office work | This Is Drivel

happy in this job

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Dave O

I recently went to a meeting with my supervisor, who was busily working up an e-mail or a memo or something as I walked in. “Give me just a minute,” she said, banging away at the keyboard in a most determined way and I answered, “No problem,” and waited while she finished her thought.

When she hit the final full stop and turned from her keyboard, I made an offhand remark like, “Are they keeping you busy much?” She took a deep breath, let it out and said, and I wish I could quote her verbatim but it was something like, “Oh, it’s been one of those days, but I guess none of us has ever had a job that we looked forward to every day,” by which I’m sure she meant only that there are good days and there are bad days, not that she wasn’t happy in her job. But her comment made me perk right up and blurt, “That’s not true!” It was out of my mouth almost before I realized I’d said it.

That stopped her dead in her tracks. She looked puzzled, then asked, “You had a job that you looked forward to every day?” as if she didn’t quite believe it. And then she had to ask, “Well, what was it?”

So I proceeded to tell her about when I was a resource manager, programming the work schedule at a military facility just outside of Denver, Colorado. I know it sounds lethally boring and I wish I could tell you exactly what made it so enjoyable that I looked forward to it every day, but I can’t because I’ve been sworn to secrecy about it, not in the cool I’ll-have-to-kill-you-if-I-tell-you way but in a mundane, we’ll-both-go-to-jail-if-I-tell-you way. Think Edward Snowden instead of James Bond.

But I can tell you that I was part of a small, specialized team of people whose work made it possible for dozens of other people to get their work done. Without our team, everybody else would have been sitting on their hands a lot of the time and billions of dollars worth of hardware would have sat idle. The team I was on found where those idle spots were most likely to be and reassigned the hardware.

It was entirely different work from anything else I had done before that, so I had to learn it from scratch, mostly by sitting next to the inestimable Chad Burlingame for a few weeks as he explained how things worked, talked me through what he was doing, then moved aside to let me sit in his seat and nervously try to mimic what I’d seem him do. I listened carefully as he patiently correct the thousand and one mistakes I made, and eventually he let me do the job on my own, so I must have learned it well enough.

I did that job for three or four years (I forget exactly), and loved it from beginning to end. There were probably a few off days, but I don’t remember them and I never got tired of the job. I would’ve done it for as long as the Air Force let me stay there.

cross-eyed

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Dave O

I’ve been making myself cross-eyed staring at drivers license applications all day long. Or is it driver’s license applications? I feel there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere. Without it, “drivers license applications” is just a long string of nouns. Truly, the phrase should be “applications for the licensure of drivers” because it sounds so much more grand that way and because I’m kind of an officious boogerhead.

Staring at blank drivers license applications all day wouldn’t necessarily make me or anybody else cross-eyed, but examining hundreds of applications day in and day out, looking for mistakes, finding them and then meticulously cataloging them for analysis – that, I can tell you, would make everybody and their mothers lose their minds.

Not only have I been doing that, I’ve also been reviewing the applications that other people have already looked at, to make sure they haven’t missed anything. By actual count, the people in my office have looked at just over 3,900 applications and found mistakes on about half of them, which I have then re-reviewed. My brain hurts. I think it may be permanently damaged.

drier hands through technology

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Dave O

The management has installed new paper towel dispensers in the restrooms. These are better than the old paper towel dispensers because you don’t have to touch them with your dripping wet hands. There will always be a square of paper toweling hanging from the mouth of the dispenser. If you rip it off, another square will automatically be dispensed. The size of this square has been carefully calculated so it will be precisely the right amount to dry both your hands. Therefore, it is absolutely unnecessary for you to grab a second, third or fourth sheet of paper toweling. So just stop doing that. I mean it. Cut it out. And whoever told you to push the button that makes the dispenser spit out a sheet of toweling three feet long should learn to keep his mouth shut. You’re not supposed to touch the dispenser, remember? That’s why we took out the old dispensers and installed these high-tech dispensers! Use them the way they’re meant to be used, okay? Did you hear me? Keep your hands off them! Stop! Pushing! The! BUTTON!

steam dead

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Dave O

I’m wracking my brains trying to think of a single thing that happened to me yesterday worth writing up some drivel about, but it’s just not coming. I sat in a classroom all morning while I listened to a guy read power point slides to me, then sat in a classroom all afternoon to watch two people explain how to use the advanced features of a piece of software I’d never learned how to use. By the end of the day I was numb. That’s about all I’ve got.

Oh, and it’s real cold.

Wait! I almost forgot! When we got to the office in the morning it was oddly quiet. I even said something to B about it, like “Why aren’t the air handlers running?” When I walked into the classroom about ten minutes later, it felt like stepping into a meat locker. I stopped, turned and read the temperature on the thermostat by the door: 56 degrees. “No way,” I said out loud.

“Yeah,” the instructor said, “there’s no heat in the building.”

“There’s no heat in the building?” I asked. Because it didn’t seem possible that it could be as warm as 56 if there was no heat in the building. The temperature outside was seven below. But it was true. When I checked my e-mail there was a DMV-everybody message in my inbox explaining that a steam pipe had busted overnight and there was no heat coming in. They got it fixed by about ten o’clock, but it was mighty chilly for a while, especially near the windows where I was sitting.

b52

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Dave O

When I was about seven or eight years old, my dad took me to the open house at K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base in upper Michigan. It’s closed now, but back then the place was buzzing with B-52s, and Dad thought a visit would be pretty cool. It was. I even got to sit in the cockpit of a really big plane, might’ve even been a B-52. It was a different world then.

This story is relevant because I’ve been sitting through an advanced class in how to process applications for driver’s licenses, something I’ve never done but the rest of the people in the class have. The last hour of the class is a practice period, where the other students get to apply the lessons they just learned by logging in to a testing database and processing applications as if they were the real thing. I tried, but after logging in, I couldn’t even figure out how to open a record. They’d showed me all the advanced pieces of the processor, but they hadn’t shown me how to start the thing up. It was exactly as if the pilot of that bomber had sat me down in the cockpit, explained how that and that and that worked, and then said, “You know what? Why don’t you take her out for a spin? I’ll be right here if you have any questions.”

orienting

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Dave O

I’ve been banished to New Employee Orientation. Not forever. It just feels like forever. Amazing, really, how you can make time freeze in its tracks by putting any random set of Power Point slide up on a screen and have somebody read them to an audience. Einstein would’ve busted a blood vessel trying to figure out how that fit into his concept of time.

Lucky for me I’m at a table of people who don’t take it too seriously. Yesterday we designed a new license plate (because every single briefing has to have an activity), so we drew a fish swimming under some wavy lines and called that our Save The Great Lakes plate. Our plate wasn’t chosen by the committee to make it to production, but by then we’d moved on to playing with the pipe cleaners, so we weren’t bothered much.

If there’s one thing they should change about New Employee Orientation, it’s the candy. There’s probably way too much candy in the bowl on the tables, and it’s all gone by the end of the day. That means we’re eating it, but I don’t remember eating it, so we’re eating it without realizing we are, which usually happens when there’s a bowl of candy on the table. They should either get rid of the candy, or replace it with nuts or something healthy. Or, if they’re not willing to get rid of the candy, they should put out full-size candy bars, because when you eat one of those little things you always think, That was just a little piece of candy, so I can have another one. And you keep doing that until your stomach tells you you never want to see another piece of candy for as long as you live.

Barb Karpowla

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Dave O

Brittney: “Do you know Barb Karpowla?”

Me: “Who? I don’t think I’ve met her.”

Brittney [funny look]: “Barb, your wife. Do you carpool?”

Me: “Oh. Yeah. Uh, I thought you were asking about somebody named Barb Karpowla.”

Brittney [laughing]: “I thought you were making fun of me!”

return trip

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Dave O

At the end of my first day at my new job the boss came around and asked, “So, what do you think? Will you be coming back tomorrow morning, I hope?”

Of course I will. But it reminded me of the guy I hired as a limited-term employee not long ago. He came to work on Monday, which anybody knows is a throwaway day because he had to go to HR to get the introductory talk, then he had to talk to payroll, then I introduced him to everybody, then he couldn’t log on to his computer, then when he could log on we found out his computer wasn’t set up correctly, etc etc etc.

He was off Tuesday for a medical appointment. When he came back on Wednesday he put in a full day of work. It was paper-pushing, mostly, but he knew that’s what it was going to be because I’d made sure to describe the job in some detail when I interviewed him.

Thursday morning he came into my office to say, “Sorry, this isn’t a good fit for me. I won’t be staying.” I got one day out of him, then good-bye. So I guess it does happen.

moving on

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Dave O

This was my last day working at the offices of the Department of Safety and Professional Services, known as the Department of Regulation and Licensing when I was hired there a little more than three years ago. On Monday morning when My Darling B and I climb into the O-Mobile to start the commute to work, we’ll head straight for Hill Farms on the beltline instead of meandering across the isthmus through town so that B can drop me off at the corner of Dickenson and Washington, as has been our custom until now. B will be pleased that she doesn’t have to drive (I always end up getting stuck with the driving, for unspoken reasons that I don’t clearly understand beyond, “Because I’m the guy and have to do what SWAMBO says”) and her commute will be much shorter.

I am of mixed feelings.

Pretty Damn Happy: It’s a new job! A new adventure with new skills to learn and people to meet. No, really. As cliche as I know this is going to sound, I’ve learned to look forward to a change in jobs because each new job has been packed with opportunities to expand my horizons. Even if I push them only a little bit, it’s still a net gain, right? Right.
Relieved: Learning to do a new job every few years is normal to me. I think the longest I’ve ever been at one office or workshop or whatever has been about five years. This has been going on so long that it’s nearly impossible to imagine what it would be like to work in one office at one job all my life. How do people do that?
Kinda Bummed: Well, more than just “kinda.” I’m leaving behind lot of people I sincerely enjoyed working with, quite a few of whom I came to think of as friends. Even though we worked hard to get the job done, they showed me how to have a little fun with it. I think I respect them more for the having fun part than the getting the job done part.
Ambivalent: In the military incarnation of my life I got used to moving from one job to another every few years, so I’ve never become so attached to a job that I couldn’t bear leaving it.

I’m thinking it’s going to take maybe a couple weeks to sort through these mixed feelings before I finally settle on one that I’m happy with. Until then, I’ll just hang out here in limbo and deal with my transition from one office to the next.

summary

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Dave O

cake This Friday will be my last day at the office, so my coworkers organized a nice little pot luck dinner as a going-away for me. They booked a conference room and brought plenty of delicious goodies and we sat around the table for about an hour during the lunch break and shot the bull while we noshed.

As delicious as all the dishes they brought were, the best thing about it was the cake. Cindy, one of the women who organized the pot luck, ordered a cake from Hy Vee and when she phoned in the order, she asked them to write “Good luck and best wishes – Later, traitor!” (Because I’m going to work at another state agency.) Here’s an important lesson for you: Never phone in an order when there’s a chance the person on the other end of the line doesn’t know how to spell. Cindy said she picked up the cake with fifteen minutes to spare, but on the way to the cash register she looked down and saw that it said, “Later Trader!” Well, nothing she could do about it at that point, so she just paid and brought it to the pot luck. I’m so glad she did. I’ll get a chuckle out of that every time I think of it.