TriumphAnt

It’s Obligatory Bitch About Work (OBAW) Day!!

OBAW 1: I work on the 12th floor of a building that is actually one of four. Together, the four probably qualify to be called a “complex”. (Lord knows when you ask a ground-floor commissionaire for directions anywhere, he gives you just enough guidance to get yourself to the next commissionaire, who in turn will pass you off like you are a baton and they are some sort of retired veterans’ relay team. The building I’m in is home to a pretty major department in the Government of Canada, possessed of the biggest single budget in government, in fact – for one thing, it distributes the monthly Employment Insurance cheques, but I digress.)

But what falls within the eyesight of each and every person who steps from the elevator on my floor is a small black sign with white letters that announces, “For elevator service and assistance…” That, at least is what it’s supposed to announce. Long ago, some wag who no doubt believed the only thing separating him from the wit of PG Wodehouse and Stephen Leacock combined was exposure, took it on himself to stand and methodically obliterate a few of the letters, leaving, “For elevator vice and ass stance…” (I say “himself” because there isn’t an adult woman in the world who would possibly be that juvenile and be employed by the Government of Canada.)

It has to be the same guy who scratches out portions of the instructions on hot air hand driers in men’s rooms. They all seem to come with a variation on their operating instructions that direct the user to push the knob and turn the exhaust upwards to dry your face. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered scratch-outs that leave a variation on these directions telling the user to "turn… your… knob upwards and… blow…"

And people wonder why the Canadian “public service” occasionally gets tarred with a pretty broadly-swept brush.

OBAW 2: We have just completed a massive re-configuration of our cubeville space. The process required our packing everything into boxes, labelling same, going home for the weekend and returning to find the entire floor had been re-carpeted and each cubicle fitted with new dividers and work surfaces, (you can’t really call them desks when they’re fused to the wall, with nothing touching the floor) and new storage space.

The end result has been a net enlargement of the aisle space separating the lines of cubicles, and a corresponding reduction in the amount of individual in-cubicle space, with a corresponding increase in the overall pissed-offedness of the employees who now have to conform their box contents to the reduced space to hold it all.

But for me, the worst of it is that this new configuration has me sitting with my back to the “door” (read that as “gap in the cube wall”). When I went home on Friday, I was actually seated side-on to the “door”, so I could at least see who was coming in and who was merely passing by. Now I can’t, so every extra-cubicular rustle of fabric causes me to turn around to see whether it’s a visitor or merely a passing Ringwraith in search of the One Ring to Rule Them All (Pat Pend, tm reg’d, void where prohibited by law – that last, by the way, is not so much a statement of admonition as it is an anarchical directive.)

I have since spoken with the manager of the installation team and with the person who co-ordinated the reconfiguration design. And I have received the astonishing intelligence that “no one likes it”, ergo, there’s no point re-re-configuring my workstation or they’d have to do it for everyone!

Assembling these damned spaces is not rocket science, and their components are flexible. How hard would it have been, I wonder, to have had a brief pre-move chat with each space-holder and ask us what wall we want our “desk” to be on; what direction we want our monitor to face and whether or not we want / need (I don’t) one of those under-desk slide out keyboard trays that probably cost the government about $200 a pop and are, inevitably, the first items collecting by the freight elevator labelled “surplus” after each section’s move is completed?

Having reached the ripe old half-century point in my life, I wear bifocals and I need my computer monitor set slightly below eye level. The good folks in “IT” repositioned my computer so that, when I came in on Monday, I was actually facing a monitor set slightly above eye level. So I had to tilt my head back to be able to view the screen through that portion of my lenses intended for near work. I looked like Joe Flaherty doing Alistair Cooke on SCTV’s send-up of Masterpiece Theatre!

It took me about a hour and a half to disconnect all the cabling and power source links to my workstation, re-feed the wires through a different part of my “desk”top and reconnect everything, with my monitor now sitting where it works best for me. But at least that could be done as a DIY exercise. Reconfiguring the work surface locations rather inconveniently marries the twin difficulties of a requirement for tools designed specifically to fasten and unfasten the wall-hung furniture, plus the fact that they rather inconveniently weigh hundreds of pounds and moving them will require the constitution of and the strength of twelve good men and true.

Could be worse… my boss – a unit director for God’s sake! – had his corner “office” reconfigured so that not only is it significantly smaller than it was, its entrance is now actually part-way along the cubicle wall of one of his subordinates. In other words, he has to enter her office en route to his own. And as luck would have it, she requires more than average privacy in order to concentrate on her own work.

Perfect. And so considerate of the career progress that marks one’s arrival into a senior supervisory position.

On another note…

I have just finished reading Stephen King’s book of advice to budding writers. It’s called, appropriately enough, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”. Besides documenting his own pathway to bestsellerdom, he has a lot of straightforward, no-nonsense suggestions. He believes that an awareness of what makes some writing good and other writing bad comes not from any “magic bullet”, but rather from the experience of reading and the practice of writing. And by “reading”, he means a lot of reading. His own booklist for the past year is paced at better than a book a week, and that’s just listing the titles he recommends.

Its epilogue is an especially grim chapter about his accident – he was almost killed when a van smacked into him while he was walking on the shoulder of the road. And it’s a necessary epilogue to this book, because this is the project that King was working on at the time of the accident.

Not surprisingly, he’s no fan of writers’ workshops because he suspects its participants, in fact its facilitators, harbour either a fear or an unwillingness to be honest in their criticism of the work of other paying participants.

As King puts it, (in this case, he’s describing a writers’ camp where feedback take place around a late-night bonfire): “What about those critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. ‘I love the feeling of Peter’s story,’ someone may say. ‘It had something… a sense of I don’t know… there’s a loving kind of you know… I can’t exactly describe it…’ Other writing-seminar gemmies include ‘I felt like the tone thing was just kind of you know; the character of Polly seemed pretty much stereotypical; I loved the imagery because I could see what he was talking about more or less perfectly.’ And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful. In too many cases the teachers and writers in residence are nodding, smiling, and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that, if you have a feeling you just can’t describe, you might just be, I don’t know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.”

And finally, here’s the Gold Medal award winner in my ad hoc Best End-of-Election-Campaign-Before-the-Vote-Result-is-Known comment from among the many, many I read on voting day. It’s from the June 28th Globe and Mail’s Roy MacGregor: “At a park between Squamish and Whistler, I hiked a trail until it came to a tumbling, roaring creek where, if you took off your shoes and waded in, the mountain water would turn your ankles so numb within a few minutes that you could barely wade back out. Tomorrow morning, depending on the returns, I may have to come back here to dip my head.”

I’ll do an election-result rant in a day or few.