaving all sorts of mini applications I’ve been working on are moving through development and testing into production. This is good. I’d rather leave things completed if possible. I’m a reasonably tidy person and don’t like to leave loose ends. I have eight more work days to bring them to closure. It should be more than enough.

For days after I gave my boss the news I was leaving I wandered around and no one said anything unusual to me. I found that very odd. Eventually I figured out that the chain of command hadn’t bothered to tell the rank and file that I was leaving. So I just announced it myself. Once the news got out then people stopped by my desk to wish me their best. I thanked them of course, but reminded them that I’d still be around for a while. I don’t want them to forget me quite yet. I don’t want to feel like a ghost walking down the hallways.

I still don’t know if there is a plan to give me a farewell luncheon. I don’t particularly care if I get one or not. I know Lynnette and Yolanda plan to take me out to lunch, and Yolanda is working on some sort of presentation. But I haven’t heard of any date for such an event. Perhaps they will hold it and forget to invite me.

I’ve heard a number of people tell me I am wise to leave at this time. “Get while the getting is good,” I hear often along with “You are one of the first rats off a sinking ship.” I heard this a lot when I left my last job, but AFPCA is still there. And I am sure ACF will continue to exist too. But it’s probably not a good omen for ACF that so many of its people feel this way. I would hope our management would take note. But they seem to be too busy demonstrating they can score all “greens” on the President’s Management Agenda than to worry about minor things like whether the staff’s morale is going down the toilet.

Doubtless to meet one of these pointless goals my position won’t be filled. According to Bush, fewer staff is good because we’ll be meaner and leaner. Our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Administration recently publicized our scorecard for the President’s Management Agenda. Woo hoo! We are all green! We’ve met goals like reduced staff counts and increased outsourcing! But this does not mean we are necessarily doing our job better or more effectively. It most likely means the opposite. This means fewer people overseeing work. And that means loss of focus and a higher likelihood that things will be poorly managed.

I’d feel better about leaving such silliness behind but I’m in Club Fed. That means USGS is going through this silliness too. And since I will have some supervisory responsibilities in my new job I too will probably be looking to get green marks to show how effective I am. A note to my new boss: expect me to support these goals but don’t expect me to believe this crap.

Sokhama took me out for a birthday lunch on Monday. Sokhama was my chief customer point of contact for a system I deployed back in late 1999. She since left ACF but since she is still located close by we meet for lunch once a month or so. One of the drawbacks of leaving is I will see a lot less of her. I’ll miss meeting her for lunch on a bench in the gardens of the Smithsonian castle, talking about stuff, then enjoying a walk on the Mall. As much as I’ll be glad not to work in D.C., I’ll also miss the energy of the city and the loveliness of the National Mall that was always so close to me.

I doubt I will have a lunch partner like Sokhama at USGS, but who knows? However, I will be able to come home for lunch any day I choose. And meeting my wife for lunch will be no big deal.

Eventually. Meanwhile, the days pass by so slowly.

February 8th, 2004 at 10:15am Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments