06-22-2026

Today, I realized, not for the first time, although the incoming knowledge felt fresh because it's been a while since it's occurred to me with such clarity, that I spend a great deal of time and effort trying to convince other people that I am very busy even on the days when I am not, in fact, very busy.

"Other people" can be anybody. It can be co-workers, my manager, my mother or father, my wife, and even my dog. When my dog wants to play and I don't feel like grabbing the fox-tail plush that Shelley so loves to chew on (only when I'm holding it) and chase (only when I toss it) – I instead tell my dog right to her face that Daddy is too busy and must work.

Then I go upstairs to my office, turn on a monitor, read emails, type responses, read bug reports, type updates or hypotheses as to what is going wrong, review project details and test scenarios to make sure that I'm covering all the bases.

How much of this work really had to be done? Usually: Some of it. Sometimes: None of it. Occasionally: All of it.

And how well did it have to be done?

This also depends. If my co-worker Alpo (not his real name but satisfyingly close enough given that this used to be a real brand of dog food) asks for something, I probably have to do it, because he is so insufferably insistent and pushy that if I fail to do something he will nag me ceaselessly until it's complete. But do I have to do a good job? Maybe and maybe not. He's proven to me that sometimes, when I do a poor job, he'll find his own solution instead of using mine. The occasional lack of acceptance is sometimes painful to me – when I felt like my solution was good enough and worked perfectly fine – and sometimes not – when I just don't give a fuck about the work he is trying to get me to do, like the time he used AI to generate a list of nice-to-haves regarding bells and whistles surrounding a new feature.

That particular thing did not have to be done well, or even at all, so I let it slide, until I realized that he would continue to bug me incessantly, in public, on daily scrum meetings, to be sure that I was properly humiliated.

In situations such as these, I get creative. I took the feature and reassigned it to a different JIRA epic (this is a parent bug which organizes many sub-bugs underneath it) that he didn't follow or have access to. I made sure that doing so was a defensible maneuver in terms of labeling and tagging in case anyone bothered me about it, and I did it without asking anyone.

The task went away for a month until an incident occurred which forced the team to evaluate all the bugs and features and tasks under that "different JIRA epic" to which I had re-assigned the bug. Alpo saw it and said "how this bug come to be under this JIRA? What is the status Tawby?" (Alpo cannot pronounce my name properly, which is why I think it's fine for me to call him Alpo. Tit for tat on the "Can't be bothered to learn foreign person's name.")

I looked at the bug and said "oh that old thing. Yeah it's more or less done. I mean if it was important and undone, wouldn't you have added some notes to it or something to bump it back into visible status? You're pretty on top of stuff Alpo, I can't imagine you would have let something like this drop."

And just like that I can win arguments against him that prevent me from doing bullshit work that he's trying to assign to me for very little reason other than to appear authoritative.

But I have to be clever enough to defend myself against this type of bullshit. There are many times when I am not so clever. There are days when I am tired and stressed and working on things with actual importance – outages that need to be resolved, or features that 100% of the faculty and staff are going to use and therefore need to be perfect. On these days I cannot summon the will – or even the awareness – to fight back against these types of inane requests.

Anyway. The point is that a lot of the time I get to choose, to some extent, how much effort I put into a given thing. Not all the time – maybe not even 50% of the time – but 30-40%? That's still "a lot of the time," isn't it?

Today I was supposed to attend a department meeting, the Information Technology bi-quarterly All Hands On Deck gathering, and I consider these sorts of things to be a phenomenal waste of time. There is never anything important to learn. It is about face-time and signaling – making sure that the powers that be note that you are present, which they seem to think equates to commitment, which they definitely mistake for actual job performance.

It is not. Actual job performance is me waking up at 5:30 AM tomorrow morning to cut over the project I've been working on for the past 12 or 18 months into live production. It will work because I'm a reasonably performant worker. It will work because I've focused time and effort and energy on the details, over and over again, day after day, programming this feature and that feature and guarding against this scenario and that weird usage that I'm sure someone will do (e.g. hit back 5 times in a row after traversing six pages down in a menu which used to blow up the app). It will work because I've made sure it will work, and this indicates I'm a strong, competent employee.

Workplace competence is not showing up at a department meeting, sitting on my ass, twiddling my thumbs, and leaving after two and a half hours of slide decks and self congratulatory speeches made by our relatively new CIO.

And yet I know that there's zero chance that I can convince my manager of this fact.

We had a 1:1 at three o'clock, a few hours after that IT meeting ended. I left halfway through the meeting, during the intermission, in which there is a so-called Ice Breaker game, wherein everyone seated at the same table – usually five or six people – has to talk to one another over some pretense that the organizers have come up with. I didn't even stay long enough to know what the game was – as soon as the Ice Breaker game was called, I stood up, walked to the double entrance doors, through, then out to the parking lot, then out to my car. I was home by eleven.

My manager asked why I wasn't at the meeting.

"I was at the meeting," I told him. "It was great. Especially the moment of silence for Al Dionne." (Al is a co-worker who died unexpectedly two weeks ago at age 59, a year or two away from retirement.)

This thew my manager for a loop. I could not have known about the moment of silence if I wasn't there, and yet he clearly made it a point to scan the room and couldn't locate me. On top of that, the point I made was so somber that it stunned him – he couldn't press his attack. "Yes, Al – it was a big loss for the organization." He said some other things about Al and the importance of mourning people we have lost, people that have passed, and I congratulated myself on the deft escape.

Back to the point of this entry. It took work to come up with this deflection – to sell my manager on the idea that I was present for the entire meeting when I was not, in fact, present for the entire meeting. It took work and ethical violations and energy and time to defend myself against the repeated demands to blatantly waste my time.

But sometimes, it is worth spending time to waste time. It is important to show, obliquely if you must, just how asinine others are.

Not only was I subtly making a point about not needing to be at the meeting, I was, at the same time, reminding my manager that we are all going to die, some sooner than others – Al was only ten years older than me! – and none of us, I absolutely guarantee, are going to say, on our deathbed, that we really wished we had attended, fully, every single fucking meeting that someone we don't even personally know put on our individual calendars and demanded we attend simply so we could hear very important people talk about their very important achievements and the very important direction of our very amazing organization.

RIP Al.