Category: 2017

I don’t read or listen to the “regular” news because I prefer long, in-depth articles that have been well researched.

Since starting my new job, I’ve been occasionally reading the Bloomberg BNA Daily Environment Report. The publisher is the Bureau of National Affairs. I think they create some other professional reports as well, for law and economics, etc. The Environment Report is emailed to us at work every day. I don’t have time to read it every day, but it does a good job of giving one-paragraph summaries of the articles on the front page. I love the layout, complete simplicity; black and white, no photos, no ads. Articles in two columns on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. (Ours comes in pdf form in an email, so I read it on my computer.)

Here is more info, https://www.bna.com/environment-energy-report

Here is an example of the headlines on the first page. This is the front page, the report itself is about 10 pages.

If you’re interested in this and it turns out to be prohibitively expensive, let me know. As far as I’m aware, I’m allowed to forward emails 🙂

Every morning I park behind these two cars.

The one on the right has a sign that says, “I believe in fairies.” The one on the left has a plate frame that says, “To close for missiles, switching to guns.” And I don’t understand either one. It’s such a juxtaposition.

I’m like, I don’t get it. I don’t get either one of them. Does she really believe in fairies or is it just some sort of ironic commentary on our political times? Maybe she doesn’t really believe in fairies but wishes she could? Is it supposed to be funny? Or maybe just unique?

The one about guns – is this just some sort of he-man macho meaningless statement, or is there something more subtle that I’m missing? Is it funny? Is it clever?

I finally ran into the owner of the missiles-to-guns car and I asked him. What does it mean? So he tried to explain that missiles go further than guns. Yeah I know that, but…so? Why did you put that on the back of your car? (I didn’t quite ask it that way, but almost).  Apparently, it’s a “if you can read this you’re too close”, back off and quit tailgating statement. Okay, I was just wondering.

Then I saw a bumper sticker that I thought was funny (sorry, no photo, I was driving). It said, “My other car is my motorcycle that don’t run.” I took that as a little bit of self-depreciatory humor, and I laughed. But then I got to thinking about it and I’m like, hmmm, maybe not? The rapidly widening economic gap – and the misconceptions about the cultural differences of the haves and have nots – is causing a big problem in our country. And it’s maybe not so funny after all.

I momentarily wished we were back in simpler times. But those times weren’t much simpler. I grew up in logging country when that industry was in massive decline. Hundreds of square miles of beautiful forestlands had been decimated, leaving bald hills and enormous clear-cut scars through the entire northwest. This prompted understandable pushback. But imposing limits to logging meant poverty for a huge percentage of the local population. One bumper sticker I remember from back then went, “Hug a logger – you’ll never go back to trees.” This bumper sticker did point to the class differences in that debate – but I like to imagine that it did so in a reasonably friendly manner.

It’s ironic, speaking of the role of trees, that we’re belatedly realizing that our earth is getting too hot and now they are talking about ways to use trees to recapture the CO2 we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere. One way is to plant a bunch of trees (a really big bunch of trees), and let them soak up the CO2. Then instead of releasing the CO2 back again as the trees die and decay, burn the trees for fuel and capture the CO2 while burning them. Then somehow sequestering the captured CO2, perhaps by pumping it back into the ground where it came from. It’s a complicated, expensive idea that would take huge amounts of land. But I gather we’re going to have to do some sort of expensive CO2 removal, because it’s basically too late to just cut emissions, even if we all stopped using any fossil fuels at all, starting this very moment.

Well, I don’t want to end this post on an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it topic. So here’s something cute I saw on a car at lunch today; a vanity license plate that read, “Gampa”. Awwww! That’s exactly how they say it too!

It’s been nuts. It’s particularly been nuts at work. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it, but it’s relentless. It was plenty enough challenge to simply have a brand new job in an area I know very little about (air quality). But no, one month into it, they anoint me acting manager (with no actual previous management experience). So that’s it, right, like surely it can’t get any harder than that, right? Right? Wrong.

So guess what? Our senior manager is doing a reorganization of his whole department, and we’re now in the early stages of more than doubling the size of my team, and more than doubling my team’s workload. We currently have one vacancy already, and three new (vacant) positions will soon be moved into my team. So I’ll have 4 new people to hire and train. Our team currently only consists of 3 of us, and 2 of the 3 of us are brand new. So we’re going to have a team of 7, with 6 of the 7 of us still in new-hire probationary status, and only one guy who actually knows what he’s doing. Don’t say it. No, he’s not going to retire. He is not allowed to retire. Because I said so.

And our metrics suck. My team currently isn’t even doing a third of the work we are supposed to be doing. If the facilities we are regulating had any idea how few of their reports we are even filing, much less looking at…omg. We’ve got boxes of unreviewed submissions stacked in unused cubicles. Ideally, we’d be reviewing all the reports. But meanwhile I’m just trying to get some prioritization in place so we can try to catch the most egregious violations.

In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not the official manager yet. The job will be posting in the next week or two, and then I will need to apply and interview, and tell them all about how great I am in this job. I’ve been learning a lot fast, and I probably don’t realize how much I already know. But let me tell you, I spend every minute of every day feeling clueless.

For example, I get an email. I don’t know what the email means or why it came to me. I don’t have any idea what to do with the email. I google phrases and acronyms out of the email. I print the email and walk around to random people in the department and show them the email. I write down the incomprehensible things they are saying about the email. I go back to my desk and google some more. I then tentatively draft something that sounds like it might make sense about the email, and send it to approximately the right set of people (give or take a few) and pray that I don’t sound like a total idiot. Then on to the next email. And repeat.

Meanwhile I’m supposed to be writing project plans and timelines for projects I don’t even understand. I’ve also been put in charge of several online applications, all in various stages of development, none of which I know how to use.

It’s soooo way different from Sandia. At Sandia we were extremely micromanaged and everything was spoon-fed. We had to know everything about everything before they allowed us to do anything. Here it’s the opposite. They’re like, don’t worry about the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing, you just gotta do it anyway because it needs done and we don’t have anyone else to do it. Just go, go, go, you’re doing great, keep going as fast as you can.

And the weird thing – the work here is actually more technically difficult (in my job at least) than it was at Sandia. I have a lot of credibility here from having worked at Sandia, because Sandia has a reputation of doing highly technical incomprehensible stuff. So they think I’m some sort of uber technical wiz. But the reality is, air quality – and the facilities we regulate (oil and gas plants, compression stations, etc.) – are actually really complicated.

Oh by the way, do you know I have the ability to just edit the state’s websites on whim? That I actually know how to do. And they’re letting me do it. Like really? Yes, I can just go up there and write or upload whatever I want (he-he-he). But seriously, can you imagine Sandia allowing something like that?

Ok, update, I found out I can’t actually edit EVERYTHING I want on the state website. I have total access to write whatever I want on any of the pages. BUT, I cannot change the title of a link in a dropdown menu without Bureau Chief approval! (That’s lots of layers up there.) So I have to send a formal email up the chain in order to have one of the options in the side menu say, “Notices and FAQs” rather than “FAQ’s”. But hey, the actual page that it’s linked to is all mine. I can put whatever notices and FAQs up there that I want. Puppy pics, here we come! Ok, not really. It would be fun though.

I haven’t worked this hard at a job in my entire life.