Office Space

I had a little spat with a co-worker last week. It was 68degF with 60% humidity, which is low for where I live, and he had the air conditioning on. Mind you, the industrial A/C, the big unit that sits outside the building and makes little to no noise in our office when it’s on hasn’t been functioning for a week. Our landlord’s solution to this while he prices out the cheapest possible replacement, which won’t actually be adequate for our space because he will choose by price rather than capacity, was to provide a LG portable A/C unit which is advertised as being “So Quiet, You’ll Barely Notice It.”

This unit is loud as all living hell, and right in that frequency range that has for my entire life been supremely irritating.

My response to seeing the A/C on after I returned from an errand was to remark in a fairly sarcastic tone “It’s 73 degrees in here and we have the A/C on? Really?” His response to my comment was to tell me I was being passive-aggressive and that maybe I shouldn’t assume malice when I don’t know all the facts and sometimes the way someone acts could just be forgetfulness. And while I accepted this and apologized, after due consideration I’m not entirely sure he was right.

I am a firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor which is briefly defined as “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” I’m also a firm believer in the corollary principle to Hanlon’s razor: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” Rational Wiki more completely defines Hanlon’s Razor thusly:

• Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.
• Never assume stupidity when ignorance will suffice.
• Never assume ignorance when forgivable error will suffice
• Never assume error when information you hadn’t adequately accounted for will suffice.

I have a couple of little problems with the complete Hanlon’s Razor, one of them being the implication that people are by definition good natured. Rational Wiki cite’s Wikipedia’s doctrine of “Assume good faith,” which means assuming that most people are trying to help Wikipedia and unless there is specific evidence of malice in the editing of a Wikipedia entry other editors are to assume something erroneous inserted by another editor is an innocent mistake that can be sorted out in a civil, polite manner. [Read more…] about It’s never the heat

At SmallAgency we specialize in working with progressive non-profits. Since I’ve spent the bulk of my professional web communications career working for various progressive non-profit organizations it’s a pretty good fit in terms of knowing the problems an organization might have getting its message across to potential audiences and in combating internal obstacles in the ways they communicate with supporters. That decade’s worth of experience also puts me in a unique position to understand when and why an organization makes a mistake.

We use a mostly waterfall-based approach to project management at SmallAgency. This means that we generally organize a project into six (mostly) discrete phases:

1. Discovery
2. Functional Requirements
3. Sitemap
4. Wireframes
5. Design
6. Development

Right now we’re in the sitemap stage with an organization that does really good work in the sex education and reproductive rights issue space. Mostly they work with college students with some lobbying of state legislatures and Congress on specific bills, and they suffer from the same basic problem every progressive non-profit I’ve worked for also suffers.

When I did their original sitemap two of the major sections looked like this:

When they were done with the sitemap these two sections looked like this:

This illustrates exactly what’s wrong with virtually every progressive non-profit in the U.S.: working for the organization is not a valid way for a supporter to “get involved.”

Viewing employment as a charitable contribution proponents of this theory of staff recruitment will tell you creates a committed staff dedicated to “the cause.” The reality is while it will recruit people who are interested in the organization’s mission over the long term it only leads to massive employee burnout and to staff who have been with the organization for so long they refuse to change anything even if the way they are doing something is manifestly no longer the best course of action. After all, if given a choice of working to pay their bills or not needing to work and still being able to pay the bills only the most fanatical would choose to spend 40 hours a week working on a cause.

I have no idea if conservative organizations try to pull the same bull shit on their employees or if they are smart enough to pay market prices to attract top talent. I suspect most of them pursue the same misguided strategy in recruiting for the same ridiculous reasons.

Until non-profits treat their staff as professionals worthy of respect in their fields they will continue to be less effective than the could be, which is a crying shame given the importance of some of the issues on which they work.

March 13, 2012 is my one-year anniversary at Loathesome job. I called in sick.

More accurately, I called in vastly underslept which was not true but given the number of times in the past year I’ve gone to work vastly underslept and functioned I think I’m entitled, particularly on a day when the expected high temperature is around 75degF.

I’m also entitled because this is my second to last week at Loathesome Job and I’m burning sick leave for which I will not otherwise be paid. Yes, I gave notice, and yes, I’ve found another job to go to. [Read more…] about One year and no longer counting