About to be enGulfed

On Monday I'll start a new job (a detail for six months) and I'll be working on communications about our agency's work on the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The scope of this disaster is hard for me to comprehend. I found a widget from the Public Broadcasting System that shows how much oil has leaked since the incident began April 20. You can adjust the rate based on the various estimates available.



If It Was My Home uses Google Maps to show you the surface area of the spill superimposed on your part of the world. This is oddly effective, since you have probably visited places at different distances from your home and have a personal grasp of how far the spill reaches.

Web design and stuff

As our workgroup deals with comments on a look-and-feel redesign, we get a number of requests for making navigation elements smaller or even eliminating them, allowing for much longer page titles, and expanding the number of items we allow in the "quick finder" table at the top of some pages.

It's making me think that in Web design, as in real life (as in Weight Watchers, for that matter!):

If you keep looking for more room to cram your stuff,
have you considered that maybe you have too much stuff?

:^p

Sent this around the office today

Seventeen years ago today
I began working for EPA

Young and able, fit and trim
My head held nary an acronym

I thought I'd be a French professor
Instead I used a word processor

I can remember when email was new
And your boss got the copy you'd highlight blue

Shelter in place and TQM
I've re-org'd with the best of them

Climate change and mutant frogs
And even federal government blogs

Presidents come and presidents go
But I have learned to go with the flow

The passing of another year
Is cause for cheer, or fear, or beer

Whichever of those is in your head
Come have cookies and pumpkin bread

They're on my floor, inside the south door
And when they're gone, there won't be more

It's "official"

Today I attended a presentation on the new electronic official personnel file. It's an OPM thing that government agencies are switching to so that we'll all be in the same system. Change is scary, and people are suddenly feeling nervous and protective about their personnel files that they've never valued enough to ask to see before now.

My favorite part is the watermark that will appear on anything we print from this system. It will read:

This is an "official" government document generated from the EHRI eOPF system.

Earth Day comes but once a year

"Earth Day every day!"

Uh, sounds great, yeah. I mean, really, it's a good thing to be aware of your impact on the environment. I believe conservation of energy and natural resources.

I also work at a place where Earth Day brings out some of the same feelings as Christmas if you work at a shopping mall. Yes, it's great, and it brings you lots of attention, but it's also crazy busy and you feel a distinct relief when it's over.

I got to write a post about this for our blog at work. I wrote a straight version and a rhyming version, and I'm pleased to say that they published the latter.

I have mixed feelings as we approach Earth Day each year. I wish we started planning further in advance so that it wouldn't feel so flurried. I prefer events that accomplish something tangible to ones where people make speeches. This year was better than most; we had a clear theme of recycling electronics and medications that was easy to embrace. (Actually, recycling is not something our agency regulates, but everyone thinks we do. We encourage the heck out of it, though.)

We organized a number of events and I think it went well. Our booth at Daley Plaza got many visitors and we gave away lots of publications. It really is heartening to see so many people thinking about protecting the environment. I never thought I'd hear the phase "carbon footprint" anywhere outside our office, but now it's in all the mainstream media. (I sometimes wonder what it's like farther away from urban media epicenters like Chicago. Do I just think that people are excited/upset about the environment because our local media are saturated with those themes? What do people in the rest of the country think?)

Our band performed again for one of the events. We call ourselves the Earth Tones and play environmentally themed songs plus my favorite Irish and American fiddle tunes. :^)

Earth Day is also a personal anniversary; my better half and I had our first date on Earth Day. (My friend Al used to suggest celebrating by practicing running in slow motion toward each other across a flowery meadow. It's usually too cold or too damp on April 22nd for that.)

I hope your Earth Day brought something you can use the rest of the year.

P.S. - The Earth Tones are booking for 2009... ;^)

Fun Monday

(I'm all a-flutter. I'm so excited to be participating in Fun Monday! Thanks to Ann for hosting.)

A Web site that's changed my life.

Well, there's a couple different ways to approach this. Since I'm feeling generous, you get them both.

About ten years ago, my husband sent me a link to this quiz: Porn Star or My Little Pony? My devotion to The Brunching Shuttlecocks was instantaneous, intense, enduring. How can I ever forget The Complete and Utter Idiot's Guide to Making a Baloney Sandwich or The Björk Song? When I need laughs, I need hardcore nonsense, and here I always found my fix. The only thing remotely like it at the time was Dilbert; there was no comparison. Of course, the lads eventually grew up and got real jobs (though Lore is still out there blogging). But my sense of humor was irreversibly perverted: Engrish.com, Internet Bumper Stickers, The Onion.

On the serious side, now.

I took a job with the government sixteen years ago. I worked as a grants project officer at first. This was nothing like what I had studied to do. J'étais censée devenir professeur de français. All those years of studying French and I wasn't a French professor after all? Kinda neat, once you get past the distress.

Well, after a couple of years someone said, "Hey, you don't seem to be afraid of computers. There's this new thing called a Web site-- it's sort of like a Gopher site-- would you like to build one? We'll show you how." I accepted, and I think it was Halloween 1994 when the SEAHOME Web site first went live. (I can't find any screenshots from back then, but the Wayback Machine has a few archived from later years.)

This really did change my life. It headed me in a new direction in my career. Heck, it gave me a career. I've moved on to be the lead web person for our region, and I really enjoy what I do.

Hope this is what you were looking for. Can't wait to read the other posts for Fun Monday.

No more earplugs

I still feel childish about my last ranting post. I never want to take people for granted or let the little insignificant things get in the way.

When it came time to move to our new desks, we chose based on seniority (length of time since the date we started government service). I've had people shake their heads at how petty that is, but if you think of Office Space or The Office, you'll remember that pettiness defines the modern cubicle farm. There were three window seats, and I was number four in line. Jessica, our move coordinator, offered to go stand in the hotline cubicle and talk to herself while I scoped out the noise bleedover level in the remaining cubicles. Now that's a pal! I chose one that seemed workable, if a bit dim, and began moving my non-essential possessions over the next few days so there wouldn't be so much to do on move day.

A couple days before we were to move, my colleague who was number three in seniority came by and suggested I not move all my stuff to that new cubicle. It looked like she'd be moving to a job in another division, and we'd most likely get to play musical chairs all over again. It came to pass exactly as she predicted, and I now have a splendid seat by the window facing west. It is bright and quiet, and there's a slight white noise effect from the ventilation system that masks most nearby conversations. And I have a view by day and by night:

Sometimes you get lucky. :^)

Why I wear earplugs at work

I keep a pair of squishy foam earplugs at work. They have some fantastic industrial rating, and when I wear them, I can't even hear my keyboard as I type. Clearly, I'm not working with a jackhammer or a high-powered blender. So why do I wear them, in my pleasant office setting?

Because I work about ten feet away from someone, who, like Nature, abhors a (conversational) vacuum and so fills it all day long with talk.

I try to remind myself that he does a good job, that I'm glad he's here, that he's a pleasant, dedicated worker. If I were shipwrecked alone on a desert island, I'm sure I'd grow to miss his constant chatter. But it might take a few years.

I try to just concentrate on my work, and sometimes that's enough. But sometimes I just can't shut him out.

"Would a brown bear really kill a grizzly bear? Don't they know they're cousins? They shouldn't do that! I don't think I like Nature."

"Did you ever hear of a fan tax? I know this guy who's one of the last clothing manufacturers in the city, and they came to him one day and said, 'you know, we noticed you have a fan up in the back of your shop, and there's a new fan tax.' And a ladder tax, too. Can you imagine that?..."

"Wow. I put (unintelligible) in my shoes and now they're stretched out."

"They're coming to our house today to put in new cable TV. HD TV, something to do with high definition, supposed to be a sharper picture..."

"I got a new phone. The old one was really big, and it didn't get good reception anymore and..."

All this in the space of four minutes before I inserted the earplugs. Sweet Lord in Heaven! Can you not give it a rest?

This is when he's got down time. Otherwise he's answering the phone, routing calls to the appropriate people. Sometimes the appropriate people would be a state government agency, or maybe a mental health hotline. He's got Bob Newhart syndrome. Like the comedian in his early days, he doesn't just answer the phone; he repeats everything the caller says. "You say you've got a terrible problem? You say you're concerned for your life? Your, uh, yes, neighbor lives downstairs and she's... trying to poison you by using dryer sheets in the laundry? And you want us to come out and test your apartment? And arrest your neighbor?"

It just drives me wild sometimes. There's no partition between this gentleman and me, so nothing to diminish the sound. He's fairly quiet when he's by himself, though he does like to go around to people's cubicles and strike up conversation with them if the phones are slow. Once his colleague arrives in late morning, he's got a tidal wave of suppressed chatter that needs to come out.

But I see an end in sight. In a few more weeks, we're to move desks, and I should have enough seniority to choose a desk well out of earshot of the Babbling Brook.

I feel guilty even writing about it, because I know he means no harm. But I can't hear myself think when I have to hear someone else think, too.