You already know perfectly well that this is a classified topic. {sigh} Now we have to clean it up. Agents should be arriving at your house in... well, they're already in your house, you just don't know quite yet. We'll have to go collect the Slashdot servers, and every computer that has accessed it along with their owners. Do you realize how much work it is to dispose of that many people without anyone noticing. Now we have to create another incident to make them disappear. Hmmm, how many people saw this? Damn, we're going to have to sink a cruise ship or something.
That's easy enough for them to fix. Sit on the work until the billable hours have racked up high enough. Take advantage of it for additional testing.
Oh, and never try to give me an impossible job. If I accept it, it'll be done right and on schedule.
I typically quote 3x to 4x the expected time, take my time and have it done in my expected time (1/4 to 1/3 the quote), test until I'm positive it's good, and then hand it over early. I get paid for my time, and everyone's happy. Too bad I can't find more gigs to do. I loved doing weird 1-2 week jobs. Even the overnight "My server is broken" call, where I show up to a datacenter at 8pm, and don't leave til 2am. Customers love getting the email at 2am saying "The job is done. Send $600 to....."
Real time: 40.416666666667 hrs
They pay: 38.00 hrs
Say $20/hr.
Real pay: 808.34
They pay: 760.00
To the bean counters, they like it.
Between the bean counters and Mr. Boss, they like it.
Between Mr. Boss and Mr. Employee, "You haven't been working hard enough, you're 2 hours under for the week. If you don't shape up, we're going to let you go."
Mr. Employee "Let me show you the hours I've been working, and that I've been underpaid."
Mr. Boss "I don't care what you have to show me, work more or else."
Funny thing, if every day is 8.0 hours, you're not working hard enough. Even if every day is 8.5 hours, you still aren't working hard enough. In both cases, the money will mysteriously be short.
I'm pretty sure IEEE 754 isn't a real excuse for that.
A while back I worked for a place that paid incentive bonuses in shares of the company. Ahhh, what an evil trick. I still have them, just to remind myself any time someone offers me shares that they can and will be completely worthless. I've been offered shares in startups that had nowhere to go, and refused the gig. Nope, I believe in cash. If you give me a check, I don't even believe in that until I cash it or it clears. Sure, it might be the next Microsoft, but really the odds of that are so slim it isn't even funny. Never ever accept shares unless it's on top of an acceptable amount of money. Otherwise, they'll just end up as a decoration to how I was suckered into doing work for free.
But it was a wonderful place to work. "Officially" everyone loved their jobs. Unofficially, like on break or after work, everyone would tell me how they're job hunting, and how much they hated it. It wasn't just "I hate this job", they'd give me their personal laundry list of gripes. I was the unofficial social counselor that everyone could talk to. There were a few good people, and a lot of less than pleasurable people to work with. The higher up in the chain of command you went, the worse it got. Well, until the top, then it was good again. Go figure. Senior people wouldn't tell me anything like that, but they'd disappear to a new job suddenly. "I got a new job, see ya." was always answered with congratulations by everyone.:)
Getting rid of me wasn't targeted at me. I was #5 or #6 on a nice long list. They were working their way through the ranks, trimming out people they didn't like, regardless of how hard they worked, how well they performed, or even how they interacted with other staff. I wasn't last on the list either. Quite a few people were invited to not have jobs after that. Most of the circumstances were not very nice. For example, one guy was told "take a one month severance pay and quit, or we'll fire you.". He quit, and was allowed to collect unemployment. Another guy was given exactly the same deal, and quit. His unemployment was refused because he was fired with justification. Their justification? Nothing significant. One guy was just straight out fired because a project he wasn't involved with had a customer impacting problem. The customer was told who they fired and why. Like firing someone makes good with the customer, right? That wasn't a one-off event either.
I used the "I fired him over it" like a few times when I was in charge of a shop. I didn't actually fire anyone. If someone screwed up, I told them what they did and how to correct it. Continued failure was grounds for termination. It's not good for morale to arbitrarily fire someone to make customers happy.
I've been caught surfing several times, and had to bring the windows that are compiling to the front and simply say "Look. Compiling. Can't do anything else right now.". I was actually asked to compile less and work more. hrm. Now I just work on the spreadsheet analyzing my pay, and start asking questions about inconsistencies in the checks. "Why is there a 10% difference between what I've worked, and what you've paid me for? Should I just go home until you've figured out your mistake?"
They really shouldn't have made me find more work related items to do, and I wouldn't have found their accounting errors in payroll. A little here and there isn't all that noticeable until you go and do an audit of it. It may be uglier if I go get the rest of the numbers from accounting and compare it to the P&L sheets. Sometimes they forget, sysadmins and programmers can frequently do math better than accountants, because we can write a program to do it for us, and I use floating point numbers, rather than rounding everything.:) Sorry, your rounding doesn't work as accurately as you'd like.
Too bad I can't cut checks, or I'd have it sending all the $0.00[1-9] to my own check. Whee, I made $50k extra this week.:)
It's ways embarrassing to zone out in a meeting so much that when they finally get around to asking you a question after the first hour, you don't know what they're talking about. I guess what's worse is when they don't direct anything your way for the first two hours, and you start snoring. It was a good way to not get invited to many more meetings though. I told my supervisor, "If it doesn't actually involve me, I'm going to refuse the meeting invite unless you suggest that I attend." That was when I actually had a competent and professional supervisor.
As I like to tell people when they interrupt me, it takes about 15 minutes to get back into a task. Every time they interrupt me, that counter is reset. So when they come by every half hour to see how well I'm making progress, that means it's taking twice as long. Being that they keep doing it and I expect an interruption every 30 minutes, I stop at about 20 minutes (5 minutes of productivity) and prepare a report of what I've accomplished.
So, in 8 hours, I may accomplish 1.5 hours of work.
Some employers and staff understand this. I end up coming in at my own time (usually around noon), spend the first few hours taking input and answering questions about the progress, and then around 5 I dedicate myself to work until midnight. So 5 hours of chitchat and minimal on-task work, and 7 hours of serious uninterrupted work.
So 7.5 hours vs 35 hours of accomplished work. Which is more advantageous to the company? Quite often I've accomplished a week long task in a single night.
At one employer, they asked me to modify a partially completed application for a new client with new specifications. This was on Friday at 4pm, and was required by Monday morning. They were specific down to what font, size, and layout of the GUI. I said it would take a month or so. They didn't like my answer, so they got the lead developer from the project who talked in circles and finally said it would take a few months if he put his entire team on it. I came back with "I can start from scratch and have it done by Monday morning, but don't expect me to come in til after noon, and no one is allowed to call me all weekend. I'll initiate any necessary communication.". They said it was impossible for me to do that, it took the original team two years to get it to this point. I worked all weekend by myself at home, and at 6am Monday I sent them the finished product.
1 sysadmin who does development for fun 1 weekend vs a team of developers for two years. Hrm. My code was only a few thousand lines. Theirs was a few hundred thousand lines. I considered taking some of their code to use in mine, but it was so chaotic and poorly written that I would have spent the whole weekend reviewing it and fixing it.
The customer was happy, but the boss was pissed at me for some reason. And I was a salary employee, so they didn't even pay me anything extra. The sad part was, it also served almost all the functions of our primary product, which didn't always work right. There was lots of "but you didn't do it this way.", which I followed up with "but this is better, faster, more robust, and made the customer happier."
They fired me a few months later for an arbitrary reason to get me out. Go figure. I think they gave me the impossible task to accomplish in a weekend so I would fail and they could fire me for it. I was given a few other "impossible" tasks, which I accomplished also, before they finally just got rid of me. Hmmm, I did more than the entire development group, by myself, with easy to understand and manipulate code, and they weren't happy.
I did. She wasn't happy about it at all. But that isn't why she left the second time. She had some very bad habits. I won't go into it, but suffice it to say, she found somewhere else to feed those habits, since it wasn't happening at my place.
Hell, the last time I went for a "dance" I just gave the girl a bunch of 20's and told her to sit there so we could have a decent conversation.
You know, it's funny, I mentioned the adult entertainment industry. At one point, we had a relationship with a strip club, and I had to go in occasionally to maintain cameras. A few of the girls knew me. Sometimes if things were slow, they'd grab me, throw on something resembling clothes and talk to me at a table. Part of it was that they were bored and wanted to have an actual intellectual conversation. Sometimes it was to bring in business.
A girl by herself not getting any other guys attention is intrinsically uninteresting. A girl getting tipped or even just talking to a guy for any duration is more interesting. Obviously I wanted to spend 10 or 15 minutes talking to her, there must be something good there. Almost without fail, when I'd get up to walk out (or fix cameras, or whatever) she'd have another guy there before I got more than a few feet away.:) I've even been paid to tip dancers. For example, they'd give me $20 in $1's. I'd then tip then $10 like I was really interested (one at a time, of course). If I ran out of the money they gave me, they'd come over, whisper in my ear, and slip money back into my hand. It's a fun game. The more I tipped, the more other guys would tip. Likewise, it made me more money, being the plant in the audience.:) It's almost like a sociological experiment for both me and the girls. Human nature is a really weird thing.
I haven't gone into a strip club for anything other than work reasons because it's so obvious how it works.:) Since I haven't worked there in a few years, I haven't had any reason to do anything more than drive by one.
Well, not the strip club part. I don't do those. (I worked in the adult industry, and see the money guys waste on not getting laid and laugh).
Ya, the prettier, skinner girls end up costing us a fortune. What's worse is the ones who want to date, and want you to go out with them every night, but it never goes anywhere. I was seeing this totally hot girl who dropped every hint that she wanted me, except for actually doing it. She insisted on splitting the cost of going out when applicable, so we were on a "just friends and then more" level. Then the equality of us going out went away when she "didn't have any money" and I was to pay. So one very pointed statement was made, and a few hours of fighting ensued. Well, one sided fighting, but hey. I woke up to a bunch of voicemails and emails. There was an apology in the middle, but it was wiped out by the absolute hatred in the ones that followed. I like fights that I don't even have to be involved in.:)
I had a roommate the same way. I spotted her insanity a mile away. She was a friend of a friend, who needed a place to stay and I had a spare room. I let her stay with me. She made very suggestive moves on me, which were stopped at the most inopportune times by "I think we should stay friends." Ok, whatever. Then she met a guy, and went to stay with him. Just over a month later, after living with him and his dad giving her a job at the family business, she showed back up at my door. "Do you believe he wanted to sleep with me? He wanted sex!" Well, no shit. You moved in with him, were sleeping in bed with him (without having sex). Dad gave you a job and anything else you wanted. You were his girlfriend. She never did learn that she was dropping hints saying that's what she wanted, and was completely stunned when anyone broke the news to her. So, she stayed at my place for two more nights and was gone.
And if my sampling of women of the world has anything to say, all women are completely nuts. We'll suffice it to say, the sample set is large enough to make almost any statistician happy.:)
And now that I've been woman-free for months, I'm almost happier. No crazy-chick headaches. More money in my pocket. And, I have time to mess around with things I want to do. There's no "but sweetie, I wanted you to go shopping for shoes with me." or "can you help me do this." Bah. For what dating costs, it's cheaper to hire a good escort. $1000/hr and you're with a beautiful woman who'll do anything you want, and when you're done she leaves and never bothers you. She won't even come over again until you call her.:)
You know, your test flight mention is actually very legitimate.
When I was a kid, I lived on one of the military practice routes. I loved watching the jets fly over, so if I heard them coming, I'd run outside to watch them fly over.
One day, around 1985, I saw a very odd plane fly over. I hadn't ever seen anything like it. It looked kind of like a fighter jet, but it had very angular features, including a tall angled cockpit , a weird body, and weird tail. I told my parents, friends at school about it, and even some teachers. They all thought I was nuts. I had even sketched generally what it looked like, and I was told "there's no such thing."
About 3 years later the gov't announced their "new" F-117, and that was the plane.
Of course, since I had been watching and trying to identify the planes flying over for quite a while, I knew this was definitely a military jet of some sort, so there was no good reason to scream alien conspiracy.
I fell for another one that I was convinced was a UFO, because I had no better way to explain it. Years later, I was talking to a retired USAF pilot, and he told me exactly what it was. It would have been a rather uncommon sight, so I just dumb lucked into seeing it. It helped that I could tell him my precise location, time of day, and even the direction I was facing. Given the choice of the very likely answer I was given by someone with no advantage to lie to me, or believe that an alien spaceship buzzed me, while I'd like to believe it was an alien, it simply wasn't.
I was actually screwed by two cops being a witness to a physical impossibility when I was a kid. That is unless it's really possible to do "Dukes of Hazzard" moves with a car with a v6 engine and no ramps. It took a year to keep me from getting jail time. I was happy that a few years later they were busted for falsifying reports .
I did get pulled over once for spinning my tires. The cop was cool about it though. I had made a stop on a 30mph road, and was turning onto a 55mph road. When I hit the gas to pull out, the tires spun in loose gravel that was there. Apparently he did the same thing pulling out to follow me.:) I stopped because I saw he was following me, and he just said "be more careful." That was lucky though, there were standing orders to pull me over if I was seen in that area. I hated living there. I would be pulled over at least once a week with no reason. That'd be hundreds of times I was stopped, and only ticketed twice (and beat both of them).
That my friend comes under the fine study of cryptozoology.
It's the study of anything that you want to believe could be out there, without any real proof that they exist.:)
Then again, if I remember right there isn't a legitimate school in the world that teaches cryptozoology, other than maybe in a passing reference in a real class.
I've joked about if I ever got a position where I made friends with the folks flying an AWACS, I'd want to set it up with blinky lights all the way around the dish. It would be hilarious to have them fly around with the rest of their marker lights off, and just this circle of flashing lights in the sky. How many people would be calling in UFO sightings?:)
But, if they are landing in Kansas or wherever, I'd think it may be so they don't accidentally squish people in a populated area, or knock structures over.:) It's hard to say "we came here on a peaceful mission of exploration and to exchange of information", when you knock over something like the Effiel tower and squish a few hundred tourists.
Really, if they've observed for a while, they'd spot the "good" places to land and meet with gov't official types. (make peace with the ones that can shoot back, -n- stuff.) This is a great place to land Lots of room. Access to the gov't hierarchy without pesky civilians getting in the way. If you came in quiet with no lights, you'd probably have a nice private audience with exactly the people you'd want to talk to.
You know, the religious community is exactly why UFO studies should be taught.
With religion, you have 0 evidence, lots of faith, and you are left with many questions that cannot be answered unless your god (or gods) come down and answer them him/her/their self.
With UFO studies, you have a small bit of evidence, some faith, and are left with my questions that can someday be explained, either from them coming to us, or us going to them, or us doing a better analysis of a "sighting" and finding the real cause of it.
I only hope it's taught responsibly, and not in a total tinfoil hat crazy way.
With enough evidence, "UFO" sightings can be explained. I'm not saying explained away as something else. I won't doubt that there could be aliens playing pranks by bending wheat in farmers fields.:) There was a great one that I loved. I lived near Los Angeles a while back. I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and looked to the West. I saw a disk floating over the city with lights on it. I swear I'm not kidding.
I watched it for a minute. As I watched, it slowly turned towards the south and the "disk" was actually a blimp, and the lights were the lighting on it that gave it the illusion of being a disk. I saw a perfect moment to have some fun. I waited until just before it had turned towards me again and I ran inside and told my girlfriend and her daughter to come outside. "OH MY GOD, THERE'S A UFO! I SWEAR, COME LOOK!". When they came out, my girlfriend looked at me like I was nuts but she didn't have an answer. Her daughter freaked out.:) Before she got a chance to run and hide, I told her to just watch it and see what it does. As it turned again, we could see the profile, and we all started laughing.
It was unidentified at first (like, I didn't know what it was), so I guess it was a UFO. Sometimes it just takes a little more thinking an investigation to figure out what it really is before you firmly strap on the tinfoil hat.... and that girlfriend did make me a tinfoil hat.:) It was all in good fun though. I can honestly say they aren't very comfortable.
Everybody lies in court. That's the game. The lawyers don't blatantly lie, but they will say what they need to in such a way that it comes out in their favor.
I was in court once for a careless driving ticket (it was dropped because the cop didn't show). While I was there, a lady was there fighting a ticket where she made a left on a red light. She was driving a full size van with 6 kids in it. The cop testified that he was in a position to see the traffic light clearly. The lady got up, swore that she had a green light. Then she had each of the kids testify to it. "yes, I saw the light was green when she went." The judge asked where each was seated, and even the one in the back of the van swore that it was green. He even went as far as saying "Really? From the back of the van?", without actually accusing them of perjury. For those who haven't had vans, there's no way to see a traffic light that you're stopped at from the back of the van. I was familiar with the intersection, and if you were stopped at the line, even the driver had to look up through the very top of the windshield.
Everyone knew the kids were lying, and that the driver put them up to it. They got off the ticket, because there wasn't further evidence, and there were 7 "witnesses" vs 1 cop.
I'm not too far from you. The old people are starting to thin out here, but now the roads are being tied up with spring breakers. Wheee. I'm not sure what's worse, old people who can't see where they're driving, or kids who don't know where they're going and will change lanes with no warning because they realize they missed their turn. Well, that or just walking out into the road. My friend almost hit a lady yesterday. We were driving along, mostly side by side. That was coincidental, we were each leaving the same place at the same time, and we each needed a different lane for the way we were going. She walked out from the right side, and I was in the right lane. I hit my brakes. She continued across and my friend had to brake even harder. I swear, some people have a death wish. Who walks across a poorly lit road at night in the middle of the block (there were crosswalks a hundred feet or so either way) without looking, and ignores the fact that there's cars driving directly at them?
People complain about Florida, but really it's the fault of everyone everywhere else for sending their stupid people down here to vacation.:)
Don't try to make California sound like the golden example of traffic control.:) There are plenty of places to make left turns that you may sit for 10 minutes (or more) waiting for a gap in traffic.
Try going into downtown on the 110 South, and then hitting the 4th street exit. There's nothing like having 4 lanes of the 101 that have to merge left into 3 lanes of the 110, and one of the 110 lanes has to merge right.
It's not the worst intersection I've ever navigated, it's just one I can name off the top of my head.:)
Actually that's usually for traffic organization. They don't want cars changing lanes where they know cars will be stacking up quickly. If there's lots of traffic expected at a given light, they will be longer. Some areas they will be shorter. From my observations (well over a million miles of driving), that's the way it's been.
An intersection that's expected to end up with 50 cars stopped at the light will have longer lines than an intersection that may have two.
A "safe" stop depends on the vehicle. My car can make a safe stop very quickly. I drove a friends truck with a trailer, and had to leave significantly more time for a "safe" stop. That's a wide range, from a performance car with excellent braking, to a heavily laden vehicle consumer vehicle. I've seen what happens when a car with poorer braking is blocked by a car with better braking. Two cars slid off the road in front of me a few days ago because of that. I was behind them at a safe distance, and was able to make a safe stop before I got near any of them.
That's only in the retirement areas. Some places are speedways. I joke about "The Florida Speedway", which is a long loop. I-75 South starting at I-10, continuing the length of the state. It then turns East across the southern part of the state, switches to I-595 just as you exit the Everglades, and then turns North onto I-95. When you reach I-295 in Jacksonville, head West, and catch I-10 West.
Looking at most colored objects in most surroundings, there is no difference.
The first thing I noticed was "black" lights appeared as a very bright light, kind of a blue-purple. With my normal eye, I would only see things that we'd all see (like white clothes glowing). With my altered eye, it looked like there was a bright blue-purple light in the room. Roughly the same, but higher in the color spectrum, to if someone had blue party lights in the room.
It wasn't too long after the initial surgery that I noticed this. It gave me a severe headache, so I had to keep my altered eye closed when around black lights. Except in the presence of black lights, I kept both eyes open normally.
Over the years, this sensitivity went away, so I no longer get headaches. I do see "something odd" sometimes. Kind of what you'd normally experience if you were to wear colored 3d glasses in the real world. My eyes see two different colors, so it's almost like interference, where my brain is trying to process the object being two different colors at the same time. For example, a local Walmart has UV germicidal lamps where they store their shopping carts. Looking at that, I see the difference. Looking at the picture of one on this page (top right photo), I don't see it any differently, because the camera cannot capture that part of the spectrum, and my monitor cannot reproduce it.
As for more natural things, a friend of mine grows orchids. I noticed the purple/violet flowers are different colors, depending on which eye I use. Those flowers are under natural light. I haven't noticed a change under normal indoor lighting. It's very odd though. They're a pretty purple with one eye, that is probably what everyone else sees. It's an amazing glowing purple with my altered eye. I haven't noticed too many objects in regular day to day life like that.
Slashdot Mirror
You already know perfectly well that this is a classified topic. {sigh} Now we have to clean it up. Agents should be arriving at your house in ... well, they're already in your house, you just don't know quite yet. We'll have to go collect the Slashdot servers, and every computer that has accessed it along with their owners. Do you realize how much work it is to dispose of that many people without anyone noticing. Now we have to create another incident to make them disappear. Hmmm, how many people saw this? Damn, we're going to have to sink a cruise ship or something.
That's easy enough for them to fix. Sit on the work until the billable hours have racked up high enough. Take advantage of it for additional testing.
Oh, and never try to give me an impossible job. If I accept it, it'll be done right and on schedule.
I typically quote 3x to 4x the expected time, take my time and have it done in my expected time (1/4 to 1/3 the quote), test until I'm positive it's good, and then hand it over early. I get paid for my time, and everyone's happy. Too bad I can't find more gigs to do. I loved doing weird 1-2 week jobs. Even the overnight "My server is broken" call, where I show up to a datacenter at 8pm, and don't leave til 2am. Customers love getting the email at 2am saying "The job is done. Send $600 to ....."
Ya, but you can't refer to 1 hour 25 minutes of work time as 1 hour.
Mon: 7hr 25min
Tue: 8hr 15min
Wed: 8hr 5min
Thu: 8hr 45min
Fri: 7hr 55min
Real time: 40.416666666667 hrs
They pay: 38.00 hrs
Say $20/hr.
Real pay: 808.34
They pay: 760.00
To the bean counters, they like it.
Between the bean counters and Mr. Boss, they like it.
Between Mr. Boss and Mr. Employee, "You haven't been working hard enough, you're 2 hours under for the week. If you don't shape up, we're going to let you go."
Mr. Employee "Let me show you the hours I've been working, and that I've been underpaid."
Mr. Boss "I don't care what you have to show me, work more or else."
Funny thing, if every day is 8.0 hours, you're not working hard enough. Even if every day is 8.5 hours, you still aren't working hard enough. In both cases, the money will mysteriously be short.
I'm pretty sure IEEE 754 isn't a real excuse for that.
A while back I worked for a place that paid incentive bonuses in shares of the company. Ahhh, what an evil trick. I still have them, just to remind myself any time someone offers me shares that they can and will be completely worthless. I've been offered shares in startups that had nowhere to go, and refused the gig. Nope, I believe in cash. If you give me a check, I don't even believe in that until I cash it or it clears. Sure, it might be the next Microsoft, but really the odds of that are so slim it isn't even funny. Never ever accept shares unless it's on top of an acceptable amount of money. Otherwise, they'll just end up as a decoration to how I was suckered into doing work for free.
But it was a wonderful place to work. "Officially" everyone loved their jobs. Unofficially, like on break or after work, everyone would tell me how they're job hunting, and how much they hated it. It wasn't just "I hate this job", they'd give me their personal laundry list of gripes. I was the unofficial social counselor that everyone could talk to. There were a few good people, and a lot of less than pleasurable people to work with. The higher up in the chain of command you went, the worse it got. Well, until the top, then it was good again. Go figure. Senior people wouldn't tell me anything like that, but they'd disappear to a new job suddenly. "I got a new job, see ya." was always answered with congratulations by everyone. :)
Getting rid of me wasn't targeted at me. I was #5 or #6 on a nice long list. They were working their way through the ranks, trimming out people they didn't like, regardless of how hard they worked, how well they performed, or even how they interacted with other staff. I wasn't last on the list either. Quite a few people were invited to not have jobs after that. Most of the circumstances were not very nice. For example, one guy was told "take a one month severance pay and quit, or we'll fire you.". He quit, and was allowed to collect unemployment. Another guy was given exactly the same deal, and quit. His unemployment was refused because he was fired with justification. Their justification? Nothing significant. One guy was just straight out fired because a project he wasn't involved with had a customer impacting problem. The customer was told who they fired and why. Like firing someone makes good with the customer, right? That wasn't a one-off event either.
I used the "I fired him over it" like a few times when I was in charge of a shop. I didn't actually fire anyone. If someone screwed up, I told them what they did and how to correct it. Continued failure was grounds for termination. It's not good for morale to arbitrarily fire someone to make customers happy.
If this is who I think it is, pot, meet kettle.
I'm a pompous, productive, asshole.
I've been caught surfing several times, and had to bring the windows that are compiling to the front and simply say "Look. Compiling. Can't do anything else right now.". I was actually asked to compile less and work more. hrm. Now I just work on the spreadsheet analyzing my pay, and start asking questions about inconsistencies in the checks. "Why is there a 10% difference between what I've worked, and what you've paid me for? Should I just go home until you've figured out your mistake?"
They really shouldn't have made me find more work related items to do, and I wouldn't have found their accounting errors in payroll. A little here and there isn't all that noticeable until you go and do an audit of it. It may be uglier if I go get the rest of the numbers from accounting and compare it to the P&L sheets. Sometimes they forget, sysadmins and programmers can frequently do math better than accountants, because we can write a program to do it for us, and I use floating point numbers, rather than rounding everything. :) Sorry, your rounding doesn't work as accurately as you'd like.
Too bad I can't cut checks, or I'd have it sending all the $0.00[1-9] to my own check. Whee, I made $50k extra this week. :)
It's ways embarrassing to zone out in a meeting so much that when they finally get around to asking you a question after the first hour, you don't know what they're talking about. I guess what's worse is when they don't direct anything your way for the first two hours, and you start snoring. It was a good way to not get invited to many more meetings though. I told my supervisor, "If it doesn't actually involve me, I'm going to refuse the meeting invite unless you suggest that I attend." That was when I actually had a competent and professional supervisor.
(...and I know you read here, so kudos to you.)
As I like to tell people when they interrupt me, it takes about 15 minutes to get back into a task. Every time they interrupt me, that counter is reset. So when they come by every half hour to see how well I'm making progress, that means it's taking twice as long. Being that they keep doing it and I expect an interruption every 30 minutes, I stop at about 20 minutes (5 minutes of productivity) and prepare a report of what I've accomplished.
So, in 8 hours, I may accomplish 1.5 hours of work.
Some employers and staff understand this. I end up coming in at my own time (usually around noon), spend the first few hours taking input and answering questions about the progress, and then around 5 I dedicate myself to work until midnight. So 5 hours of chitchat and minimal on-task work, and 7 hours of serious uninterrupted work.
So 7.5 hours vs 35 hours of accomplished work. Which is more advantageous to the company? Quite often I've accomplished a week long task in a single night.
At one employer, they asked me to modify a partially completed application for a new client with new specifications. This was on Friday at 4pm, and was required by Monday morning. They were specific down to what font, size, and layout of the GUI. I said it would take a month or so. They didn't like my answer, so they got the lead developer from the project who talked in circles and finally said it would take a few months if he put his entire team on it. I came back with "I can start from scratch and have it done by Monday morning, but don't expect me to come in til after noon, and no one is allowed to call me all weekend. I'll initiate any necessary communication.". They said it was impossible for me to do that, it took the original team two years to get it to this point. I worked all weekend by myself at home, and at 6am Monday I sent them the finished product.
1 sysadmin who does development for fun 1 weekend vs a team of developers for two years. Hrm. My code was only a few thousand lines. Theirs was a few hundred thousand lines. I considered taking some of their code to use in mine, but it was so chaotic and poorly written that I would have spent the whole weekend reviewing it and fixing it.
The customer was happy, but the boss was pissed at me for some reason. And I was a salary employee, so they didn't even pay me anything extra. The sad part was, it also served almost all the functions of our primary product, which didn't always work right. There was lots of "but you didn't do it this way.", which I followed up with "but this is better, faster, more robust, and made the customer happier."
They fired me a few months later for an arbitrary reason to get me out. Go figure. I think they gave me the impossible task to accomplish in a weekend so I would fail and they could fire me for it. I was given a few other "impossible" tasks, which I accomplished also, before they finally just got rid of me. Hmmm, I did more than the entire development group, by myself, with easy to understand and manipulate code, and they weren't happy.
I did. She wasn't happy about it at all. But that isn't why she left the second time. She had some very bad habits. I won't go into it, but suffice it to say, she found somewhere else to feed those habits, since it wasn't happening at my place.
You know, it's funny, I mentioned the adult entertainment industry. At one point, we had a relationship with a strip club, and I had to go in occasionally to maintain cameras. A few of the girls knew me. Sometimes if things were slow, they'd grab me, throw on something resembling clothes and talk to me at a table. Part of it was that they were bored and wanted to have an actual intellectual conversation. Sometimes it was to bring in business.
A girl by herself not getting any other guys attention is intrinsically uninteresting. A girl getting tipped or even just talking to a guy for any duration is more interesting. Obviously I wanted to spend 10 or 15 minutes talking to her, there must be something good there. Almost without fail, when I'd get up to walk out (or fix cameras, or whatever) she'd have another guy there before I got more than a few feet away. :) I've even been paid to tip dancers. For example, they'd give me $20 in $1's. I'd then tip then $10 like I was really interested (one at a time, of course). If I ran out of the money they gave me, they'd come over, whisper in my ear, and slip money back into my hand. It's a fun game. The more I tipped, the more other guys would tip. Likewise, it made me more money, being the plant in the audience. :) It's almost like a sociological experiment for both me and the girls. Human nature is a really weird thing.
I haven't gone into a strip club for anything other than work reasons because it's so obvious how it works. :) Since I haven't worked there in a few years, I haven't had any reason to do anything more than drive by one.
I second that one.
Well, not the strip club part. I don't do those. (I worked in the adult industry, and see the money guys waste on not getting laid and laugh).
Ya, the prettier, skinner girls end up costing us a fortune. What's worse is the ones who want to date, and want you to go out with them every night, but it never goes anywhere. I was seeing this totally hot girl who dropped every hint that she wanted me, except for actually doing it. She insisted on splitting the cost of going out when applicable, so we were on a "just friends and then more" level. Then the equality of us going out went away when she "didn't have any money" and I was to pay. So one very pointed statement was made, and a few hours of fighting ensued. Well, one sided fighting, but hey. I woke up to a bunch of voicemails and emails. There was an apology in the middle, but it was wiped out by the absolute hatred in the ones that followed. I like fights that I don't even have to be involved in. :)
I had a roommate the same way. I spotted her insanity a mile away. She was a friend of a friend, who needed a place to stay and I had a spare room. I let her stay with me. She made very suggestive moves on me, which were stopped at the most inopportune times by "I think we should stay friends." Ok, whatever. Then she met a guy, and went to stay with him. Just over a month later, after living with him and his dad giving her a job at the family business, she showed back up at my door. "Do you believe he wanted to sleep with me? He wanted sex!" Well, no shit. You moved in with him, were sleeping in bed with him (without having sex). Dad gave you a job and anything else you wanted. You were his girlfriend. She never did learn that she was dropping hints saying that's what she wanted, and was completely stunned when anyone broke the news to her. So, she stayed at my place for two more nights and was gone.
And if my sampling of women of the world has anything to say, all women are completely nuts. We'll suffice it to say, the sample set is large enough to make almost any statistician happy. :)
And now that I've been woman-free for months, I'm almost happier. No crazy-chick headaches. More money in my pocket. And, I have time to mess around with things I want to do. There's no "but sweetie, I wanted you to go shopping for shoes with me." or "can you help me do this." Bah. For what dating costs, it's cheaper to hire a good escort. $1000/hr and you're with a beautiful woman who'll do anything you want, and when you're done she leaves and never bothers you. She won't even come over again until you call her. :)
You know, your test flight mention is actually very legitimate.
When I was a kid, I lived on one of the military practice routes. I loved watching the jets fly over, so if I heard them coming, I'd run outside to watch them fly over.
One day, around 1985, I saw a very odd plane fly over. I hadn't ever seen anything like it. It looked kind of like a fighter jet, but it had very angular features, including a tall angled cockpit , a weird body, and weird tail. I told my parents, friends at school about it, and even some teachers. They all thought I was nuts. I had even sketched generally what it looked like, and I was told "there's no such thing."
About 3 years later the gov't announced their "new" F-117, and that was the plane.
Of course, since I had been watching and trying to identify the planes flying over for quite a while, I knew this was definitely a military jet of some sort, so there was no good reason to scream alien conspiracy.
I fell for another one that I was convinced was a UFO, because I had no better way to explain it. Years later, I was talking to a retired USAF pilot, and he told me exactly what it was. It would have been a rather uncommon sight, so I just dumb lucked into seeing it. It helped that I could tell him my precise location, time of day, and even the direction I was facing. Given the choice of the very likely answer I was given by someone with no advantage to lie to me, or believe that an alien spaceship buzzed me, while I'd like to believe it was an alien, it simply wasn't.
I was actually screwed by two cops being a witness to a physical impossibility when I was a kid. That is unless it's really possible to do "Dukes of Hazzard" moves with a car with a v6 engine and no ramps. It took a year to keep me from getting jail time. I was happy that a few years later they were busted for falsifying reports .
I did get pulled over once for spinning my tires. The cop was cool about it though. I had made a stop on a 30mph road, and was turning onto a 55mph road. When I hit the gas to pull out, the tires spun in loose gravel that was there. Apparently he did the same thing pulling out to follow me. :) I stopped because I saw he was following me, and he just said "be more careful." That was lucky though, there were standing orders to pull me over if I was seen in that area. I hated living there. I would be pulled over at least once a week with no reason. That'd be hundreds of times I was stopped, and only ticketed twice (and beat both of them).
That my friend comes under the fine study of cryptozoology.
It's the study of anything that you want to believe could be out there, without any real proof that they exist. :)
Then again, if I remember right there isn't a legitimate school in the world that teaches cryptozoology, other than maybe in a passing reference in a real class.
I've joked about if I ever got a position where I made friends with the folks flying an AWACS, I'd want to set it up with blinky lights all the way around the dish. It would be hilarious to have them fly around with the rest of their marker lights off, and just this circle of flashing lights in the sky. How many people would be calling in UFO sightings? :)
But, if they are landing in Kansas or wherever, I'd think it may be so they don't accidentally squish people in a populated area, or knock structures over. :) It's hard to say "we came here on a peaceful mission of exploration and to exchange of information", when you knock over something like the Effiel tower and squish a few hundred tourists.
Really, if they've observed for a while, they'd spot the "good" places to land and meet with gov't official types. (make peace with the ones that can shoot back, -n- stuff.) This is a great place to land Lots of room. Access to the gov't hierarchy without pesky civilians getting in the way. If you came in quiet with no lights, you'd probably have a nice private audience with exactly the people you'd want to talk to.
You know, the religious community is exactly why UFO studies should be taught.
With religion, you have 0 evidence, lots of faith, and you are left with many questions that cannot be answered unless your god (or gods) come down and answer them him/her/their self.
With UFO studies, you have a small bit of evidence, some faith, and are left with my questions that can someday be explained, either from them coming to us, or us going to them, or us doing a better analysis of a "sighting" and finding the real cause of it.
I only hope it's taught responsibly, and not in a total tinfoil hat crazy way.
With enough evidence, "UFO" sightings can be explained. I'm not saying explained away as something else. I won't doubt that there could be aliens playing pranks by bending wheat in farmers fields. :) There was a great one that I loved. I lived near Los Angeles a while back. I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and looked to the West. I saw a disk floating over the city with lights on it. I swear I'm not kidding.
I watched it for a minute. As I watched, it slowly turned towards the south and the "disk" was actually a blimp, and the lights were the lighting on it that gave it the illusion of being a disk. I saw a perfect moment to have some fun. I waited until just before it had turned towards me again and I ran inside and told my girlfriend and her daughter to come outside. "OH MY GOD, THERE'S A UFO! I SWEAR, COME LOOK!". When they came out, my girlfriend looked at me like I was nuts but she didn't have an answer. Her daughter freaked out. :) Before she got a chance to run and hide, I told her to just watch it and see what it does. As it turned again, we could see the profile, and we all started laughing.
It was unidentified at first (like, I didn't know what it was), so I guess it was a UFO. Sometimes it just takes a little more thinking an investigation to figure out what it really is before you firmly strap on the tinfoil hat. ... and that girlfriend did make me a tinfoil hat. :) It was all in good fun though. I can honestly say they aren't very comfortable.
Everybody lies in court. That's the game. The lawyers don't blatantly lie, but they will say what they need to in such a way that it comes out in their favor.
I was in court once for a careless driving ticket (it was dropped because the cop didn't show). While I was there, a lady was there fighting a ticket where she made a left on a red light. She was driving a full size van with 6 kids in it. The cop testified that he was in a position to see the traffic light clearly. The lady got up, swore that she had a green light. Then she had each of the kids testify to it. "yes, I saw the light was green when she went." The judge asked where each was seated, and even the one in the back of the van swore that it was green. He even went as far as saying "Really? From the back of the van?", without actually accusing them of perjury. For those who haven't had vans, there's no way to see a traffic light that you're stopped at from the back of the van. I was familiar with the intersection, and if you were stopped at the line, even the driver had to look up through the very top of the windshield.
Everyone knew the kids were lying, and that the driver put them up to it. They got off the ticket, because there wasn't further evidence, and there were 7 "witnesses" vs 1 cop.
I'm not too far from you. The old people are starting to thin out here, but now the roads are being tied up with spring breakers. Wheee. I'm not sure what's worse, old people who can't see where they're driving, or kids who don't know where they're going and will change lanes with no warning because they realize they missed their turn. Well, that or just walking out into the road. My friend almost hit a lady yesterday. We were driving along, mostly side by side. That was coincidental, we were each leaving the same place at the same time, and we each needed a different lane for the way we were going. She walked out from the right side, and I was in the right lane. I hit my brakes. She continued across and my friend had to brake even harder. I swear, some people have a death wish. Who walks across a poorly lit road at night in the middle of the block (there were crosswalks a hundred feet or so either way) without looking, and ignores the fact that there's cars driving directly at them?
People complain about Florida, but really it's the fault of everyone everywhere else for sending their stupid people down here to vacation. :)
Don't try to make California sound like the golden example of traffic control. :) There are plenty of places to make left turns that you may sit for 10 minutes (or more) waiting for a gap in traffic.
Try going into downtown on the 110 South, and then hitting the 4th street exit. There's nothing like having 4 lanes of the 101 that have to merge left into 3 lanes of the 110, and one of the 110 lanes has to merge right.
It's not the worst intersection I've ever navigated, it's just one I can name off the top of my head. :)
Apparently I've done that, and even reset it to a later time because I didn't want to wake up.
Actually that's usually for traffic organization. They don't want cars changing lanes where they know cars will be stacking up quickly. If there's lots of traffic expected at a given light, they will be longer. Some areas they will be shorter. From my observations (well over a million miles of driving), that's the way it's been.
An intersection that's expected to end up with 50 cars stopped at the light will have longer lines than an intersection that may have two.
A "safe" stop depends on the vehicle. My car can make a safe stop very quickly. I drove a friends truck with a trailer, and had to leave significantly more time for a "safe" stop. That's a wide range, from a performance car with excellent braking, to a heavily laden vehicle consumer vehicle. I've seen what happens when a car with poorer braking is blocked by a car with better braking. Two cars slid off the road in front of me a few days ago because of that. I was behind them at a safe distance, and was able to make a safe stop before I got near any of them.
That's only in the retirement areas. Some places are speedways. I joke about "The Florida Speedway", which is a long loop. I-75 South starting at I-10, continuing the length of the state. It then turns East across the southern part of the state, switches to I-595 just as you exit the Everglades, and then turns North onto I-95. When you reach I-295 in Jacksonville, head West, and catch I-10 West.
Sure, I'll play. :)
Looking at most colored objects in most surroundings, there is no difference.
The first thing I noticed was "black" lights appeared as a very bright light, kind of a blue-purple. With my normal eye, I would only see things that we'd all see (like white clothes glowing). With my altered eye, it looked like there was a bright blue-purple light in the room. Roughly the same, but higher in the color spectrum, to if someone had blue party lights in the room.
It wasn't too long after the initial surgery that I noticed this. It gave me a severe headache, so I had to keep my altered eye closed when around black lights. Except in the presence of black lights, I kept both eyes open normally.
Over the years, this sensitivity went away, so I no longer get headaches. I do see "something odd" sometimes. Kind of what you'd normally experience if you were to wear colored 3d glasses in the real world. My eyes see two different colors, so it's almost like interference, where my brain is trying to process the object being two different colors at the same time. For example, a local Walmart has UV germicidal lamps where they store their shopping carts. Looking at that, I see the difference. Looking at the picture of one on this page (top right photo), I don't see it any differently, because the camera cannot capture that part of the spectrum, and my monitor cannot reproduce it.
As for more natural things, a friend of mine grows orchids. I noticed the purple/violet flowers are different colors, depending on which eye I use. Those flowers are under natural light. I haven't noticed a change under normal indoor lighting. It's very odd though. They're a pretty purple with one eye, that is probably what everyone else sees. It's an amazing glowing purple with my altered eye. I haven't noticed too many objects in regular day to day life like that.
No, more like cars, firearms, and computer gear. But hey, to each his own.