The key

The key to doing government contracting work and not losing your mind is basically to set aside all of your reasonable expectations and make peace with the fact that the gears of the machine move at two speeds: “stop” and “flesh-shredding”. Yes, yes, it certainly would be nice for everyone to be respectful of each other’s time and realize that if something needs to be done in the next four weeks then there should probably be incremental progress every day, or at least every week, and that taking three and a half weeks to do your share and then expecting me to do my share (utterly dependent on yours being done first) in the last two days is aggravatingly disrespectful and a recipe for failure. It would be nice, but trees on every corner that dispense free soft-serve chocolate-caramel-swirl ice cream would be nice, too.

So I try, and mostly succeed, to stay pretty Zen about the fact that I’d prefer a steady trickle of work as opposed to twiddling my thumbs sometimes and racing to hit deadlines others, but keep dealing with the latter because that’s just reality. But of course, there’s a corollary to that reality, which is as follows: the speed of the gears will always change from “stop” to “flesh-shredding” at the exact same time that uncontrollable circumstances, like a sick baby, force me to miss a couple days of work.

Every. Freaking. Time.

So of course, over the course of Wednesday and Thursday and a little bit of this morning set aside for a pediatrician’s visit (official diagnosis: “the creeping crud” – awesome) there were e-mails a flyin’ at work with one thing and another that had been holding me up being resolved, at which point I was immediately lagging and dragging the process down. Considering how often I feel like I have literally zero justification for my position and continued employment, the feeling of actually falling behind on the few scraps of work thrown my way is exponentially worse. Totally irrational – in all likelihood the utmost dire consequence of missing a deadline (even several deadlines) would be a lowered score set on my annual performance review, and a smaller salary increase for 2010, boo hoo hoo – but acknowledging the irrationality of a feeling strangely fails to make the feeling suck any less.

The fact is, the feeling of doom shall pass and it really won’t take much sacrificial flesh for me to catch up on my outstanding assignments and slow the gears down to a halt again. Less transitory is the soul-groan-inducing realization that just as I was about to burst out of The Hole (leave time which I technically owe my employer because I have exceeded the hours I’ve accrued) I am now deeper into it. Back in April I took a week’s vacation, and then between April and June there were a lot of sick baby days, which mercifully ended when little Jumbo Jr. had ear tubes implanted and stopped getting recurrent ear infections (or recurrent flare-ups of one never-ending ear infection). But by surgery time I was deeply in debt for leave time. I earn about half a day every two-week pay period. Which means I will have worked off Wednesday and Thursday in about eight weeks. I suppose I should really look at this more positively, and take heart from the example of John Constantine (of the gnarly Hellblazer comics, not the mediocre Constantine movie) – he sold his soul to multiple devils and assured himself functional immortality, because if the devils allowed him to die then they’d have to fight each other to the death to see who got to claim his indivisible soul. By similar logic, if I keep owing my employer more and more time to make up for leave used, I can never be fired because it’s better for the books to keep me on. Yes, that’s … cheery.


Today’s delicious irony, then, involves a government office staple known as “59 minutes authorized”. In previous jobs at more start-up type companies, this was known as “why don’t you guys knock off early today” or even better “go the hell HOME.” It just means that the office is more or less officially shutting down at 4:01 p.m. instead of 5:00 p.m. and it usually coincides with a long holiday weekend and thus serves as a goodwill head start. (For those of you who don’t work anywhere near the federal schedule, or in the U.S. at all, this coming Monday is Columbus Day.) Why the head start has to be 59 minutes long instead of a full hour is an inscrutable mystery which I have never even bothered to … scrut … because the fact is “59 minutes authorized” only applies to government employees, and I am a government contractor, and ne’er the two shall meet. I could probably fill an entire blog (a shrill, bitter, awful, unreadable blog) with the differences between how government agencies treat their permanent employees and how they treat the contractors in the same offices and in many cases the same roles. This is just one small example. Today, my employer timesheet was due by 10 a.m., so I dutifully filled mine in with leave for the past two days and 8 full hours for today. I didn’t get in this morning until around 10, which means in order to comply with my contract and, for all I know, court martial enforceable federal law, I need to stay until at least 6 p.m. Then at noon the e-mail went around about the office closing early. So I get to spend two hours in a ghost cubicle farm instead of just one.

This job pays the bills. Including Netflix, sushi and a pretty generous comic book allowance. I have to keep telling myself that.

Oh, and did you hear about “Cisco Fatty”? If you were wondering why I refer to my wife and child by pseudonyms, myself as “me”, and my employer as “my employer”, that’s pretty much why.