How great to live in a free country. At the time, former Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler was our representative in Congress. One year, as she passed by in the parade, my father called out, “Cut off funds for the Vietnam War!” She shouted back something to the effect that she had voted for a resolution to do that. I don’t remember the precise words, but I do recall the exchange. No one swore, no one threw anything.

No one went to jail, either. I thought of this in the context of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Hong Kong, on the 25th anniversary of its transfer to China. How tough it must be to see a leader parade through, who has just imposed stifling laws, crushed dissent, jailed opponents, halted unfriendly press and will no doubt impose the all-encompassing surveillance with its command and control system for individuals already in place on the mainland. What would happen to someone who shouts a challenge to Xi, do you suppose?

Our national discourse seems as bad as ever right now. Yet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I went to the local parades, it was pretty tough too. It’s easy to forget the divisiveness of Vietnam and its expansion via the bombing of Cambodia, the original Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court, the campus “unrest” as it was called, the shocking bankruptcy of New York City and a host of other things. It all seemed to culminate in the Watergate affair. Oh my, the vitriol of that roughly 1966-1976 decade!

After Vietnam, though, the military, which had lost much esteem in the public mind, retained enough institutional resilience, and could muster enough political backing, to eventually recover. Now it enjoys a high regard, even if the policies for which it is used are not popular. An important distinction.

Watergate, while exposing the, let’s say, enthusiasm for reelection on the part of some elected, appointed and hired officials, nevertheless ultimately provoked an institutional coming together. For what it’s worth, since the Nixon/Ford administration, Republicans have held the White House for 24 years, Democrats, at the conclusion of President Biden’s current term, 24.

At the moment, the nation’s ears are gripped by the hearings connected to the  Capitol event, variously described as a riot, an insurrection, a break-in and a coup attempt, at the end of the Trump administration. That was not a good day, least of all for the former president. And yet: One theme is how strongly our institutions held. The Electoral College voted. Congress and the then-vice president accomplished their electoral missions, in spite of the dangerous circumstances. What if the nincompoops storming the Capitol had actually gotten their hands on the vote materiel? It’s hard to imagine anything other than that the regular transition of power would nevertheless have occurred. Many of the rioters are in prison.

Federal career employees have taken an oath to the Constitution. With few exceptions, they take it seriously. At least, that’s been my experience in 30 years of covering that workforce and the activities in which it engages.

Government is inherently imperfect because people are imperfect. Still, on the 4th of July, name a country where you’d rather live and claim citizenship. I can’t.

Don’t text while reading this

Fifteen years ago this week, Apple introduced the iPhone. Like the Model T a century earlier, it changed the world. Neither the first smart phone nor the first pocket-sized computer, it nevertheless became a world-changing product in ways the others did not.

The social implications of mobile computing have been thoroughly documented. Many people seemingly can’t live for two seconds without checking their devices.

In the federal environment, the iPhone significantly drove many of the changes it drove in the private sector. Namely, greater demand for mobile-native services, a still-evolving notion of customer experience, and a new idea for how and where employees can work

An irony of the iPhone era is that as a telephone, the iPhone falls short, to be honest. Whether the phone’s own internal electronics, or the limitations of the big wireless networks, but sound remains noisy and scratchy, calls still subject to going kaput. On the other hand, how much business does the average knowledge worker do on the phone any more?

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

Source: Maine Public

As our Jory Heckman reported last week, the overseers of the Technology Modernization Fund will devote a cool hundred million dollars to projects that cut wait times or excessive paperwork for public-facing federal services. This revelation, from the General Services Administration and the White House, coincided with an IRS announcement that people late on their taxes can try out a phone line and reach a robot response system to set up their payments.

The agency is expanding its use of so-called voice and chat bots to take a burden off human phone answerers. That way, the IRS employees will have more time to devote to complicated problems beyond the capabilities of the bots. And callers with those problems won’t have on-hold times long enough to hear a Beethoven piano concerto.

I’m kidding on that last point. If only on-hold music was so compelling.

But the effort can’t come soon enough. On Wednesday, the National Taxpayer Advocate had bad news for the IRS, in its objectives report for 2023. In the more recent filing season, it answered only 10% of its phone calls — and even then the average time on hold was a half hour.

The IRS isn’t doing so well with paper returns, either. Its paper return backlog has reached 21 million returns. It’s processing them at about 240,000 per week. It will have to double that rate to get through it all this year, the NTA stated.

So there’s work to do at this high-impact service provider, as the administration has designated the IRS and 19 other agencies for purposes of customer experience.

The idea of improving customer experience isn’t new. But the state of the art keeps moving. About 20 years ago, self-service kiosks came into vogue. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, they’re about to disappear from the lobbies of medical centers. A release from VA states the agency’s national contract for the VetLink kiosks expires in September. Now VA is introducing check-in for appointments using a phone and QR code affixed to a poster. It’ll save veterans a little time in verifying who they are.

Three themes in customer experience I think need pointing out:

• At its best, technology-powered CX eases burdens on both constituents served and on employees doing the serving. But it doesn’t always reduce the headcount required. I noticed this at the airport recently. The airline might have had three dozen check-in kiosks, even though you’ve “checked in” online. After re-checking in for purposes of obtaining a luggage tag, I found I had to still wait in a slow line for an agent to check my ID and yank my luggage over to the conveyor belt. I’m not sure who saved what in this chain of transactions.
• Self-service, which is preferable to human service in many circumstances, merely time-shifts burdens people have to take on at some point — registering, creating an account and filling in data, applying for a license or permit. Here, the government can exceed the private sector if only it could accomplish the dream of one person, one account, every agency. Contrast that to, say, medical health records in the private sector. All the practices have some sort of semi-comprehensible portal. But none of the portals connect. Plastic clipboards have been replaced by stovepipe portals.
• It’s easy for automated response to get a little off course. You’ve got to design systems carefully. I bot-chatted with the manufacturer of my grandfather clock, which needs repair. It’s at least 25 year old, purchased a while back by my late parents, and it is certainly out of warranty. I found an authorized repair shop at the web site, but then received an email asking me for proof of purchase so they could find my order. The bot introduced a bit of incoherence.

A footnote: The federal government in some circumstances is the provider of last, or only, resort. Talk about customer experience. I witnessed where a federal agency came through. A fellow traveler on a two-week rafting trip I took in the Grand Canyon fell sick. There is literally no way out, other than a National Park Service helicopter. The guide had a satellite phone, the only way to reach the NPS. A shiny blue and yellow helicopter arrived within a half hour. An NPS crew examined the man, loaded him aboard, then swooped out. A few days later we heard he was recovering in an Arizona hospital.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

Source: National Geographic

While Tom Temin is on vacation, please enjoy this Federal Report from the archives.

You know you’ve finally reached management when you’re personally incapable of doing a job you’re hiring someone else to do.

In the middle of my career, I oversaw the content of a small group of business magazines. One of them operated a testing lab for computer gear. It was a source of endless requests for more racks, more equipment, more benchmarking software. I also had to sign off on hires to work in the small lab staff. I had no idea how to do the work they did. Luckily I had a very smart cookie in charge of the lab, someone not only with tech chops but also with an excellent reputation in the industry.

The lab manager naturally became my go-to person to evaluate whether candidates could run benchmarks on a PC or a switch. Or if they could tell the difference between a RJ-11-tipped cable and a RJ-45-tipped one. I knew a banana plug when I saw one because I’d visited the company that invented them and had received an exhaustive briefing.

My reliance on a hands-on expert hardly constituted a genius piece of managerial insight. It seemed like the only practical way of avoiding hiring failures. If the hire were to produce grammar or punctuation problems, my copy desk could fix that. But if they screwed up an evaluation, we’d have a real problem on our hands.

The government is apparently widening its use of this method of hiring — using what it calls subject matter expert qualification assessments. It’s even a word now, smeequa. Sounds like something from Dr. Seuss.

Jennifer Pahlka, formerly of Code For America and U.S. Digital Service, had a comprehensive post about SME-QA more than a year ago. She, like many others, was surprised that 90% of competitive job postings by the federal government rely on candidates’ self-assessment questionnaires.

That doesn’t mean that 90% of hires go to phony braggarts. It means more that the government wastes a lot of time and effort sifting through resumes and interviewing people with no chance of ever getting the job. Often no one gets hired. Or the truly qualified don’t make it through resume screening.

You or I could fill out a self assessment describing our deep knowledge and skill in operating nuclear reactors. We’d probably get a call back and even an interview, say, with the Navy or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Energy Department. At best someone would catch on. At worst the government would hire into a “Catch Me If You Can” situation. Instead, under SME-QA, there’s no self-assessment questionnaire. As Pahlka described it, “Instead, subject matter experts (SMEs) partner with HR to review resumes, using their understanding of the actual job to determine who is qualified and eligible.”

SME-QA represents so much common sense, naturally the government people who saw its potential had to comb through statute and regulation to justify it legally. But it is totally justifiable for competitive hires.

Some agencies have been using SME-QA or its equivalent for years. Case in point: The Government Publishing Office. Chief Human Capital Officer Dan Mielke says he’s had success with the SME-QA methodology since 2018. In this interview, Mielke points out that GPO encompasses many craft and technical positions. It needs people who can hand-color edges of book leaves, set up a bindery, do mechanical and electrical repair on machinery and, of course, actually print books and periodicals. Physical printing remains an important part of the GPO’s increasingly digital mission.

Mielke says you can even ask candidates to perform a specific task they’d reasonably be expected to do shortly after joining. Weld that joint. Code that function.

In one case, GPO used a long-time employee with deep expertise in social media as the SME to assess a hire to do similar work.

That’s the beauty of the process with the awkward name — you’ve already got in your agency the experts you need to help you hire more accurately. And if you don’t, some nearby agency surely does. Mielke says he himself loaned his expertise to another agency looking to hire a workforce development director, a job Mielke held earlier.

You need people. A great way to streamline getting them is out there. What are you waiting for?

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

Source: National Constitution Center

Fast as the list of federal crimes has been growing, I doubt Congress will render the opening of email when you’re off duty a federal offense. Perhaps the administration could issue a policy. More on that in a second.

Many years ago Microsoft developed a new server operating system. It was called Microsoft NT. A nationally read newspaper published a story of how the company’s large team of developers on the project worked so hard they literally slept at the office as the project neared completion. This went on for months. Many kept sleeping bags at work.

One employee quoted said his child offered to give up every toy he had if only dad would come home from the office in time to see one of his (the child’s) soccer games. That anecdote stuck in my mind.

Yes, work can be demanding.

Any federal functionary who’s participated in the launch of some new emergency or short deadline program knows what it’s like. Congressional reaction to the pandemic spawned several high-dollar programs for overnight launching. Unlike those 1990s Microsoft developers, many of the overworked in the past couple of years have already been at home. Lots of those soccer games have been canceled. If anything, people with kids at home have been getting too much time with them.

By 2002, the pager for email, otherwise known as the Blackberry, came onto the scene. As a pianist (of sorts), I gained new meaning for the idea of using your thumb for the black keys, thanks to that device. More crucially, it cemented the idea of email anywhere, all the time.

You always knew bosses and hypercompetitive peers who sent emails after dinner or at 2 a.m. With mobile devices charging on people’s nightstands, such jerks developed the expectation of getting answers after dinner or at 2:05 a.m.

Now teleworking has taken over worldwide, bringing all of the office computing resources into people’s homes. Without concern for Beltway traffic, Metro mobbing, or MARC train delays, employees have extended their own workdays, in some cases by hours. You know how that goes. Well I’ll work to 6:30 just this once. Well, I’ll work to 7 just this once. Pretty soon, you’re always working.

Thus the neutral response to that federal employee “pulse” survey question: “I feel exhausted in the morning at the thought of another day at work.” The 3 on a 1-5 scale means people rate themselves on both ends of the scale. Who wouldn’t feel exhausted in the morning if you were up doing email at 2 a.m.?

It so happens, in the land of 35-hour workweeks and cradle-to-grave governmental safety nets — the European Union — after-hours email is verboten, at least in some places. A publication called DeMorgen reported recently that Belgian government officials “may no longer be called by their boss after normal working hours from February 1.”  This was issued by Belgian Minister of the Civil Service Petra De Sutter. She called it the “right of disconnection.”

It doesn’t ban after-hours email so much as draw managerial boundaries.

A second provision in De Sutter’s circular states a federal employee “shall not be disadvantaged if he does not answer the phone or read work-related messages outside normal working hours.” These policies apply to about 65,000 civil servants in the land of great chocolate and witbier. Employee unions have expressed suspicion, because the policy allows for vaguely-defined exceptions.

My hunch is the U.S. federal workplace is sufficiently civilized that SESers aren’t routinely calling lesser mortals at all hours. And that rarely does the average fed receive an email that can’t wait until the morning for a reply.

I don’t know about Europe, but the U.S. federal workplace, for all its hierarchical customs, is more culturally horizontal than large-scale private sector organizations. Leaving aside the appointees, the SESer might have a nicer car than the GS-whatever contracting officer, but both drive themselves to work and take the same elevator. No workplace is nirvana, but if you log off and silence your phone at 5:30 or 6, you’ll still have a job in the morning.

I have a friend, a high level state education official, who does a lot of volunteer and collegiate alumni work. She once remarked her policy is to shut everything down at 8:30 in the evening. That’s a pretty good approach.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Daisy Thornton

Source: USA Today

• The hiring process takes so long, good candidates have become hedge fund quadrillionaires before your creaky agency even sends back a yes-or-no letter.
• No one young wants to work for the government. That’s why the workforce is aging, with a big percentage having one foot out the door.
• Government salaries are no match for what people can get in the private sector.
• Government “onboarding” is indifferent at best, so new hires are left wandering around looking for the foosball table.

On-and-on it goes. Cliches always contain a tincture of truth. But what about when these shibboleths are not accurate?

The young-people-won’t-join belies the fact that many of the retirement-age generation started when they were young. So presumably they made it through federal hiring and stuck around. It reminds me of a judgy analysis I read in a business magazine 30 years ago about Cadillac. The analyst confidently predicted the demise of Cadillac cars since the average age of its buyers was 58. Cadillac not only survived the Cimmaron, but as far as I can tell, is humming along very nicely. It’s coming out with a hot electric SUV soon.

In reality the government can attract talented young people, and agencies have a lot of discretion in how they go about getting talent. Even within the rules — and yup, there are lots of rules — agencies have leeway and a host of hiring and pay authorities. Will your agency be a sinuous new electric SUV or grandma’s Laramie Beige De Ville?

This brings me to my case in point. She may be an anecdote, an exception that proves the rule. I think she’s more an example of what is possible. I’m talking about an examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Brooke LaBranche. I met her by chance at the U.S. Inventors Hall of Fame Dinner last month. She graduated with a biomedical engineering degree from the University of Virginia. This after attending a magnet high school with lots of math and science specialty classes. She understands mathematics to be a language.

LaBranche, now 28, told me was was attracted to USPTO because as an examiner, one gets the opportunity to explore a wide range of sciences and technologies.

“It’s kind of exciting in that sense that there’s there’s going to be something new basically every day that you show up to work or get on your computer; the different [patent] applications that you’re looking at all involve something different,” LaBranche told me.

She said the hiring took ten weeks. She turned down offers from the pharmaceutical industry and the medical device sales industry. Also, though USPTO is known for its liberal telework policies, LaBranche and other new hires were required to spend their first two years in the office, specifically to bond to the organization. New employees were put into small “labs,” groups of 10 people paired with mentors to help them get through their initial patent examination cases.

Those two years before teleworking? “It was really good to be in the office to kind of get to know people and be able to ask questions, to be across the hallway from your supervisor and go get help if you needed that,” she said.

So there you have it: A smooth, successful hire of a young, technical person who is now at more than six years with the agency.

Lessons learned?

• Make your own standard for hiring. There’s no rule that says it has to take months and months.
• Design an onboarding process that goes past issuing a PC and a pat on the back.
• Make sure newbies meet and get to know colleagues at all levels, take in the culture and traditions of the organization, feel like someone cares they’re there. There’ll be plenty of time for the isolation of telework.
• Give people, even newly-minted graduates, real work to do, work that matters.

Was that so hard?

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Daisy Thornton

No U.S. Presidents have been an only child.

Source: Business Insider

The protagonist in the song worked in a factory with a bad foreman. The ’70s were the height of the Rust Belt era. Factories often retained a 19th century atmosphere. Today’s factories are typically clean, highly automated and require significant skills on the part of employees.

For the same half century, the federal workplace has also undergone a lot of change. Computers, automation, the advent of the cubicle changed the office environment. But it didn’t fundamentally change the model of work conjoined with workplace. The sudden switch to telework, though, has broken that office model across the economy.

A Deloitte report gathers many of the weird work statistics brought about by the pandemic. At the state and local levels, government shed some 600,000 people, more than lost jobs in manufacturing, wholesale trade and construction combined. In the private sector, labor force participation seems stuck at about 62% — rates not seen since the “Take This Job and Shove It” era.

But shoving jobs they are. Some 4.5 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs this past November. Gartner’s Jackie Wiles writes extensively about what she calls the “great reflection” people are having, leading to dropping their jobs. In this article she includes statistics from a 3,500-person survey.  Two thirds of respondents agreed with these statements:

• “The pandemic has shifted my attitude towards the value of aspects outside work.”
• “The pandemic made me rethink the place that work should have in my life.”

Employers cannot expect to provide whatever religious or spiritual needs people might have. But, Wiles writes, “ignoring it is, at the very least, shortsighted. Every organization’s strategic plans contain goals that cannot be met without people.”

In this environment, it’s no wonder the government has continuing difficulty recruiting and retaining people. Everywhere you look, the federal government is hiring, or trying to. But the long-standing challenges of the federal hiring process are worsened by the generational change in attitudes towards work.

Deloitte concludes that the long-standing “value proposition” for a federal career is no longer enough. Its basic formula was: Your salary might have a relatively lower upside, but you’ve got a great benefits and retirement package, stability and of course “a strong sense of purpose.” New attitudes toward work-life balance, and the desire for the new generation for way more flexibility than Boomers dreamed of, has made that traditional appeal less appealing.

So can a system perfected for the Pepsi generation work for the crowd that prefers bubly, a latter-day PepsiCo product?

I think it will come down to individual managers, agencies, and bureaus. That is, if you’re looking for some sort of big legislative overhaul to Title 5, don’t hold your breath. Deloitte and others argue for greater use of the dozens of hiring and pay flexibilities that already exist in the federal government. The authors cite the cyber talent management system engineered by the Department of Homeland Security.

Other, less tangible work qualities will be hard, but not impossible, to institute in the federal setting. For example, focusing on employee well being, fostering entrepreneurial ways, greater leave flexibility for caregiving or other personal needs and of course flexible and permanent telework options. Don’t overlook training — “upskilling” — opportunities that people find attractive.

Jobs are like other elements of the economy in that they shift back and forth from sellers’ to buyers’ markets. Federal managers are selling job openings into a buyers’ market. So is the private sector, but it has more options to throw at people than you do. The mission is still your strongest card, but it’s going to take a lot of creativity to convince a warm body to join your agency.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

There is an abandoned Subway station underneath New York City Hall. Today, it serves as a turn-around for the 6 line.

Source: New York Transit Museum

It doesn’t take much to get motorcycle enthusiasts to hop onto their steeds for a jaunt of a few miles or a few hours. When a ride is coupled with helping some great causes, you can convince federal employees and contractors to take off half a weekday.

Thus it was that 19 riders from the federal information technology community joined in Federal News Network’s 3rd Annual Motorcycle Ride for Charity. From contributions of the individual riders and from this year’s corporate sponsors, we raised enough to give $7,000 checks to three charities:

• Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund, which provides emergency loans and grants to federal employees in distress, as well as scholarships to children of federal employees
• Friends of Patients of the NIH, which supports families of those in clinical trials with housing and transportation; and
• U.S. War Dogs Association, which rescues and rehabilitates combat canines and, in many cases, reunites them with their former military handlers.

FEEA’s Robyn Kehoe, Friends’ Heidi Williams, and the War Dogs’ Chris Willingham joined us at the finish of the ride at Daingerfield Island in Alexandria, Virginia, to receive the checks and mingle with the riders over box lunches.

Riders gathered Friday morning at District Harley-Davidson/BMW/Ducati. We departed at 10 a.m. for a 60-plus mile route on a series of beautiful back roads of Montgomery County, Maryland. The final parts of the route took us across the Chain Bridge into Virginia and the George Washington Parkway.

For the first time this year, we had corporate sponsors from the federal contracting and services industries. They were:

Touring Bike Presenting Sponsor: Carahsoft
Cruiser: DLT, A Tech Data Company; WAEPA; Steve Charles Ventures
Sport Bike: TriCorp Inc.; Andrew Schreiner Marketing; archTIS; Google
Sidecar: Fairfax Radiology Centers

Special thanks goes to the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center (ATARC) for lunch, Stephen Charles for ride support, and the staff of Federal News Network for marketing, publicity, and logistics support.

It read in part:

“A global pandemic, prolonged remote work and learning, an economy in flux, a tense sociopolitical environment, and increasing mental health challenges as a result of the unprecedented situation and associated uncertainty have created an environment that is rife for stress and burnout, ultimately leading to high turnover, lack of productivity and negative health effects.”

At 54-words, that sentence was worthy of a New York Times lead. The association issuing this statement did so to publicize workshops it will put on for members. They’ll receive advice on “effective steps we can take immediately as individuals and organizations to move forward in a positive trajectory.”

The question of over-stressed or burned out employees emerges as organizations bring people back to the office. In part, the return itself adds to whatever stress people are already feeling. I’ve commented already, for many the commute itself is a stressor. There’s also the uncertainty about what evil germs billow from the persistent hack of your newly close office mate.

Few reliable statistics exist about burnout. The term itself doesn’t really have a set definition. It apparently first applied a while back to health care providers, the same people who have borne the brunt of the mass occurrences of COVID-19. Burnout is something people know when they see it, or feel it.

At a government-industry informal gathering the other evening in downtown D.C., from the moderator’s lectern I asked the 80 or so people there whether they’ve experienced burnout recently, or know people who have. I’d say two thirds of the hands went up.

My panel discussed how managers will deal with the future of work. Mainly, the rules of yesteryear, pre-pandemic, that is, have evaporated. People who were full-time office dwellers must now cope with mixed work lives.

Burnout, I now think, can result from an accumulation of relatively small factors of the mixture. For example, the dress code. At the downtown gathering, people showed up in everything from polos to suit-and-tie. Open-toe flats to high heels. In fact, beforehand, an email back-and-forth among me, the panelists and the organizers debated what to wear. My contribution was, “no loincloths.”

One panelist, a nattily-clad senior federal executive in technology, said he’d put on the suit for the first time in two years, mainly because he’d had a meeting with a deputy secretary earlier in the day.

People routinely devolve to T-shirts or hoodies, with the proverbial basketball shorts below. So does that make such apparel OK for the two or three weekly office days? What if you show up in open-neck shirt and slacks, but a coworker or boss arrives in a suit and tie, or businesslike dress? Or vice versa?

Hours of work are also causing stress. The Blackberry started scrubbing the work/personal line when it made email available 24/7. The pandemic has blurred the line even more. The IT executive said he’s started scheduling emails he composes outside of the 9-5 hours, so they don’t send until the next morning — just so people don’t succumb to the feeling they’re obligated to answer email at night or wherever.

Ironically, the commute tended to force people to quit work and get the heck home, preventing meetings from dragging on — or beginning at 5 p.m. Especially if someone needed to catch that VRE train.

Another panelist, an IT manager in a large component of a large department, said the future of work will require much more attention to the human side of things, including mental health, given the proliferation of digital distractions. She also said that includes letting people have some slack with respect to when in the day they work. Whether it’s the furnace or a sick kid, we now know people will get the work done even if hours get blurred.

My panelists also said leaders need to resist the expectation that people will work all the time, just because telework and its accompanying technology make that possible.

My take on that last point: Sometimes, something big comes up and work can expand to nearly 24/7. I talked to two Service to America Medalist finalists just yesterday. The State Department’s Holly Herrera and Hilary Ingraham, along with Kiera Berdinner, set up a whole branch to deal with the resettlement of refugees from Afghanistan. After the Taliban takeover, they started arriving at a rate of 3,000 per week. They said the branch was a ’round the clock effort involving a half dozen other agencies. Amazing work.

We heard similar stories from agencies that had big, sudden tasks because of federal pandemic spending.

But people can sustain that for only so long. An airplane can sustain takeoff power for as long as it takes to reach altitude, but the motors will burn out prematurely unless the pilot moves the throttles back to cruise. If you’re a pilot, take care of your engines.

One more word. That aforementioned email cited the “tense sociopolitical environment.” The country is rend in two politically, the stock market is in meltdown, and there’s no baby formula. Ukraine, the Supreme Court debate, the Buffalo supermarket shooting — good grief! None of these things are within a manager’s control, of course, but they do add to the general level of angst. All the more reason to make work a refuge.

One small piece of advice: Spend some time unsubscribing to email lists. In media, we get everything. Including nasty emails from partisans on all sides. Everyone else but the sender, they state, is extreme, anti-democracy, hateful blah blah blah. Often they want money. I delete them with extreme prejudice before opening them. Just the sheer volume of it can bruise the spirit. Rather than clean it out, better to prevent it in the first place.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

KDKA in Pittsburgh first commercial radio station. It went on the air in the evening of Nov. 2, 1920

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

I got a call the other day from a regular reader, a career lawyer with 31 years of federal service. This person is not a bargaining unit member and has some management responsibility. She is one of a legion of federal employees who spent most of her career going into the office every day until the pandemic. She likes her work, is a bit bored though, and says she’s gotten into the habit of perusing legal job listings pretty much every day for the last six years. She’s gotten used to teleworking, but now her general counsel wants everyone back at least two days a week.

Knowing where she works (I agreed to withhold her name and agency), I can tell you: That location is a major hassle to get to and from unless you work a graveyard shift. Parking there’s no picnic either.

She told me she was annoyed that the typical listing in USAJobs.gov lacks two important pieces of information. One, how much, if any, telework is allowed, or if the position accommodates remote work. Two, the exact location of the job, its street address.

That last detail is important because, for some, the next best thing to teleworking is having a short or easy commute. The pandemic-era traffic letup has evaporated. The office itself may feel passe to a great many working people, but I suspect the commute is the main bugaboo for many others. The best commute I ever had personally was when I rented the first floor of a house, at $100 per month, two blocks from the newspaper office where I worked in a semi-rural New Hampshire town.

From an anecdotal manager, I move on to a larger sample of worker bees, namely AFGE Local 1923, which represents more than a thousand employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

CMS has moved its designated return-to-the-office date to May 23rd, a week from Monday. Local President Anita Autrey said the original date was in last October, in line with what the White House was saying, but that was scrubbed because of the Delta variant.

In a Federal Drive interview, I asked Autrey if, from negotiations, she thought CMS management expected everyone to come trooping back.

“Not at all,” she said. “In fact, the agency looked at all of the employees’ positions throughout the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and decided, does this position qualify for telework? Does it qualify for working remotely inside the geographic area that’s close to your office? Or does your position qualify for you to work remotely outside of the geographic area?”

She estimates 90% of not just bargaining unit members, but all employees will continue to telework or work remotely.

But there’s a twist, Autrey said. If you work remotely outside of the office geographical area, you lost locality pay. She cited someone hypothetically working remotely from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the headquarters office in Baltimore. A GS-13 Level 1, Autrey estimated, would lose up to $14,000 in locality pay. The answer is, apply for telework and report into the office twice per pay period, and thereby keep the locality pay.

Not quite as convenient as fully remote, but a once-a-week schlep won’t wear you down like that daily commute.

What about all those cubicles and PCs and the rest of the detritus of a fully staffed traditional office? CMS is fielding clean-out teams, Autrey said, in anticipation of reconfiguring the spaces. Offices will be designed for hotelling or small meetings, with a reservation system under development. Even the cafeteria will undergo remodeling. Autrey noted that the agency agreed to negotiate over terms of return, as well as the restoration of office space and official time removed during the Trump administration.

People are definitely on the move. I took a rush-hour Metro trip yesterday to downtown D.C. While not crowded as in days of yore, the cars were full, and many of the people were going to work, judging from the briefcases and backpacks. Traffic on 14th Street was what you’d expect in normal times, whatever those are. My errand was attending a National Science Foundation press conference on the confirmation and imaging of a long-suspected black hole right in our own Milky Way galaxy.

One of the scientists, Vincent Fish of MIT, remarked that the pandemic did slow the project, a collaboration among hundreds of scientists and data experts from around the world. He added, “There’s no substitute for gathering in a room to solve hard problems.” But “substitute” is what it appears lots of people are prepared to do.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By David Thornton

Charles Darwin’s personal pet tortoise, Harriet, died in 2006 at Brisbane Botanic Gardens, a zoo in Australia owned by “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin and his family.

Source: Los Angeles Times

One small company just showed what’s possible. Thirty-employee Ditto makes software that ensures data synchronization and application operation in situations with unreliable connectivity. It got an Air Force contract with a ceiling of $950 million. CEO Adam Fish says that was Ditto’s second federal contract. The first was an other transaction authority (OTA) deal through the Air Force’s Afwerx, part of the Air Force Research Laboratory. The larger contract was a regular Defense Federal Acquisition (DFAR) transaction.

Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Silicon valley startup, get in through one of the innovation-focused DoD operations, move on to a big production contract.

The Air Force acquired Ditto technology for its Advanced Battle Management System project, it’s next-generation command and control network, and the Air Force’s part of the DoD Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative.

Couple of things to keep in mind, though. Fish told me his two major backers — True Ventures and Amity Ventures — were skeptical of Ditto’s going after a big federal contract. For perhaps slightly different reasons, so did Fish’s employees. Fish said the ventures capitalists don’t like what they perceive as the uncertainty of the federal environment. Budgets don’t come through, lots of people to say no, whole programs that disappear or whither on the vine. Indeed, the type of contract that Ditto won, an IDIQ, contains the word “indefinite” twice.

“That was the hardest challenge,” Fish said. “Investors want predictability.” He added, that at least on the West Coast, investors’ “eyes glaze over” at the thought of government business.

Relative to federal, the commercial market is more predictable. That’s why, Fish said, he plans to keep Ditto primarily a commercially-focused company. Not that he’d turn away from a Navy or Army solicitation, far from it. But Fish said there’s a couple of reasons to stay commercial. Besides the predictability, Fish said he believes a focus on commercial, from a technology standpoint, will keep the technology development going at a faster pace, and thereby further the government’s own imperative to ingest the latest technology as soon as it’s available.

Operationally, he said, the company is looking to hire program managers and engineers to service the Air Force contract. Fish also said he personally was motivated to pursue federal business because of his support for the military mission.

In many ways, Fish’s observations match the commercial cloud industry’s and the software-as-a-service industry’s claimed benefit: The newest technologies and innovations are organically available to all customers as soon as the vendors develop and install them.

I think the Ditto example shows that the DoD’s approach to chasing innovation can work, that the various “werxes” and use of OTA can in fact get capabilities to warfighters in a hurry.

But a VR headset could well be a standard piece of equipment your agency issues you and incoming employees. Goofy games aside, the industrial applications of VR, staged in a carefully programmed metaverse, are nearly unlimited. Until now, VR simulation has been mainly a technical training tool, used to help people learn to operate complicated machinery such as airplanes without the risk and expense of using real machines.

Now companies are experimenting with VR and custom metaverses for new employee onboarding, business meetings, and training and education in non-technical fields. It has the advantages online training has always had. You can offer it on demand, there’s no travel and lodging expense to worry about. VR simply extends into three dimensions what is now typically a flat-screen experience with people arranged in tiles like Hollywood Squares.

Maybe not so simply. With the creation of digital self-representives, the spatial characteristics, both visual and audio, of VR make the experience more than just extensions of Zoom or Teams. A social dimension comes in that’s closer to real world interactions — including their potential for bad manners or worse.

I read that the management and technology consulting company Accenture had purchased a large quantity of VR headsets for its own employees. Knowing Accenture’s footprint as a federal contractor, I asked about it.

Allison Horn, Accenture’s executive director for global talent, confirmed the company had indeed bought the headsets — 60,000 of them. An important initial application, Horn said, is new employee onboarding. Accenture has also constructed what it calls Accenture Park, located, Horn added, on the “nth floor.” She described the park as an “always open, always available, virtual reality onboarding campus.” People meet, learn through gaming, and otherwise interact there. It’s even equipped with virtual coffee shops with cappuccino machines.

I half-joked that with all that distant-but-close interaction, organizations might need to create a culture of metaquette. The more accurate digital personas and situations become, Horn agreed, the greater the need for rules, no less than in actual offices. Whatever weird costume your avatar appears in for your gaming life, it won’t do for the office on the nth floor of the metaverse.

Accenture’s learnings will eventually be available to federal agencies. Kyle Michl, the chief innovation officer in Accenture’s Federal Services unit, cited a survey showing 75% of federal managers believe VR or extended reality (XR) will be important to meeting mission needs in the next few years. The company even has a meta-facility for federal.

“In our federal studio,” Michl said, “we’ve got a number of XR experiences. For years we’ve been bringing customers through to look at immersive learning, collaboration, digital work, and even the use of digital twins for what-if scenarios and operations.”

The use cases exist, but I haven’t seen any large scale federal agency VR or XR deployment. Yet I get the sense that it’s just a matter of time.

Those videos I mentioned often show headset-wearing grandma and grandpa losing themselves in a scary video game while being filmed by laughing family members. But you’d be mistaken if you assumed comfort with, or acceptance of, VR rises and falls along age lines. I asked Horn if this was the case, or if she’d encountered any other demographically-related yes-no lines for VR.

“What we have learned is that we haven’t found one yet,” Horn said. “We of course went into this with an assumption based on, you know, just stereotypes and instinct that said, ‘Oh, are younger or more junior employees gonna be all over this? Are more tenured or more senior employees probably going to be really hard to pull into this?’ We have not seen any evidence of that whatsoever.”

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

The first television broadcast from inside the Senate chamber was December 19, 1974 when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller took the oath of office.

Source: U.S. Senate

The sample was small, 1,003 adults, but the statistical variation is reliable.

How do you define “burnout?” I asked Eagle Hill CEO Melissa Jezior. In her view, it’s a combination of feelings. These include feeling overwhelmed, unable to work at what you consider your own peak performance, fatigue and disconnectedness. I’d add, everyone feels these emotions from time to time. Usually it passes. So maybe “burnout” is having these thoughts in combination over a sustained period of weeks or months?

Jezior said federal men and women feel burnout in about equal numbers. But the reasons they cite differ.

“Men are more likely to cite workload as their primary source of burnout,” Jezior said. “Women tend to point to lack of communication, lack of feedback and support.”

The Eagle Hill survey roughly coincides with release of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys (FEVS) covering 2021. You can’t really conflate the two, but the latest FEVS results do suggest that burnout potential seems to track agency size. The key index of the FEVS, employee engagement, falls off steadily from a score of 81 at agencies with fewer than 100 employees, to a score of 70 at the biggest agencies, those with more than 75,000 people. The same trend holds for employees’ perceptions of leadership, their supervisors, and what the Office of Personnel Management calls the intrinsic work experience.

More compelling, and perhaps equally unsurprising, is the case for how the pandemic affected people. The indices for all of the job satisfaction questions rose steadily from 2017 through 2020. Then they all plopped back down to 2017 levels. My hypothesis: The heady days of the early pandemic galvanized the federal workforce, even as the virus forced a wide degree of telework. Large numbers of employees joined in the crusade to get trillions of dollars into the economy, into research, into health care. But by 2021, what might be called “video meeting” fatigue started to settle in. Plus, thousands grew tired of the house also being the office and the local school.

A New York Times story the other day, on the topic of incessant video meetings, pointed out how people are getting tired of what they consider intrusive views into their homes, and of seeing into other people’s private domains. Researchers at Stanford University last year actually did coin the term “Zoom fatigue” which they defined as the exhaustion that follows video conference meetings. It’s caused by a combination of “mirror anxiety, being physically trapped, hyper gaze from a grid of staring faces, and the cognitive load from producing and interpreting nonverbal cues.”

Sound familiar? From more than 10,000 study participants, the study team found that women suffer from this form of fatigue to a greater extent than men. One cause of the differential was that, for some reason, women respondents experienced longer video meetings on average.

OPM Director Kiran Ahuja, in her introduction to the FEVS results, cautioned that changes in survey methodology from 2020 to 2021 make it hard to compare the years. In stressing the many positive FEVS findings — and there is much to me optimistic about — Ahuja also noted how the pandemic “strained” workforces throughout the economy.

A few other markers in the FEVS indicate the potential for burnout. In 2020 the index for “my workload is reasonable” hit a five-year high score of 67. That’s not really a very good number. It fell to 62 last year. More than a third of federal employees feel overworked, in other words.

Pay satisfaction also fell sharply from 2020 to last year, from 67 to 61. No wonder, the nation is experiencing what used to be called stagflation, or a shrinking economy and high inflation.

Perceiving that job, career, employer, and supervisor satisfaction are somehow all mixed up with the pandemic weirdness, OPM included extensive questioning about telework and agency support throughout. Ahuja urges management to use the FEVS results to guide improvement. In my view, solving the in-office/telework question must top every federal manager’s list of priorities.

Less than a third of FEVS respondents were working full time at an agency worksite in 2021, up from only 17% in 2020. Only 22% are fully elsewhere, leaving a lot of people hybrid and uncertain about what they’re supposed to do next.

D.C. federal employment attorney John Mahoney points out that as your employer, the government has an absolute right to determine where you work. But in a time when the phrase “take this job and shove it” is on a disconcertingly large number of minds, diktats and absolutes should maybe give way to more careful thinking. The Eagle Consulting study also notes a greater tendency on the part of public sector employees than in private sector employees to say they’d leave if a good opportunity came along. Whether that’s true or not, no manager should be content with a workforce, half of whom are keeping an eye on the exit door.

The FEVS survey authors have a telling paragraph in their conclusions. Noting that engagement scores fell last year, they state, “It’s likely that the current scores are reflective of several unique factors. First, the opportunities for telework [have] declined since the peak of the pandemic. Telework is positively related to higher scores on Employee Engagement and Global Satisfaction and declines in telework could be linked to a decline in these scores.”

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Amelia Brust

April 29 is recognized by UNESCO as International Dance Day, and the Guinness World Record for the longest dance marathon by an individual is held by Bandana Nepal. In 2018 she danced for 126 hours, which she did to promote Nepalese music and culture.

Source: Guinness World Records

So this column is an acknowledgment of the people operating throughout the government, mostly unknown, who help others learn what they need to learn. It may happen in formal training, or it may happen with modeling good practice and behavior, or in a mentor-mentee situation.

Some people prefer the word education. I think it was the retail giant Stanley Marcus who said, “You train seals, you educate people.” In reality it’s both. Ideas educate people, but skilled instruction followed by repetition gets us good at what we’re trying to do.

The other night before the Washington Nationals game, a Navy precision drill team marched onto the field and demonstrated its prowess with glittering rifles. Then a cluster of Army paratroopers from the Golden Knights leapt from an airplane. The tiny dots in the sky transmogrified into black-clad human figures manipulating blue-and-yellow chutes. One by one they made pinpoint landings in the outfield.

I thought, that’s training. Whereas sitting in a class somewhere taking in theory from Clauzewitz and Baron Jomini? That’s education.

Now the theatrical side of the military — the drill teams, the close-formation flyers, the bands — may not be central to the mission of fighting and winning the nation’s wars. I’d argue they humanize the military and help make it a welcome and valued part of the nation’s fabric at relatively little cost. However indirectly, that does in fact support its mission. It likely also helps recruitment.

Knowledge management presents an enduring challenge for federal agencies. Companies too. But government organizations, to an extent greater than most private sector organizations, operate in a complex mix of law, regulation, procedure and cultural tradition. Just knowing where you can exercise discretion versus following the letter of the law or rule — that insight doesn’t happen automatically.

Take the IRS, for example. For a variety of reasons, it’s struggled with processing paper returns, of which it still receives millions, and with several other service issues.

I discussed these issues with one of the IRS overseers, Jessica Lucas-Judy of the Government Accountability Office. In some places, she said, the IRS simply needs more people to deal with the sheer volume. It’s using various hiring authorities to get people in. But of course that’s just the beginning. A person might be the best tax consultant in the world, but it takes a lot of training and education in highly specific things to work effectively inside the IRS. Understanding returns, knowing the nuances of the tax code, dealing with fearful or angry people, learning the many information systems — it’s not moving a load of bricks from here to there.

On the Defense Department side, planners face a million questions. A fundamental one is how the armed services maintain their edge over potential adversaries. For several years, the Defense Innovation Unit has used an acquisition method called other transaction authority to rapidly move technology innovations in the private sector into the military domain. A Defense Department-wide practice has grown up around this idea of rapid inculcation of new capabilities.

OTA is a method of buying certain things — in this case, prototypes — outside of the Federal Acquisition Regulation or the Defense version of it. The Defense Department has been expanding its use of OTA in recent years, but Congress actually enabled OTA originally for NASA in the late 1950s.  OTA is simple in the sense that a violin is simply a small wooden box with four strings stretched across. Simple, yet in inexperienced hands, both violins and OTA buys are likely disasters. In trained hands, magic can happen.

That’s why I was intrigued in interviewing Cherissa Tamayori, the director of acquisition at DIU. On the premise that skill in OTA is in short supply, she’s instituted an innovative education program of her own, based on the old surgery adage, “see one, do one, teach one.” DIU, in conjunction with Defense Acquisition University, is accepting applications for just six contracting people, 1102s, from within DoD. They’ll spend a year full-time in what the two units call an immersion course in the deep subtleties of working OTAs.

The six, dubbed fellows, will each correspond to one of the six industrial domains with which DIU does business: artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomy, cyber, energy, human systems and space. The course will also teach what OTA is not, Tamayori said. For example, while it may enable rapid acquisitions, it’s not to be used for emergency buys in the manner of, say, FEMA needing a million water bottles overnight. There’s a FAR allowance for that.

After the conclusion of their training, Tamayori said, “What we expect from these fellows is that upon completion of their time at DIU, that they then return back to their unit, to their service, and are able to become experts and train-the-trainer-type entities.”

The course has the dual effect of helping people get better at a crucial contracting activity and of helping establish a governmentwide cohort, or community of practice with expertise from DIU’s lessons-learned, Tamayori said.

I’d add, the DIU/DAU course promises to be a reference example of how human capital development coincides with a strategic need of the government.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By David Thornton

Researchers estimate that on any given day, 15.8% of people worldwide have a headache.

Source: Washington Post

RAT stood for Recovery, Accountability and Transparency. The RAT Board was the structure set up in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Congress appropriated nearly $800 billion for that one. President Barack Obama reportedly personally asked Devaney to chair the board. Obama was impressed with Devaney’s work as inspector general of the Interior Department. His office had exposed a culture of corruption and misbehavior in the agency then called the Minerals Management Service. Devaney’s work led to a total reorganization of MMS into three agencies.

The MMS scandal followed a string of high-profile investigations which Devaney led or oversaw. They included the infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff and disgraced Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles.

Earlier in his career, Devaney was a Secret Service agent and director of the Office of Criminal Enforcement, Forensics and Training at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The RAT Board was notable for having set up what might be called the forerunner of federal digital services. Anyone with access to a web browser could explore the Recovery Act spending, down to the specific location where money was spent. I recall checking out a neighborhood near Pittsburgh  where I lived as a young child. We would play on and around a piece of stormwater infrastructure, and I’d wondered if any Recovery Act money had been expended on that particular spot. Turns out, it had.

Devaney retired from federal service at the end of  2011, after three years at the RAT Board. In his Federal Drive with Tom Temin exit interview Devaney, he rated the integrity of mankind at about a 7 on a scale of 1-10.

“I’ve never cease to be amazed at people doing dumb things or exercising poor judgment,” Devaney told me and my then-co-host Amy Morris.

Experienced and old-school as he was, Devaney was enamored of new technologies that would give him an edge in oversight or investigative work.

“The enforcers have tools today that I wish I had 41 years ago,” he said. “Some of the tools we’re using at the Recovery Board, for instance, could have saved me a lot of knocking on doors and driving from house to house.”

Devaney understood the innovative nature of the RAT Board itself, saying, “I enjoyed ushering in what I think is a new era of transparency and accountability. The Recovery Board was, after all, a giant experiment in those two areas.”

He added, “Being able to go on a website as a citizen and drill down into your own ZIP code and find out where your government spending is actually occurring is brand new. I mean, as an inspector general, sometimes I didn’t know where the money was going from the Department of Interior.”

Devaney kept up personally, too. I asked him, half in jest, whether he was a BlackBerry or iPhone person, the iPhone still  being relatively new in 2011 with low penetration among feds.

“I am an iPhone person,” he answered, not missing a beat.

Tough enforcer though he was, Devaney was also a people person. He took pride in the way the RAT Board paired experienced hands with younger people newer to federal service in mentoring relationships.

“And as we sit here today,” Devaney said, “those young people are no longer inexperienced, and in fact, are incredibly talented. And I’m very proud of them.”

Devaney was quick to share credit for the popular work of the RAT Board, adding, “This was a joint effort by not only inspectors general and agencies, but other enforcement agencies as well in the agencies.”

Devaney expressed optimism that the strategies developed by the RAT Board could help agencies in their spending and accountability. He mentioned working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which wanted to adapt the Board’s technology. He also felt, correctly in my view, that the role of inspector general itself was enhanced by the Board’s work. Devaney attributed that to the way the Board’s process enhanced prevention, and not just detection and chasing, if improper spending.

“What we’re ending up with is much better relationships, my observation at least, much better relationships with agencies and their inspectors general, which is a very good residual outcome.”

I always enjoyed talking to Devaney because he was direct and plain-spoken. He let his own work do a lot of the talking. He was also frank and funny. Once on a panel with Devaney, we were sitting on a dais behind an earnest young man talking rapidly to the audience, with a very heavy foreign accent. Devaney leaned over to me and whispered loudly, “Do you understand a thing that guy is saying?”

It might sound cliched, but Earl Devaney really did exemplify the best in public service.

Teleworking, that is.

Having joined the 80 million other Americans to get hit with a variant of the coronavirus, I’ve spent the first three days of this week in more-or-less quarantine, working from one of Federal News Network’s remote bureaus. Namely, my daughter’s former bedroom. With some investment from the station’s owners, I converted it into a not-half-bad recording studio. That was two years ago.

But I’ve used it only about two or three full days during the entire pandemic, and only when I’ve had a light schedule. One of the days was a snow day, but of course the power went out. Having no confidence for when Pepco would restore it, I drove through the snow to our main studios anyway.

After three days, I’m more than ready to get back to my regular studio at our elegant Chevy Chase, Maryland offices. Monday morning I made a $20 investment in a green backdrop — delivered that day — for a couple of command performance Zoom interviews.

Yesterday was my first day back up and out. Now, I’ve got a few advantages that mitigate towards an in-office preference. I go to work very early, before rush hour, and on a short route, about 11 miles. Plus, I have my own “booth” — the radio word for an enclosed mini studio. Mine’s about 10 x 10 with counter space and cabinets. I like it in there. When it’s time to tape an interview, I just close the soundproof door to the rest of the newsroom.

By contrast, at a conference yesterday where I spent a couple of hours, I spoke with a lady who’s a union president and knowledge worker for a very large bureau in a very large agency. She has, or had, a 37-mile commute that included some of the region’s most notorious roads. She’s glad to never have to go back to the office.

But here’s what I didn’t like about teleworking:

The silence of the house. I guess looking out the upstairs window, you could call it the silence of the jambs. There’s no one around. I see neighbor after neighbor in yoga pants walking an inconceivable variety of dogs. By contrast, in our offices, while I work in a soundproof booth, most of the time the door is open. I hear the back-and-forth of the Federal News Network and WTOP people doing their thing. There’s humanity.

The distractions. My wife and I agreed to look after a neighbor’s 14-year-old golden retriever for a few days. I didn’t walk her (the retriever), and certainly not in yoga pants. For a while the old pooch settled on the floor of my home studio, and it was hard to resist scratching her behind the ears. Then the Postal truck stopped by. Then an Amazon delivery with my green cloth. I need to wind the grandfather clock. Oh, I’ll sit at the piano on the way past the living room and do a little Mozart to help me think. Think I’ll take out today’s recycling. Just a few lines of the crossword puzzle. My motorcycle windshield looks dirty. Oooh, that whistling: My wife is making tea, I’ll have a cup. Shoot, it’s 4 p.m. already?

The ergonomics. Nothing feels quite right at the home studio. I keep twisting the wrong knob on the mixer. There’s not quite enough screen real estate.  Why doesn’t the plastic floor mat stay put? My at-the-office booth was all equipped and installed by a special radio station contractor and feels like it.

Listen, if teleworking is for you, it’s for you. Mazel tov; enjoy. Me? Like the retriever snuffling on the floor next to me, this old dog isn’t up to the new tricks.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Robert O’Shaughnessy

It is estimated that more than two-thirds of $100 bills in circulation are outside of the United States.

Source: The Washington Post