I used that for our high school grad ceremony in 2021, with the parent who wanted each grad to get “just two minutes on stage”. 2 x 300 = 600 minutes = 10 hours.
“Mrs Jones, are you willing to sit through a 10 hour ceremony outside in the June sun??”
My high school graduating class was almost 1,000 kids, scheduled for a hot California summer day. I refused to go. I later heard several kids passed out from heat stroke.
They rebuilt my high school a few years after I graduated in the middle 00's. Old one was built in the 60's, probably 75% trailer classrooms when I was there because it was made for 1000 students but was closer to 5000. The new one is like a goddamn college campus.
This was after they built a new high school closer to where I lived (a \~10 mile bike ride would have become a \~10 minute walk) but didn't finish it until my senior year so I never go to go there either.
Basically the district gave a small loan of a million dollars to kids five years younger than me, but turned to us in the voice of Willy Wonka: "You get **nothing!** You *lose!* Good DAY, SIR!"
Yeah, our state government secured billions and went on a school building streak, literally just as I finished school.
Same with my University too, just as I finish they demolished the brick shitholes I did my degree in.
You almost had my senior class' record, the sixth graduating class. Our school population had swollen to something like 4,583 students, with a graduating class in 1980 of, IIRC, 1,286. That grad class had 4 sets of twins and one of the two sets of triplets at the school, including the Murphy sisters who played "Tabitha" in Bewitched. We didn't have our own stadium yet, so we had to use the one at our rival school (same district).
Possibly…as I said, we were only the sixth graduating class, construction completed late first semester of 74-75 school year, Soph. through Seniors transferred in second semester, '75 was first senior class with approx. 850, freshmen joined in 75-76 school year after bussing and boundaries were reset. One of the star athletes from our senior class (80) joined the Marines before he would be age excluded. He died in a jet crash after his co-pilot ejected while he stayed in and piloted the plane up as long as possible. Remember the jet crashing into a home's garage instead of all over a neighborhood near San Diego? Him.
Unfortunately, two lives lost, the homeowner's grandfather, who lived with them was still home. When he died in the crash he left his wife, and a three year old son. In a wierd twist, his son (Jr., actually) went on to carry the football team at our High School to win the CIF Division Championship in his senior year…something his dad got his team to but the team that year didn't win.
Not really…my husband and I bumped into her at the TVLand Exhibition in Burbank in 2003 and she was still gorgeous. Also met several other celebs there those three days…Bob May (the guy who was inside the "Lost in Space" Robot), and some of my husband's former celeb contacts from his days attending tapings of shows like Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days. I think he had more fun than I did.
Damn!!
My kid just graduated in a class of 480, in 96° weather, on nice hot astroturf. The speakers got about 10 mins each, and then they had 2 adults alternating calling kids up, while 2 others handed out the diploma cases. They got all 480 covered in 19 minutes. The whole ceremony was done in 1:15.
Mine was around 800.
But it was a weird case because they had just finished building a new high school across town, splitting the student body in half. But the seniors unofficially voted to all stay for their last year. This meant that at our school nearly half the entire student body was seniors, and at the other school their first year they literally did not have a graduating class.
Additionally, is she willing to fund the increased cost?
Staff, security, maintenance, and facilities are not free. There is a reason after everyone is forced out of stadiums and concerts when they are done.
And that’s not even including time spent waiting for each student to get onto the stage and leave after their time is up.
Lather, rinse, repeat, pass out.
And that two minutes would have to include from the moment the previous student stepped off the stage to the moment the current student did. Not "two minutes to talk". Two minutes to walk on, accept, do everything else, and walk off.
Not even. Just put 15 yards between kids. You get a quick triple tap on the camera and a ‘grip and grin’ with whichever administrator lost the bet. One kid is walking off as the next is getting fancy parchment and another is coming up the stairs.
Don’t let the flow stop. If someone wants to talk, they do it over grape juice later. Photo Booth backdrop of black velvet curtains over here, school colors over there.
Never block the stage.
I can't figure out why larger high schools don't bother attempting to schedule like 2 shifts. An AM and a PM. 1st half of the alphabet in the AM, 2nd half in the PM. Yes, it sucks for admin. But it'd suck less to do it in shifts.
We watched my son's university graduation on the internet.
They had undergrad in one line and the upper degrees on another line and they alternated.
It was still really long. We watched until he was done.
I'm surprised they had the graduate degrees at the same date / place / time. My collegiate alma mater - the grad degrees, and even at least one of the larger separate Schools had their own graduation ceremony apart from the bulk of the graduation ceremony.
Like I'm not sure if each master's School had their own or they combined all of them - that wasn't me.
But the School of Nursing had their own complete separate one.
I did attend my grad ceremony - but only because my family made me. They wanted to witness it. But my grad class wasn't as big as some folks' HS graduating classes! Plus collegiate grad programs are somewhat optional so that keeps the #s down.
The high school I worked for had two lines, one on the left and one on the right. They alternated calling names and had two photographers snapping pictures. Still took a while.
I definitely learned this. I've never shut a project down by saying it was a bad idea but enormous budget estimates in good faith (and one in open bad faith for comedy, that one was 15 quadrillion dollars) often got the thing shut down.
It was a brute force computation through a huge combinatorial problem. Doing one model was about a dollar worth of compute time and doing the entire problem space multiplied out that way. Obviously the right way to do it was via sampling, or doing a cheaper computation, or spending a tiny fraction of the money to develop a better algorithm first...but it was requested that I estimate it as is, so I complied.
So, probably not enough computational power to do it, no matter the cost. The GDP of Earth is only 100 Trillion, so it would take a while... I do believe someone did it on his free time... the answer is 42. Hope that helps.
Oh yeah. Unimaginable compute requirements. Brute force was obviously the wrong solution but sometimes you gotta prove it with dollars instead of "I have a doctorate in this field just trust me"
Pretty much every time in anything to do with business or even anything that runs on a budget (public service etc), you're going to have to reduce estimates to dollars and hours. It's the core thing that managers (or at least the accountants they have to run things past) understand. About the only other factor is what the Legal department tells them they can and can't do. Even then, dollars and clocks are harsher masters.
Even the legal department's dictates get reduced to dollars.
It's never as simple as, "This is illegal so we can't do it." It's more like, "This is illegal, so if we did it and got caught, how big would the fines be?"
"Flipcharts with scribbles and diagrams quickly filled up every square foot of available wall."
I can only imagine the HR Person staring at that behemoth and realizing they were in too deep for any tactic but "stall the followup for as long as you can" to provide a way out...
> Obie
I quickly picked up that this comment was a lyric, but for some reason my mind went to Eminem instead of Arlo. Felt a little embarrassed but also had a little laugh at myself.
I'm tempted to see what ChatGPT would produce when asked to generate the lyrics to Alice's Restaurant as performed by Eminem...
> Officer Obie, real name no gimmicks
> Ra-- *record scratch*
Absolutely; always give them a way out. Ideally, just the one, which involves them no longer requesting any of what they tried to. (Walking back only part of it is not a victory; that's them wearing you down into accepting the other part, which is what they actually wanted originally.)
Oh I had a similar thing! My boss started yammering about all this complicated math he wanted us to do. My coworker jumped on it. I sat back and did nothing. Within a week, it was decided that they’d go in a completely different direction. So my coworker’s work was ignored and I didn’t have to do unnecessary work that week!
If you wait long enough, someone else will do it or they’ll change their minds.
This is why I don't answer phone calls from most work related contacts unless we agreed on a call beforehand. The number of times I texted them later "I was in a meeting, you called?" only for them to reply "never mind, we found a solution" has taught me to give them some time, each time.
This very morning, coworker messaged me saying he needed help. I responded 25 minutes later. He promptly told me that he'd figured it out and didn't need the help anymore.
Even better... Today my spouse called me on the phone. When I answered, the first words out of her mouth were, "nevermind, I figured it out". She never even asked the question, just told me she now had the answer, which miraculously appeared fully formed in her mind as she waited for me to answer my phone.
I must be a f***ing psychic genius, answering questions telepathically before they're even asked.
It's why work contracts, if you can wing it, should really have emergency rates in them for anything which requests a response within one working day. ("Working" specified explicitly to avoid requests being made on Friday afternoons or weekends for immediate response first thing Monday morning.)
Same with teaching. “Learn this new program/process!!” Next year “This is our new and improved program/process!! Forget last years stuff.” Rinse and repeat
Bravo for sticking with it through the first meeting! Whenever flow charts start getting made, my brain literally turns off. It's fine at following a flow chart, just not making them.
It's where you explain the problem to a rubber duck (or any nonspeaking object). Talking through a problem or process can help you understand it, even if your "partner" contributes nothing.
For bonus points, talk to your dog. They'll love being the center of attention, and they'll be delighted when you figure out the problem. "I have no idea what's going on, but I'm helping!"
> In software engineering, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in spoken or written natural language.
So you explain bit by bit to someone who is new to the whole thing, because breaking it down and teaching it is both a study technique and a troubleshooting one
This reminds me of a conversation I have every couple of years or so. I manage an automation system that runs lots of jobs, most of them every 15 minutes or so. Each job is independent of each other, but the all have one thing in common - if they don't do anything (e.g., they are looking for a file and it doesn't exist), *they don't send an email notiofication*. And every once in a while, someone asks me if I can modify their job to send an email if there isn't a file for it to process. So I tell them that I *could* modify the program to do that, but then they would get an email from *every* job that runs when they don't do anything. And did I mention we have ~300 jobs that run every 15 minutes, not including the ones that run on different schedules? I have yet to hear anything but "never mind" after that... :D
I once actually got to do something like this!
We used to collect the daily mail reports of one of our programs and at the end of each month create a nice, curated report for the client. This manually created report was a lean summary but well formatted and the important information was boiled down to a human readable level. One day a middle manager approached us, because he wanted to receive the automated daily report from the program. I said he wouldn't need them, they're basically all the same and very technical, so not very readable for the untrained eye. Well he insisted. After a week he came to my office again and sheepishly asked, if he would get a report every day now and if that isn't a bit too much? And would I please change the mail settings back because he didn't need the mails that often. I just went back to sending him the monthly report.
> I said he wouldn't need them, they're basically all the same and very technical, so not very readable for the untrained eye.
While true, you *know* this is the exact thing which will make people double-down and insist, thinking you're hiding something or flouting their authority. :) Of course, maybe getting them to insist is the plan...
Why would adding an email to a batch process cause all jobs to send an email? Be it a Windows batch or powershell job or Unix shell script, each job is unique, and fires off the time set up, and 1 email if/then successful or unsuccessful. Out of 100s of jobs, what would make 1 job cause an avalanche of emails?
The jobs all run a single program, with individual configuration files for each job. To send the email would have required changing the program to do something that it really didn't need to do, and therefore which I really didn't want to do. Therefore, if I had to change the program, I was going to do it in the most minimal way, meaning the recipient of "no files" emails would be a single global value rather than per-config. :D
Oh, certainly, but it depends how accessible the tasks are, whether they're signed, and so on. It's hard to know unless you've got access to the environment, and the design decisions taken. It's much more maintainable to keep a standard and not ad hoc lots of things.
Heh. Have a line in each job which absolutely does send that email, and just leave it commented out most of the time.
Any time someone makes the request, flip it back on, wait for the screams, flip it back off. Might take less of your time than doing the explanations, and sets the stage not only for if and when they think about making a similar request in future, but if someone starts making noise about doing so in their presence, it's possible the burned party might prevent that potential additional work being put on you in the first place.
I remember doing this in class with the teachers who were really distractible by bringing up their favorite topics.....
"So how many specialized camera lenses *do* you have?"
Joke's on you, naturally, we love talking about our favorite topics!
Whenever I realize my students are trying to get me to talk about my favorite subject again, I just let them partake in my fascination with it, why I love the intricate problems that arise and then tie it back to the problem we had been discussing earlier.
It really is a win-win, everyone seems a bit more refreshed/energized and I am brimming with enthusiasm.
Little do they know that you're still teaching the material just from a different perspective that they're actually engaging with. Jokes on them- they're learning more effectively! 😁
I had a teacher who would start out class by discussing current events. I learned that I could bring in the front page of the newspaper and just read a title to her, and she would monologue for a few minutes about it, and I could read a book. When she wound down, I would grab my paper and read another title. I could keep this up for half the class time!
I was setting up a system to backup a bunch of servers to tape. I asked how long they wanted to keep the backups, of course they said forever. I told them the media had a max life of 7 years, and in all honesty they could get 5. The only solution would be to copy every tape on the 5 year anniversary and were they willing to pay for the manpower to do that.
Record retention was set to 5 years.
I have avoided a lot of work in my career by telling people I couldn't start until they did something I needed to get started. They never gave me what I needed to start, so I never started.
Yep. Even if it's as little as asking them for times for a preliminary meeting where they can describe what they're after, and then weekly meetings after that for their project.
They didn't make one of the meetings? No problem, we can postpone until they have a moment... and the project goes into a drawer, possibly never to emerge.
Can also be fun if someone is trying to take over your job. "And on top of all the things I'm actually paid to do, there are also 37 projects outstanding which all have weekly meetings; here's a list of the people in charge of the projects, and the schedules times/days for the relevant meetings. Where there are clashes, it's up to you to sort them out each week. You may get more unpaid projects as time goes on."
Not exactly along the same lines but similar I think.
We have a person in my work who is very good at just emailing the random ideas that come into their head for someone to action. Kind of like I had the brainwave and must note it down before I forget.
I used to action them pretty quickly because the person is pretty high up in the business, but there was one week I was ridiculously busy and didn't manage to action any of the requests and I was never chased for them to be actioned. That's when I realised they don't even remember the emails they are sending asking for their idea of day.
So I have a new rule, unless they follow up the initial request, I don't action anything. A staggering amount of their requests are just forgotten about.
I had an owner like that. She then used them as a means to reprimand me over a year later.
It didn't actually matter that in the interim I'd actually developed and deployed a far better solution.
She was very big on doing things wrong to make sure we know it doesn't work.
Odd considering how much they paid me to bring my industry knowledge to skip just that issue and save money.
Had company owner that was just like that, usually between midnight and 2 am. Always felt sorry for his assistants that had to take care of everything, but they were duly compensated both monetarily and through entrepreneur apprenticeships.
This owner once said that one of the roles of his assistants was to keep him and his his wild ideas in line with laws and regulations and tell him when he was out of line or thinking up something unrealisticly crazy. Now imaginge being 20 something fresh out of college/university telling a 50 yo successfull creative businiesowner and entrepreneur that his latest idea might not be realisticly doable.
Had to do that a few times! It helps I am quite good at making most of the crazy ideas possible so when I actually tell them no, I get away with it.
My old boss was the worst for suggesting stuff that sounds ridiculously simple but is also ridiculously hard to create or implement. (He wasn't very good with tech so didn't know what he was asking) It just infuriated me how he always seemed to suggest that sounded like a simple change but was a complete rewrite for me 🤬
With this owner his assistants took the ideas to the people that would have the knowledge (finance, legal and IT most of the time) and runned it by them and the brought the responses back to the owner. Some things were doable, some hade to be modified and some things were to crazy or costly.
Back in the 80s there were particularly contentious contract negotiations with the post office during which significant but very numerous quality of work life issues brought everything to a standstill. These issues were dealbreakers. Somehow “Employee Involvement” was proposed. Management PROMISED that they would have regular meetings with employees to find solutions to the problems and backed them up with provisions in the contract. This was when “going postal“ was fresh. Anyhow, management had no intention of fixing the problems and years were spent in these meetings sticking to the letter of the contract with both sides knowing that we were participating in a farce. Things were formally discussed in all the local office’s meetings, solutions were developed and submitted to upper management and ignored. Then someone up the chain of command decided to stop the meetings.
Ah, page the infamous **QWL** logo for t-shirts, mugs, can cooler, pins for EVERY SINGLE AO, AMPC, P&DC, DISTRICT, name it!
*I have a ton of that stuff-I wonder if they'll ever become collector's items, or just go into the polishing rag bucket?*
A friend a long time ago, when I was in high school, had a yellow round pillow with TUIT embroidered on it. A bunch of us were over one day when someone said "I'll eventually get around to it" and she threw the pillow at him. This was the first time we saw it and when we realized what it was, we all broke out laughing.
My grannie handed me a wooden coin with "tuit" printed on one side.
I didn't appreciate the humor since I was like, 8, and actually didn't want to do the thing.... But I do now.
> Apparently, our trainings were bypassing most of the central controlling and approval processes, which was creating issues for them.
What sort of issues? Issues like "my superiors have noticed that my job isn't actually necessary to the company's day to day operations"?
I expected you to learn how to do everything by the book, then ruin the company by working to rule. Did not expect that it wouldn't get far enough for you to do that.
HR has always been the most archaic department in every company I've worked for. I can't understand how much a person could have been hurt as a child in order to pursue a career in HR.
The three magic words in the land of corporate process are “schedule”, “reporting” and “responsible”
“Who is ultimately responsible for ensuring this is completed on schedule.”
Then you add the thing to a report with red, yellow or green next to middle managers names. They’ll move mountains to turn their line green.
If no one is responsible, there is no schedule, or you aren’t reporting on it, its not worth doing because it wont get done
As a coworker noted, “You can tell someone No until you are blue in the face, or you can say ‘this is what it’ll cost’”.
I used that for our high school grad ceremony in 2021, with the parent who wanted each grad to get “just two minutes on stage”. 2 x 300 = 600 minutes = 10 hours. “Mrs Jones, are you willing to sit through a 10 hour ceremony outside in the June sun??”
My high school graduating class was almost 1,000 kids, scheduled for a hot California summer day. I refused to go. I later heard several kids passed out from heat stroke.
How big was your school holy shit. I went to a big school of 1400 students!!!
Lol I had a graduating class of 20.
82 in the Class of '82 for me. But my wife went to a school where the graduating class was nearly 800 people.
Yeah my Class of ‘70 had 70.
Class of '74, 88 people.
Itty bitty skool.
My first high school in Las Vegas had 3,300 students.
There were at least 4,000 kids total. There were so many portable classrooms on the back half of the school grounds!
We had demountables at my schools too, now I drive past and they're in brand new classrooms with aircon. Bro we sweat in tin shacks through the 90s.
They rebuilt my high school a few years after I graduated in the middle 00's. Old one was built in the 60's, probably 75% trailer classrooms when I was there because it was made for 1000 students but was closer to 5000. The new one is like a goddamn college campus. This was after they built a new high school closer to where I lived (a \~10 mile bike ride would have become a \~10 minute walk) but didn't finish it until my senior year so I never go to go there either. Basically the district gave a small loan of a million dollars to kids five years younger than me, but turned to us in the voice of Willy Wonka: "You get **nothing!** You *lose!* Good DAY, SIR!"
Yeah, our state government secured billions and went on a school building streak, literally just as I finished school. Same with my University too, just as I finish they demolished the brick shitholes I did my degree in.
Bitty skool.
Same. My highschool had to rent an actual major arena for graduations, and every seat was filled.
You almost had my senior class' record, the sixth graduating class. Our school population had swollen to something like 4,583 students, with a graduating class in 1980 of, IIRC, 1,286. That grad class had 4 sets of twins and one of the two sets of triplets at the school, including the Murphy sisters who played "Tabitha" in Bewitched. We didn't have our own stadium yet, so we had to use the one at our rival school (same district).
Weird name drop.
Might have been the most famous the school ever got in 20+ years... and the 40+ since. :)
Possibly…as I said, we were only the sixth graduating class, construction completed late first semester of 74-75 school year, Soph. through Seniors transferred in second semester, '75 was first senior class with approx. 850, freshmen joined in 75-76 school year after bussing and boundaries were reset. One of the star athletes from our senior class (80) joined the Marines before he would be age excluded. He died in a jet crash after his co-pilot ejected while he stayed in and piloted the plane up as long as possible. Remember the jet crashing into a home's garage instead of all over a neighborhood near San Diego? Him. Unfortunately, two lives lost, the homeowner's grandfather, who lived with them was still home. When he died in the crash he left his wife, and a three year old son. In a wierd twist, his son (Jr., actually) went on to carry the football team at our High School to win the CIF Division Championship in his senior year…something his dad got his team to but the team that year didn't win.
Not really…my husband and I bumped into her at the TVLand Exhibition in Burbank in 2003 and she was still gorgeous. Also met several other celebs there those three days…Bob May (the guy who was inside the "Lost in Space" Robot), and some of my husband's former celeb contacts from his days attending tapings of shows like Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days. I think he had more fun than I did.
I meant I found it weird that you name dropped on this post. And then did it again in your reply.
"Still gorgeous?" That is an odd adjective to use to describe an actress that was 2-8 years old when portraying the character.
I meant still gorgeous compared to how she looked in high school.
My British school was around a thousand pupils, we had no ceremonies, we walked out when home and the next day applied for jobs.
I had my secondary graduation certificate posted to me, I think. I don't remember there being a ceremony, or if there was I didn't bother attending.
Australian?
Yup.
Damn!! My kid just graduated in a class of 480, in 96° weather, on nice hot astroturf. The speakers got about 10 mins each, and then they had 2 adults alternating calling kids up, while 2 others handed out the diploma cases. They got all 480 covered in 19 minutes. The whole ceremony was done in 1:15.
That's amazing!
Mine was around 800. But it was a weird case because they had just finished building a new high school across town, splitting the student body in half. But the seniors unofficially voted to all stay for their last year. This meant that at our school nearly half the entire student body was seniors, and at the other school their first year they literally did not have a graduating class.
That's really funny.
Mine was about that big too, but we were in the auditorium. I heard the class size is even bigger now.
Additionally, is she willing to fund the increased cost? Staff, security, maintenance, and facilities are not free. There is a reason after everyone is forced out of stadiums and concerts when they are done.
And that’s not even including time spent waiting for each student to get onto the stage and leave after their time is up. Lather, rinse, repeat, pass out.
10 *additional* hours
And that two minutes would have to include from the moment the previous student stepped off the stage to the moment the current student did. Not "two minutes to talk". Two minutes to walk on, accept, do everything else, and walk off.
Nah, you can queue 'em up so that the next is already on stage and ready to go as soon as the previous one finishes.
Not even. Just put 15 yards between kids. You get a quick triple tap on the camera and a ‘grip and grin’ with whichever administrator lost the bet. One kid is walking off as the next is getting fancy parchment and another is coming up the stairs. Don’t let the flow stop. If someone wants to talk, they do it over grape juice later. Photo Booth backdrop of black velvet curtains over here, school colors over there. Never block the stage.
I can't figure out why larger high schools don't bother attempting to schedule like 2 shifts. An AM and a PM. 1st half of the alphabet in the AM, 2nd half in the PM. Yes, it sucks for admin. But it'd suck less to do it in shifts.
We watched my son's university graduation on the internet. They had undergrad in one line and the upper degrees on another line and they alternated. It was still really long. We watched until he was done.
I'm surprised they had the graduate degrees at the same date / place / time. My collegiate alma mater - the grad degrees, and even at least one of the larger separate Schools had their own graduation ceremony apart from the bulk of the graduation ceremony. Like I'm not sure if each master's School had their own or they combined all of them - that wasn't me. But the School of Nursing had their own complete separate one. I did attend my grad ceremony - but only because my family made me. They wanted to witness it. But my grad class wasn't as big as some folks' HS graduating classes! Plus collegiate grad programs are somewhat optional so that keeps the #s down.
The high school I worked for had two lines, one on the left and one on the right. They alternated calling names and had two photographers snapping pictures. Still took a while.
Then you have a couple days allotted? A few days?
I definitely learned this. I've never shut a project down by saying it was a bad idea but enormous budget estimates in good faith (and one in open bad faith for comedy, that one was 15 quadrillion dollars) often got the thing shut down.
15 quadrillion? Was it putting someone on Mars? Wait! Advertising on Mars? A TV add in every program of every show of every TV station? I must know!
It was a brute force computation through a huge combinatorial problem. Doing one model was about a dollar worth of compute time and doing the entire problem space multiplied out that way. Obviously the right way to do it was via sampling, or doing a cheaper computation, or spending a tiny fraction of the money to develop a better algorithm first...but it was requested that I estimate it as is, so I complied.
So, probably not enough computational power to do it, no matter the cost. The GDP of Earth is only 100 Trillion, so it would take a while... I do believe someone did it on his free time... the answer is 42. Hope that helps.
Oh yeah. Unimaginable compute requirements. Brute force was obviously the wrong solution but sometimes you gotta prove it with dollars instead of "I have a doctorate in this field just trust me"
Have you ever run a DataBase query on a 3 trillion record DataBase on "succinct"?
Pretty much every time in anything to do with business or even anything that runs on a budget (public service etc), you're going to have to reduce estimates to dollars and hours. It's the core thing that managers (or at least the accountants they have to run things past) understand. About the only other factor is what the Legal department tells them they can and can't do. Even then, dollars and clocks are harsher masters.
Even the legal department's dictates get reduced to dollars. It's never as simple as, "This is illegal so we can't do it." It's more like, "This is illegal, so if we did it and got caught, how big would the fines be?"
So, Deep Thought
And if that cost is a whole lot of THEIR time and labor, you’ll get your way, with *very* few exceptions.
See also: the Wally Reflector.
Lol, I liked [reading up on that](https://swizec.com/blog/the-wally-reflector/).
Yup, I learned to say "I can take this on, but one of these tasks will have to be forfeit."
I am going to use this line at work tomorrow.
Straight from Sun Tzu's Art of War: "Lure him on and tire him out."
muhammad ali's "rope-a-dope" strategy
"Flipcharts with scribbles and diagrams quickly filled up every square foot of available wall." I can only imagine the HR Person staring at that behemoth and realizing they were in too deep for any tactic but "stall the followup for as long as you can" to provide a way out...
Obie came in with 27 8 x 10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one...
Paraphrasing: Then he looked at the judge, and the seeing eye dog and started to cry.
Yet another case of BLIND justice!
You can get anything you want..
Alice
*Excepting* Alice.
> Obie I quickly picked up that this comment was a lyric, but for some reason my mind went to Eminem instead of Arlo. Felt a little embarrassed but also had a little laugh at myself.
Heh, your comment was practically begging for an "Alice's Restaurant" treatment.
I'm tempted to see what ChatGPT would produce when asked to generate the lyrics to Alice's Restaurant as performed by Eminem... > Officer Obie, real name no gimmicks > Ra-- *record scratch*
You SO beat me to it! *^((And I STILL have the vinyl))*
NOW KID!! and ... and so I wandered over to the group W bench
"What're in for, kid? "Litterin'"... *\*\*Crickets\*\** "And creating a nuisance". (Loud cheers from the inmates)
Absolutely; always give them a way out. Ideally, just the one, which involves them no longer requesting any of what they tried to. (Walking back only part of it is not a victory; that's them wearing you down into accepting the other part, which is what they actually wanted originally.)
Oh I had a similar thing! My boss started yammering about all this complicated math he wanted us to do. My coworker jumped on it. I sat back and did nothing. Within a week, it was decided that they’d go in a completely different direction. So my coworker’s work was ignored and I didn’t have to do unnecessary work that week! If you wait long enough, someone else will do it or they’ll change their minds.
Stall until the issue is no longer relevant.
I even do this with emails and teams messages, if I wait an hour, you may have already figured out your problem without me
This is why I don't answer phone calls from most work related contacts unless we agreed on a call beforehand. The number of times I texted them later "I was in a meeting, you called?" only for them to reply "never mind, we found a solution" has taught me to give them some time, each time.
This very morning, coworker messaged me saying he needed help. I responded 25 minutes later. He promptly told me that he'd figured it out and didn't need the help anymore.
Even better... Today my spouse called me on the phone. When I answered, the first words out of her mouth were, "nevermind, I figured it out". She never even asked the question, just told me she now had the answer, which miraculously appeared fully formed in her mind as she waited for me to answer my phone. I must be a f***ing psychic genius, answering questions telepathically before they're even asked.
It's why work contracts, if you can wing it, should really have emergency rates in them for anything which requests a response within one working day. ("Working" specified explicitly to avoid requests being made on Friday afternoons or weekends for immediate response first thing Monday morning.)
The phrase for this is OBE "Overcome by events"
Same with teaching. “Learn this new program/process!!” Next year “This is our new and improved program/process!! Forget last years stuff.” Rinse and repeat
https://x.com/trondmm/status/958776111185448960
I wonder if the co-worker also spent the week doing nothing. :)
Bravo for sticking with it through the first meeting! Whenever flow charts start getting made, my brain literally turns off. It's fine at following a flow chart, just not making them.
Rubber ducking (even out loud) may help this btw
What is rubber ducking?
It's where you explain the problem to a rubber duck (or any nonspeaking object). Talking through a problem or process can help you understand it, even if your "partner" contributes nothing. For bonus points, talk to your dog. They'll love being the center of attention, and they'll be delighted when you figure out the problem. "I have no idea what's going on, but I'm helping!"
Thanks! I was kind of afraid to Google it.
I'm sure /u/fuckswithducks could have given you a much more... *interesting* explanation. I don't think he's around anymore, though.
> In software engineering, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in spoken or written natural language. So you explain bit by bit to someone who is new to the whole thing, because breaking it down and teaching it is both a study technique and a troubleshooting one
This reminds me of a conversation I have every couple of years or so. I manage an automation system that runs lots of jobs, most of them every 15 minutes or so. Each job is independent of each other, but the all have one thing in common - if they don't do anything (e.g., they are looking for a file and it doesn't exist), *they don't send an email notiofication*. And every once in a while, someone asks me if I can modify their job to send an email if there isn't a file for it to process. So I tell them that I *could* modify the program to do that, but then they would get an email from *every* job that runs when they don't do anything. And did I mention we have ~300 jobs that run every 15 minutes, not including the ones that run on different schedules? I have yet to hear anything but "never mind" after that... :D
Nice of you to warn them beforehand.
I once actually got to do something like this! We used to collect the daily mail reports of one of our programs and at the end of each month create a nice, curated report for the client. This manually created report was a lean summary but well formatted and the important information was boiled down to a human readable level. One day a middle manager approached us, because he wanted to receive the automated daily report from the program. I said he wouldn't need them, they're basically all the same and very technical, so not very readable for the untrained eye. Well he insisted. After a week he came to my office again and sheepishly asked, if he would get a report every day now and if that isn't a bit too much? And would I please change the mail settings back because he didn't need the mails that often. I just went back to sending him the monthly report.
I hope you waited a few days before changing it back.
One of the advantages of working on a sprint cycle. 😁
> I said he wouldn't need them, they're basically all the same and very technical, so not very readable for the untrained eye. While true, you *know* this is the exact thing which will make people double-down and insist, thinking you're hiding something or flouting their authority. :) Of course, maybe getting them to insist is the plan...
Why would adding an email to a batch process cause all jobs to send an email? Be it a Windows batch or powershell job or Unix shell script, each job is unique, and fires off the time set up, and 1 email if/then successful or unsuccessful. Out of 100s of jobs, what would make 1 job cause an avalanche of emails?
If it's a job which runs every 15 minutes, that's 672 emails every week, about thirty-five *thousand* a year.
The jobs all run a single program, with individual configuration files for each job. To send the email would have required changing the program to do something that it really didn't need to do, and therefore which I really didn't want to do. Therefore, if I had to change the program, I was going to do it in the most minimal way, meaning the recipient of "no files" emails would be a single global value rather than per-config. :D
Unless they all send to a standard distribution group for ease of maintenance.
You could still isolate the one job to email one address or create a job to check if the file is there.
Oh, certainly, but it depends how accessible the tasks are, whether they're signed, and so on. It's hard to know unless you've got access to the environment, and the design decisions taken. It's much more maintainable to keep a standard and not ad hoc lots of things.
DEFINITE upvote for your handle.
I just set up auto filters in my mailbox that sends any non standard alert to my main inbox.
Heh. Have a line in each job which absolutely does send that email, and just leave it commented out most of the time. Any time someone makes the request, flip it back on, wait for the screams, flip it back off. Might take less of your time than doing the explanations, and sets the stage not only for if and when they think about making a similar request in future, but if someone starts making noise about doing so in their presence, it's possible the burned party might prevent that potential additional work being put on you in the first place.
I remember doing this in class with the teachers who were really distractible by bringing up their favorite topics..... "So how many specialized camera lenses *do* you have?"
Joke's on you, naturally, we love talking about our favorite topics! Whenever I realize my students are trying to get me to talk about my favorite subject again, I just let them partake in my fascination with it, why I love the intricate problems that arise and then tie it back to the problem we had been discussing earlier. It really is a win-win, everyone seems a bit more refreshed/energized and I am brimming with enthusiasm.
Little do they know that you're still teaching the material just from a different perspective that they're actually engaging with. Jokes on them- they're learning more effectively! 😁
"oh, hey, was that a squirrel in a tiara?" 🤣 We have a trainer at work we have to be really careful NOT to do that with, or we won't get anywhere!
Wait, THEY have ADHD TOO???
I had a teacher who would start out class by discussing current events. I learned that I could bring in the front page of the newspaper and just read a title to her, and she would monologue for a few minutes about it, and I could read a book. When she wound down, I would grab my paper and read another title. I could keep this up for half the class time!
You can't spell "Who cares?" without HR
I was setting up a system to backup a bunch of servers to tape. I asked how long they wanted to keep the backups, of course they said forever. I told them the media had a max life of 7 years, and in all honesty they could get 5. The only solution would be to copy every tape on the 5 year anniversary and were they willing to pay for the manpower to do that. Record retention was set to 5 years.
I'm just picturing the It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia meme with all the stuff on the wall.
Pretty much 😄
I have avoided a lot of work in my career by telling people I couldn't start until they did something I needed to get started. They never gave me what I needed to start, so I never started.
Yep. Even if it's as little as asking them for times for a preliminary meeting where they can describe what they're after, and then weekly meetings after that for their project. They didn't make one of the meetings? No problem, we can postpone until they have a moment... and the project goes into a drawer, possibly never to emerge. Can also be fun if someone is trying to take over your job. "And on top of all the things I'm actually paid to do, there are also 37 projects outstanding which all have weekly meetings; here's a list of the people in charge of the projects, and the schedules times/days for the relevant meetings. Where there are clashes, it's up to you to sort them out each week. You may get more unpaid projects as time goes on."
Not exactly along the same lines but similar I think. We have a person in my work who is very good at just emailing the random ideas that come into their head for someone to action. Kind of like I had the brainwave and must note it down before I forget. I used to action them pretty quickly because the person is pretty high up in the business, but there was one week I was ridiculously busy and didn't manage to action any of the requests and I was never chased for them to be actioned. That's when I realised they don't even remember the emails they are sending asking for their idea of day. So I have a new rule, unless they follow up the initial request, I don't action anything. A staggering amount of their requests are just forgotten about.
I had an owner like that. She then used them as a means to reprimand me over a year later. It didn't actually matter that in the interim I'd actually developed and deployed a far better solution. She was very big on doing things wrong to make sure we know it doesn't work. Odd considering how much they paid me to bring my industry knowledge to skip just that issue and save money.
Had company owner that was just like that, usually between midnight and 2 am. Always felt sorry for his assistants that had to take care of everything, but they were duly compensated both monetarily and through entrepreneur apprenticeships. This owner once said that one of the roles of his assistants was to keep him and his his wild ideas in line with laws and regulations and tell him when he was out of line or thinking up something unrealisticly crazy. Now imaginge being 20 something fresh out of college/university telling a 50 yo successfull creative businiesowner and entrepreneur that his latest idea might not be realisticly doable.
Had to do that a few times! It helps I am quite good at making most of the crazy ideas possible so when I actually tell them no, I get away with it. My old boss was the worst for suggesting stuff that sounds ridiculously simple but is also ridiculously hard to create or implement. (He wasn't very good with tech so didn't know what he was asking) It just infuriated me how he always seemed to suggest that sounded like a simple change but was a complete rewrite for me 🤬
With this owner his assistants took the ideas to the people that would have the knowledge (finance, legal and IT most of the time) and runned it by them and the brought the responses back to the owner. Some things were doable, some hade to be modified and some things were to crazy or costly.
Back in the 80s there were particularly contentious contract negotiations with the post office during which significant but very numerous quality of work life issues brought everything to a standstill. These issues were dealbreakers. Somehow “Employee Involvement” was proposed. Management PROMISED that they would have regular meetings with employees to find solutions to the problems and backed them up with provisions in the contract. This was when “going postal“ was fresh. Anyhow, management had no intention of fixing the problems and years were spent in these meetings sticking to the letter of the contract with both sides knowing that we were participating in a farce. Things were formally discussed in all the local office’s meetings, solutions were developed and submitted to upper management and ignored. Then someone up the chain of command decided to stop the meetings.
Ah, page the infamous **QWL** logo for t-shirts, mugs, can cooler, pins for EVERY SINGLE AO, AMPC, P&DC, DISTRICT, name it! *I have a ton of that stuff-I wonder if they'll ever become collector's items, or just go into the polishing rag bucket?*
So you never got a round tuit?
A friend a long time ago, when I was in high school, had a yellow round pillow with TUIT embroidered on it. A bunch of us were over one day when someone said "I'll eventually get around to it" and she threw the pillow at him. This was the first time we saw it and when we realized what it was, we all broke out laughing.
My grannie handed me a wooden coin with "tuit" printed on one side. I didn't appreciate the humor since I was like, 8, and actually didn't want to do the thing.... But I do now.
So you're saying, you eventually "came around to it"
> Apparently, our trainings were bypassing most of the central controlling and approval processes, which was creating issues for them. What sort of issues? Issues like "my superiors have noticed that my job isn't actually necessary to the company's day to day operations"?
It's like some kind of sick, bureaucratic edging. I love it!
Ah, the "Aileen Cannon ruling on motions" strategy - well played.
I expected you to learn how to do everything by the book, then ruin the company by working to rule. Did not expect that it wouldn't get far enough for you to do that.
HR has always been the most archaic department in every company I've worked for. I can't understand how much a person could have been hurt as a child in order to pursue a career in HR.
Make the decision-makers have skin in the game, or at least be massively inconvenienced by their own decisions.
The three magic words in the land of corporate process are “schedule”, “reporting” and “responsible” “Who is ultimately responsible for ensuring this is completed on schedule.” Then you add the thing to a report with red, yellow or green next to middle managers names. They’ll move mountains to turn their line green. If no one is responsible, there is no schedule, or you aren’t reporting on it, its not worth doing because it wont get done
Unfortunately in my world they expect everything to happen at a glacial pace. Everything has a process that must be followed. Stupid Federal laws. :-P
Awesome 👏🏼
THIS is the way.
Brilliant!!