Overclocking

I got a work e-mail from my government boss (as opposed to my contractor boss) about a week and a half ago, and I’m somewhat tempted to reproduce it in its entirety right here, but at the same time I recognize that doing so would probably cross a line that I’ve been conscientiously trying not to cross, so I’ll have to simply sum up.

The e-mail was a quick-and-dirty rundown of the various office policies and procedures, and official spelling out of How We’re Supposed To Do Things Around Here. And don’t get me wrong, I appreciate being given specific documentation as much as the next guy, despite how accustomed I’ve become to just kind of trusting my own common sense and ability to make best guesses and move on. I especially enjoyed the way the whole e-mail was framed, with my boss seemingly going out of her way to specify that she was not trying to address any problem behavior and not thinking of anyone in particular who was doing things that directly contravened the (previously unexpressed) rules. According to my boss there hasn’t been enough time to do a proper new hire orientation lately as lots of new people have come on board, and an employee handbook doesn’t technically exist, hence the e-mail bulletin.

I suppose the most noteworthy thing about the list of do’s and don’t’s in the e-mail was how many of them I personally have been contravening in the year or so that I’ve been working out of this office exclusively. Like, it was news to me that lunch breaks are only supposed to be a half hour long. Sometimes I work through lunch and sometimes I leave for an hour or so, and no one has ever demanded that I account for my whereabouts after the fact. Once I start thinking about things like that I start to wonder if the e-mail was sent out to everyone in the department because that was the easiest Outlook Address Book Group to use, even though it really only applies to the government employees. Contractors just have to work the hours their contract stipulates, and my contractor boss has been pretty clear on that all along.

So it seems to be just another case of the perils of having two different bosses who routinely contradict one another, and again, I’m pretty used to that. Usually when I have any doubt I listen to my contractor boss because, seriously, the government policies often don’t make any sense. Another item in the e-mail noted that the core hours of the office are 0900 – 1500, and that no “alternate schedules” are allowed. Which … ugh … let me see if I can parse this out. There are six core hours a day, and five workdays a week, so does that means we are only required to work 30 hours a week? Clearly not (my contract stipulates the standard 40) but it does mean that whatever hours we work they need to cover the core hours at a minimum.


That also means that you can work from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m., or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., or whatever else works for you above and beyond that, as long as you’re present between 9 and 3. And I know lots of people who come and go early, and lots who come and go late; I’m an early-in, early-out type myself. All of which certainly seems like alternating (early vs. late) schedules to me. And obviously I know that what my boss is really trying to convey is that no one is allowed to just decide they’re going to work 10 hour days Monday through Thursday and have every Friday off, and no one is allowed to roll in around noon every day even if they stay until 8 p.m. (though I’ve had jobs like that, and they were pretty awesome, and would be awesome on a day like today when I stayed up until midnight last night flipping back and forth between checking if the Jets were going to cover the spread against the Dolphins and gaping at the bizarro Yankees-Red Sox extra innings game, but I suppose that is neither here nor there) and I even get the reasoning behind it, that basically everyone needs to be in the office at the same time so that everyone is physically available to everyone else in order to accommodate the collaborative nature of the tasks at hand. It’s just one of those things where saying “core hours are 0900 – 1500” pretty much covers it, and trying to clarify by elaborating that alternate schedules are not allowed ends up confusing things and would have been better off not even being brought up. But that’s government agency-speak for you.

Overall the policies e-mail – both in terms of what it represented and what it actually conveyed – really just kind of reinforced to me once again how, in this office, I have such an off-to-the-side existence that nobody really notices whether or not I’m re-recording my voicemail greeting every day (yes, seriously). And once again for the record, I like that just fine, thanks.