I’m three weeks into my detail and I have a few observations.
My first impression was that the National Marine Fish people are very neat. The office was almost stark with no big piles of paper, no personal clutter, no junk on the floor. There were actually clear working space surfaces. I’m not talking about public space, people had a clean and clear personal working space. I had to ask a few people ‘where is your stuff?’ They didn’t understand the question. “You know, the loads of papers that need to be recycled, the flood of files, the stacks of reports, the deluge of draft documents, the oodles of agendas, the mounds of meaningless memos, the conglomeration of clutter, the tons of trash, the desktop debris, the heaps of crap that no one wants to deal with?”
I learned that I was accustomed to living in bureaucratic paper squalor. I like going to the NOAA office. It is clean.
Before I arrived at the Sacramento office, I received a phone call from their IT Specialist. Yes, a living, breathing, human being named Shawn Martin and he was going to set up my computer account. First their IT person is a real person, and second, he called me. Wow. I took a photo of him because he’s real and he was right there, sitting at MY desk, setting up my account, my passwords, my access to the server and wanting to know if I had any questions! Woe. First, the place is clean then someone wants to help me with my computer. This is a photo of Shawn. No Photoshop touch up here. Real photo, real computer guy at my desk and his name is Shawn. ( End User Support Center what the hell does that mean?)
He must have thought something was up when I had to breath into a paper bag to stop myself from fainting from hyperventilation. I asked Shawn (I used his name) so, what do you do here? And we had a conversation about the electronic file system, the printers in the office and how he likes his job.
I like NOAA. They are living human beings.
What I’m not sure about is what do they do? There are several desks that look like someone uses it (albeit neatly,) but I haven’t had the chance to meet them. There are a lot of staff that “telework.” That means work at home. Some have long commutes, some have health and family considerations and some work for other offices like Arcata and Santa Rosa. Of the twenty-six names on the phone list, thirteen list either an alternate cellular phone or a telework phone number. Staff either are there, or they aren’t. I left notes on the desks of a couple of people, and they didn’t give me a call. Nothing different there, other than they list a phone number where they can be reached. They admit that they won’t be in the office daily.
I’m not sure I like having a virtual position, but it appears that I with my once-a-week schedule fit in just fine. I need to make appointments if I expect to talk with someone, but that’s ok. It means that I need to know what I want to discuss, who I need to discuss it with and have a plan for when. I can learn how to do that.
In my conversations and exploration of who does what, it appears that they manage a lot fewer projects. Some seem to have maybe one or two projects, not the five million that we juggle on a regular basis. I met someone who’s only responsibility is to work with Caltrans’ consultations; sort of a Caltrans Coordinator. When Caltrans has a project, he is their contact. The agency focus is much narrower, and so is their workload. I think I could stand to have so few projects that I could count them on my fingers.
When it comes to my project, well, that is a bit fuzzy. “We need this paper that talks about… not sure what format to use… not sure exactly what to cover, or what you need to do…but I’m sure whatever you do will be so much more than what we currently have.” My project instructions are a bit fuzzy, a bit nebulous, a bit vague.
Now that is something I do understand! I can work with that.
