Category: Work
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Stairs: The Silent Killer
A couple of years ago, I bristled at a fellow employee berating me for running up the stairs at work and not using the handrail. I argued that using stairs is something that we educated people should be trusted to be able to do without the need for further instruction or the helping hand of a corporate mother-figure. Apparently I was wrong. At my last location (which I’ve thankfully now vacated – geez, what a deathtrap that turns out to have been!) there were signs aplenty around the stairwells (of this two-story building!) advising people to hold the handrail, watch their… Read more
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Back in the Saddle
You have to admire their powers of persuasion. The project that was trying to pressgang me a while back have finally managed to second me onto their team. Officially I’m on an 80/20 split, but both projects think they are the 80% so my workload has increased from “Ridiculously busy” to “Sleep, what’s that?”. The work itself is about the same (Change Management / Knowledge Management), but this new project is just starting out so it will be nice to be able to make the right decisions from the outset as opposed to coming in mid-project and trying to get… Read more
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Refining my appearance
After four months on my new project, I finally got the chance to travel beyond my cubicle. All the way to our refinery at ‘beautiful’ Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We’re implementing (among other things) a new dock management system, and I had to go and train some of the users on how to use it. The site is on Scenic Highway, but I think this must be an attempt at suspension of disbelief, because you’d be pretty hard-pushed to find a place less ‘scenic’ than this – it’s just a huge collection of tanks, pipes, and chimneys which takes up all… Read more
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“You’re my little puppy now”
What a week. For a minute back there, I thought I’d been human-trafficked. It all started on Tuesday when I found out (from someone not even on the project) that the next phase of the project I joined only two months ago, and the phase on which I was scheduled to spend much of the next year, had been “indefinitely postponed” – generally a euphemism for “canceled”. This happened on my last project as well, and was one of the reasons I moved onto this project. (Now I’m starting to feel like the kiss of death on a project…) No-one… Read more
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My Glittering Second Career
I have a bad habit of writing in books. Only textbooks, and only my own books, but it’s still a bad habit. I highlight key passages, make notes in the margins, and underline important concepts. I even cross out bits I disagree with. I know that you shouldn’t deface books (lord knows I had my knuckles rapped for it often enough at school) but I read a lot of textbooks, and this makes it easier to find back key information when I’m looking for it. Plus, I find I actually retain more of what I read this way. An extension of this (and… Read more