Writing on the Job

Hey, don't mind the delay....I've just been lost in management hell.

Not sure about outside the government, but here in the Bowels of Bureacracy, "management hell" is the perfect storm of reviewing promotion packages and writing mid-term evaluations. Lest you think that's still "not too bad," remember that the Laws of Bureaucracy require each action to be accompanied by an arcane set of rules, multiple forms, and multiple levels of review.

Needless to say, all of this takes up most of February (at least if you're like me and have a good bit of people underneath you in the organizational chart).

In a way feedback on a promotion package can dovetail quite nicely into a mid-term evaluation because you can provide an employee opportunities to accept more responsibility in your organization if they don't like where they fall out in the mix of things.Unfortunately, even there you have to abide by the rule that you must break up the conversation into two separate conversations and get confirmation that the employee understands that it's two separate conversations. Not to mention, by the end of February supervisors are so addled-brained with this whole process, they can barely string words together or if they do it sounds like buzzword gumbo.

The good news...I'm writing.

The bad news...I'm not writing romance novels like I want.

Saying evaluation and promotion feedback is writing is like saying your letter to the editor counts as a publishing credit.

I did get a letter to the editor recently published though. Just saying. It's my name in print in the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of the Atlantic.Go ahead, look it up. I mean, it's still kinda cool that they thought my bitching was worthwhile enough to be considered for "The Conversation."


But anyway..."Writing on the Job"...doesn't that sound illicit? It would be if I could squirrel away enough time to pound out a chapter of erotic romance.

The fact is I do count this management hell as writing, even storytelling. How else do you capture what you've done in the last year for a wider audience, particularly when you're in a technical field like me and my employees? You have to get them with a hook!!

A quick lesson I gave my employees:

DON'T WRITE:  "I mowed the lawn."
DO WRITE:  "Tall grass was allowing gremlins to sneak into our house and break shit, so I mowed the lawn decreasing gremlin population in our house by 99.9%."

When management sees this, they're totally like "holy shit, gremlins!!!"  I kid you not, this is true. 

Not everyone can do this, which is why in my own promotion package I specifically pointed to my pursuit of a Degree in Writing Popular Fiction as a HUGE benefit for government as a whole.

Cue sly eyebrow raise & delicious grin.......mmhmmmm..........All of leadership should fear the gremlins!

Curious Morals

My first-grader and I...

Me: I thought you had a 100-day of school project you were supposed to do.

Jack: Yeah, I gave a girl $1 to do it for me. So then I only had $2 but the project was done. 

Me: …..

Jack: She wanted to do it.

Me: Or she wanted your money. Did you eat lunch yesterday?

Jack: I ate lunch.

Me: How much is lunch?

Jack: 3 or 4 dollars

Me: …..

Jack: I mean 2 or 3 dollars.

Me: So you ate lunch with your $2.

Jack: Yeah!

6-year-olds have curious morals, and Jack especially. I would think that's an age thing, but my other son Lincoln isn't usually as egocentric. A part of me thought, "it's wrong to not do your own work." But a stronger part of me was more concerned about Jack having enough money to eat lunch. 

In a way, I agreed with his decision. 

The project was to find 100 pieces of things and glue them to a piece of paper. Does that sound tedious? It sounds like a office temp job - GO, Copy, Collate, Staple, man-child scrub! Would I want to do that project? No. Would I pay someone $1? Absolutely!

The real moral of the story is....DELEGATE! Good leaders and managers do this! They have to. Need something done? Can't do it? Won't do it? Hire someone to do it!

Jack isn't a brilliant student, but he makes up for it with an uncanny charisma. When he plays "pick a hand," he doesn't always show you what's in the other hand. 9 times out of 10 it's a shell game. He might end up in showbusiness. A game show host, a comedian, a magician, a Ryan Seacrest, a Caesar Flickerman. And I would say...well, that just suits him to a tee.

Speaking of show business, this idea for getting a 6yo to tell a story is brilliant. Wish I thought of it. It has a moral of the story too. :)

the Scared is scared from Bianca Giaever on Vimeo.

Recycling Day

I noticed this morning that my neighbors were showing up for the recycling game. We routinely win recycling rounds by the sheer amount of crap (mostly wanted) that we order from Amazon, but not only did we have competition, but they brought their A game.

They must have noticed the Coach shopping bag...or maybe the large cardbox indicating the top-of-the-line steam cleaner that we just ordered this week....or maybe the shoebox for my brand new running shoes.

Something must have stirred their middle-class angst!

I also noticed that they most distinctly put all of their crap out before 6pm last night. I'm sure one of the HOA trolls will take note. I only notice because it was drilled into our heads that WE DO NOT LIVE IN A DUMP. Don't put out trash/recycling before 6pm!

I have been socialized. I almost picked up one of those "Choose Civility" bumper stickers that they hand out to residents here.

In other news...this is how I feel today...

Girl Brain on Color Matching

I'm pretty sure all psychologists would agree that there are different parts to a persons brain. Freud proposed the ego, id, super-ego as a way of structuring the psyche. The older I get the more I wonder if the id especially has gender components.

For example, whenever I have a sudden longing to play with Micromachines (which they don't make anymore), I feel like I'm tapping into my boy brain.

Since I'm female I notice that my girl brain is an even more potent part of this repressed psyche, and there are levels of pleasure that are downright erogenous if maximized.

For instance....

Think of all the ways we get Girl Brain to work out:

1. I work out, so I can eat chocolate. 
2. It's zumba, so it's so fun it's not even working out.
3. I'm gonna work out, so I can take a shower, so I can wear my BRAND NEW PERFUME that just arrived in the mail on NICE CLEAN SKIN!!! OMG, I'm gonna smell amazing!

That last one I came up with last night. And my boyfriend looked at my like I had two heads when I said it.

How about color matching?

Color matching is like chocolate for my girl brain, and the more I can secretly work it into my attire, the more I feel like THE QUEEN OF ALL FASHION!

Level 0: Matching pants with shoes

• Effect Negligible. Seriously toddler girls can do this much.

Level 1: Matching winter hat with gloves

• Effect: Overall feeling of put-togetherness. I'm ready to be seen in public.

Level 2: Matching hat and gloves with the thread used in pattern on winter scarf.

• Effect: Put-together but also clever and rather worldly since I got my pashminas in Dubai.

Level 3: Using this hat/gloves/scarf color to match the belt you're also wearing underneath coat.

• Effect: Put-together, clever, and anticipating a nice REVEAL when you take your coat off AND YOU STILL MATCH!  #shock-and-awe

Level 4: Matching bra and panties with accessories.

•  Effect: Put-together, clever, and naughtily anticipating AN EVEN BETTER REVEAL at the end of the day.

Level 5: Matching the color of your shirt to the LINING OF YOUR SHOES!

• Effect: Orgasmic self-adulation!!!

Come on now, SHOES!!! It starts and ends there!

Wolf Moon

Last night was a full moon. I'm a big fan of full moons. I find them completely fascinating. The idea that years ago the phases of the moon were considered magical gives them an allure to me. (I feel the same way about the mysticism behind the Holy Eucharist...and ghost hunting.) Because there seems nothing more logical than organizing your life by season, I adopted pagan-like names for the moons and began treating them as significant markers in the year.

January's moon is the Wolf Moon, and is one of my particular favorites. Years ago during the January moon, the wolves would get so hungry in the wintertime, they would come into the towns and villages to steal chickens (and maybe babies). Thus the name.

I have told this story to my boys for years now, and because they are young, they demanded a resolution to the situation that would render wolves less scary. I told them that if they dressed up like wolves and howled at the moon, other packs of wolves wouldn't bother their neighborhood. So they do that. They howl.

When I see my kids walk down our dark path to the lake in the dead of winter at bedtime, even though "there might be other wolves out there," as my 5-year-old says, I understand better what early man was doing when they set out to worship anything - manage the unpredictable world.

Becky's First Law of Bureaucracy

Today was good day for me and the government.

I was told that I was valued. I was encouraged to follow projects that I enjoyed. I found people who were just as enthusiastic about them. And best of all....I had a sense of humor.

What else can you do when a developer of a major project tells you that not only did he not expect people to want to export results to a spreadsheet, but that he also expected end users to be able to write their own Python scripts in order to interpret the results of a query to his database?

Hahahaha!! Sometimes the government is like when my 6-year-old uses first grade logic to explain the existence of unicorns!

Why does this happen?

Presenting the first of Becky's Laws of Bureaucracy:

The Law of Mediocrity Acceptance
Allow room for mediocrity, but encourage people to rise above it.

Some people need a box. They love the box, and they can't operate outside of it. These people are generally at the middle of the bell curve. The government - like society in general - needs to find places for those people. We need to develop a check list, so that they can follow it. In this way they will always know how to do the bare minimum. In general things will get done. And those people will be happy because as Tom Stoppard wrote... "Life in a box is better than no life at all."  [nevermind that in the stage play, that line is said in a coffin]

The bureaucracy also needs to accept that some people can master multiple boxes, can move between boxes, and can create new boxes. These people are force multipliers. If allowed to thrive, not only will things get done, but things will improve.

The bureaucracy also needs to accept that some people should be sent straight to the Farm to pull weeds and spread manure. But this last part is a rare thing for government to accept.

For more on the psychological pandering to mediocrity and how the Jets personify it, check this out...That Sunk-Cost Feeling.  Haha...it's not just the government.

Portrait of the Lady Novelist as a Young Girl

Growing up in Georgia, my friend Erin and I were the champions of the romance novel among our circle of friends. Compared to the Southern Baptist contingent that largely made up our hometown, our parents were religiously tolerant, liberal, and most important at that age non-curfew. Snellville...everybody is somebody in Snellville. Our high school library didn't have romance novels, we gladly brought our own, dog-eared at all the best parts.

I always thought that my mom raised me to be a good feminist, but I didn't realize how this small act of independent thinking regarding romance novels was an example of it. 

Here is a video on why the history of romance novels is important in relation to women's studies:

I love writing romance novels as well. In the course of moving last month, I found that one box you never want to open but can't help it. All my old notebooks! My tweeny handwriting! All of them filled with gothic, melodramatic romance. I can't help but hug my young feminist self for all of it!  :)