1. Keeping the calendar. Among other things, I am keeper of the calendar for what my annual self-assessment only slightly mockingly calls “the premier large meeting and event venue” on the installation. Unfortunately, that means every time someone wants to have a meeting in our fancy 750 seat auditorium, they have to come through me. It should be easy enough. It’s all automated. Except everyone consistently jacks up the automation, or schedules the wrong rooms, or the wrong times, or the wrong days, and generally has no idea what they’re doing or what they actually want. And then I have to unsort them. Repeatedly. You’d think if someone can schedule an Outlook meeting they could use a nice simple reservation website. You would, however, be wrong in thinking that. I suspect these are also people who struggle to make Outlook work.

2. Panic buying. The news and social media are filled with clips of people panic buying toilet paper because of the ongoing east coast dockworker’s strike. Here’s the thing… TP for your bunghole is almost entirely produced domestically right here in the US of A. It doesn’t arrive by ship. The port strike will have no effect on being able to get a package of Charmin extra soft. Still, it’s disappearing from shelves because people are fucking stupid. I take no comfort that people learned nothing from the opening days of the Great Plague and they are the same “average Americans” we’re expecting to exercise good judgement in picking a president next month.

3. “Where’s the government?” Having been seconded over to FEMA for several hurricane seasons back in the early 00’s, I have at least an educated opinion about what the basic response process to a large-scale natural disaster should look like. What is impossible for me to miss, of course, is the army of online experts who are demanding to know “where’s the government” practically before a storm hits. It’s obvious they don’t know the processes or procedures or the sheer complexity of spinning up a massive and complex inter-agency operation… even one you’ve practiced and exercised often. The fact is, for the first 3 to 5 days of a disaster (at a minimum), you’re on your own. There’s no easy way to say it. In those early days you have to be prepared to look out for your own health, safety, and hygiene requirements. After that you’ll start seeing local, state, and federal responders in that order as roads and other critical infrastructure items are brought back online and/or made accessible. There’s no magic wand the federal government can waive and make a “FEMA guy” appear in all the places where the roads are otherwise impassible instantaneously. It’s not the answer anyone wants to hear, of course… be we collectively don’t react well to anything that calls for dealing with complexity and abstractions, so here we are.