Procrasination Saves the Face
A lengthy dissection of the potential impact on the San Jose Sharks the trade for Joe Thornton would suggest had ensued in this space as of Thursday and Friday, but its lack of completion kept it from attaining posted status. This, it turns out, is a blessing since any questions or concerns about the wisdom of trading three fan favorites for one marquee-name were resolutely hushed with the ringing of a shot off the post seven seconds into Thursday night’s game. Four assists in two games later (and, more significantly, two wins later) I think it is clear what Joe Thornton has meant for the Sharks and there is no “other hand” to speak of.
Regardless of how my favorite sports teams are doing, things of a personal note have begun to develop which outweigh in terms of both impact and importance any type of professional athletics.
I would prefer that we simply ignore the previously dropped hints and allusions to some key events since I can now speak of them clearly and without potentially negative repercussions. To the point, this coming Thursday marks my last official work day at the City. That date will dovetail nicely with my three-year mark here, meaning that I have worked here longer than I have worked at any other single place. It has been a long time for what was initially a mere stop in the road as I moved forward into bigger and better things.
In the end it wound up being a place that I felt comfortable with, at least from certain perspectives. I’ve made friends here (real friends, that I anticipate maintaining contact with even after I no longer have to see them on a daily basis), I’ve put a lot of myself into my various tasks and I have taken a significant sense of pride and ownership into building the site that has been my ward since 2002. Turning it over to someone else feels oddly like giving a pet to a stranger. I have a sense that it will be fine and in any case it should no longer be my concern, but I can’t help worrying that I didn’t do enough to get it ready to be without me.
My new employer is waiting for me to begin in one week’s time. There are tradeoffs, elements of the change that cannot be casually dismissed: I have a commute to contend with now, for one. Adjusting from the six-minute drive to the City offices to an hour-plus putter over congested freeways and busy surface streets will take some effort. My new job also requires a different sort of work than I’ve been used to and focused on since even before I began working at the City. And of course there is the transition from public servant to private-sector machine cog.
It takes some adjustment to get used to working for government agencies. It took me a good nine months before I really felt like I understood how things operated in the City. The crux of it is this: Things operate slowly. I can understand how talking about how inefficient things work in government would come across as griping, or even sniping at the job. That isn’t the case; there are actually many smart, talented and hard-working people here at the City and, I presume, elsewhere in government. What happens is that those people don’t have any opportunities to let those qualities show because there is a carefully crafted series of policy and historical mechanisms that literally prevent people from being truly productive.
The essence of this—how this actually manifests in a working environment—is that people are quite literally encouraged to maintain a slow and steady pace to progress because… well, honestly I still can’t exactly tell you the exact “whys” of it all. There is a sense that while the public pays for what is done in government, they themselves are resistant to change, as if the government staying on the cutting edge of technology, productivity, action and problem resolution would only be acceptable in certain historically-correct circumstances. For example, the public seems to have no problem with Fire Departments being fast to react to things, and they expect the Police to do so as well, but if street development projects were rolled through the process at breakneck speed, at least the perception is that there would be serious ramifications to not giving the public an unusually long time to debate, argue and nitpick the project to pieces.
Even where the public-facing elements are allowed to be quick, the internal workings have a tendency to move slowly with excessive commentary and meetings and committee intervention where, as best as I can tell, the thought is that we’re using public funds so we better make sure we get everything right on the first try. Which is ludicrous, of course, because no government agency gets things right on the first try all the time, no matter how ponderously they approach problems. But this is counted as gospel and there is little motivation to try and buck trends, and actual resistance to such efforts.
Still, while from a personal work ethic perspective being involved in City government may have been a little eroding, extracting the generalities of government work from the specific environment I can say that I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had a tremendous amount of freedom, had some interesting projects come my way, been involved in the largest-scale web site of my career, made more progress in a single organization than I ever had before and learned a lot about things I can’t imagine having otherwise been exposed to.
* * * * *
Fall has finally come to the Central Valley in California. I know this because my feet are cold. From the first significant series of rains until sometime in mid-May, my feet are perpetually frozen. I don’t know if this is indicative of some kind of circulation issue or just one of the reasons why I loathe the winter so much or what. Either way, very few things even help alleviate the icy feet symptoms, and nothing gets the deep chill out completely.
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