Coffee Break [22/3/21]

Your mid-morning pick me up.

As if I didn’t feel inadequate enough already I gotta wake up to this shit. Kimberly Strable has accomplished more at 17 than I have in my whole life, earning a doctorate in Business Administration, outpacing her older sister, the family underachiever, who didn’t receive a master’s degree until the ripe old age of 18. But seriously, congratulations to Ms. Strable on her accomplishment. Maybe somebody should put her in charge of managing the road construction in Lakeview, LA.

Why is this road work taking so long? Harvey said it’s because of the sporadic work schedule.

“As an example, they’ll work every day for a week, then there will be two to three weeks with nothing,” she said. “The work has definitely picked up in the last couple of weeks. But you never know when it’s going to stop and when it’s going to start back up again.

Now that’s a crew I’m suited to working with. Which one are you this Monday morning, the phenom or the deadbeat?

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25 Comments

  1. I’m feeling like a Phenomena (woke up early to post a DUAN). But mostly I’m a deadbeat.


     
     
     

    • @HammerZeitgeist I know you’re raising children and that takes a lot of energy and work. So, I think you have it backwards – you may feel like a deadbeat but are mostly a phenom.

  2. Road construction management is probably conducting a lot of meetings. That’s what stalls us out.
     


     

    • Most managers don’t know how to run a meeting. Stick to the agenda, and have a time keeper. Start on time, hit the main points, and close. It’s not that hard, and yet….

      • Hah! I have a standing weekly meeting on Monday. Today it took four minutes. 
         
         

          • I have no use for meetings. They are where work goes to die. And my company is insanely meeting-happy, mostly because we’ve got a lot of high-paid deadbeats who need to look like they’re doing something. I start precisely on time, stick to the topic, ask if anyone has questions, and then say, cool, meeting over and click the “end meeting for all” button on Zoom. If you want to bullshit with me, cool, but we ain’t doing it during my meeting. 

            • I would happily work for you.

      • There’s an old management trick whereby if you want to keep meetings to a minimum length no one sits down. That moves things along. Do you like the people you’re meeting with and haven’t seen them for a while? Do it over lunch, preferably with an attendee with a corporate card and an entertainment allowance.

        • That trick is a jerk move if you’re wearing high heels because you also don’t want to shift your weight from foot to foot because then you look antsy or distracted. 

    • Could be my theme song, lol.

  3. Living in Pennsylvania, we citizens are used to roads that suck hard. I also believe that the state put the management of PennDot roads in charge of vaccination roll out.

    Today’s water bottle full of coffee is hazelnut cream; saving the blackberry brandy for tomorrow.

    Happy Monday, DeadSplinteratti!

  4. Feeling like a deadbeat but forecast is due today so I gotta suck it up. I’m just really, really, really burned out. My annual review is Wednesday and I deserve a promotion (my boss seems to agree but I don’t actually know if it will happen), so if I don’t get it I’m going to be very disgruntled. So I’m getting cranky now in anticipation of being angry on Wednesday, because that’s how it works with me and promotions. Somehow there’s always some little technicality that pops up (we’ve got this new policy that says …). So I’ll put my head down and continue to do far more than my share until it’s time for me to get shafted again. 

  5. @Elliecoo Having grown up in PA I can attest to the terrible roads. And the vaccine roll out, not a single one of my older siblings have gotten theirs yet. But I’m getting my second in April. 

  6. …considering it’s a monday it feels like I’ve got more done than I expected…although I did have some assistance so maybe it’s true that many hands make light work…or at least (given the current restrictions) more than two hands gets more done

    …but some of that involved moving a couple of things that would have been where they now are before christmas were it not for pandemic complications…arguably I’m still in deadbeat territory?

    • @SplinterRIP It seems to me you get an awful lot done, I’d put you in the phenom column.

      • …aw, shucks…that’s kind of you…might be an illusion though…the not-so-much sleeping thing does technically mean I have more hours in my days than some?

    • nothing deadbeat about those articles full of links you regularly put out.

      • …articles might be an overstatement…but I appreciate the sentiment…thank you kindly

  7. Natalie Harvey needs to move to New York, where things often move at a glacial pace, despite the outmoded phrase “in a New York minute.” When I was commuting my workplace subway station, one of the busiest in the system, shut down the right-hand side of 1/2 of one short staircase (so, half a flight, a little deck, and half a flight again) to replace some corroding concrete. It took seven years. A friend of mine’s local subway station is very deep and they have three elevators. It took them 12 years to replace (not install new ones, replace) one of them. When we moved to our apartment there was a gas station and a parking garage next to it pretty close to the building; I can see the site from our windows. I thought that would be handy, but they were roped off and closed down. The land was bought/taken for redevelopment about 13 years ago. Still not much. People in public housing have it the worst of all. It’s not uncommon to read a horror story like, ” X has lived in her apartment since 1987 and she still…” 

    • When you put it like that Louisiana isn’t doing such a bad job! 

  8. The important thing is to not compare yourself to the overachievers who you will have no interaction with.

    For example, graduating high school was an accomplishment in my family. Going to college was definitely a big fucking deal. 

    I’m not going to compare myself to the super focused overachievers because then I’ll just feel bad about myself. 

    • @brightersideoflife I almost always feel bad about myself,lol. If it wasn’t that it would just be something else! 

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