Earlier this week, a friend texted me a ridiculous story. The short version is that his team at work had recently hired a new admin (‘admin’ meaning someone hired exclusive for administrative duties like filing, scheduling, and so on). Unfortunately, the new person’s start date had just been delayed because the boss had not completed all the necessary paperwork for the new hire. In other words, because of too much admin, the person hired due to too much admin… couldn’t start doing the admin!
This raises the question – what is with all the damned admin? Longtime readers will know that here at TOA, we simultaneously despise and respect admin, sneering at it in the monthly ‘proper admin’ recap yet grudgingly acknowledging that its secure position in the TOA rotation confirms its relative importance among other regular topics. Lately, however, my view toward admin is darkening as I notice all the little debits it’s charging to my tab.
Take for one example the fish I cook each week. I usually buy two pounds of salmon on Saturday and cook it in one batch for three meals during the week. This takes fifteen minutes once the oven hits 350 degrees. Quick and easy, right? Sure, if you ignore the admin, which is… the walking to Haymarket and back, the planning required to arrive there with cash in the appropriate denominations, the arranging of the fish on the baking pan, the careful hand-washing after the fact lest I unintentionally garnish my salmon meal with salmon-ella, the peeling of the cooked fish from the skin, the disposing of the parchment paper into a plastic bag, the sealing and storing of said bag into my freezer to discourage late-night rodent visits, the scrubbing of the baking pan after the fact… and after all this, I haven’t eaten yet!
I’m sure you get it by now, reader, but I'll go on. The saddest version of this tale came one morning at the start of the month when the process of baking potatoes, boiling beets, and washing the associated pots, pans, and cutlery stripped me of all but thirty minutes of the two hours I could have used for writing. I know these details because one of my projects in April involved taking careful notes about my routine for one week, this project resulting in almost nothing of interest except for my realization about how f’ing long EVERYTHING ADMIN takes. The lesson, I suppose, was that a routine is valuable for the way carefully planned repetition saves time from the admin of switching, completing, and repeating our various tasks.
Speaking of that project – when will you get to see this work, reader? Well, it’s based on a book I read in December, so naturally… probably this summer. Again, repeat after me: blame the admin. For whatever reason, I’ve found that all of a sudden the reliable ninety-day cycle of reading, writing, and posting that I had established in the early days of TOA has ballooned out to six months or longer. This is despite my best efforts to reduce the turnaround time by posting daily. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but I know that it’s the admin to blame, surely, because when things run on beyond schedule without explanation, there’s never really any other explanation.
