Posts by the.spike 30 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2012
As is mine (25 years+) and no part has have ever been replaced. However I have in the last 5 years tried to get it serviced and guess what? None of the parts are available anymore. Yes I could pay the watchmaker to make them, but then it's probably easier and cheaper to buy something new if and when it stops working.
It really is a mess at the moment, and it's really really hard to get this stuff to work. But I can't wait till it does.
Less traffic jams. Safer roads. No need for car parks (I'll just send it home). The future will finally be here!
I just hope it's in my lifetime (next 30 years), but I doubt it.. :(
I think the idea of trying to cut pay for people that want to WFH that were in the office is abhorrent. You're not paying me for my commuting time. You're paying to provide a service to you commensurate with my skill set. Did the skills you are paying me for suddenly become worth less? If there's some task or service I'm now not carrying out, then by all means call it out and we can discuss it. But by cutting my pay you're saying I'm worth less than when I was in the office.
I hope people vote with their feet. Which is ironic because if they do, they won't have to walk anywhere...
That is a shame. Can I assume that you're part of a small company or a one man band?
Several of my friends are voting with their feet as they've been pushed back into the office. But they work for larger organisations. I can see that would be much harder with customers..
It would be interesting to see what your customers attitude is for their own employees and if they are treating you and them differently. It would be a shame if they are.
Back when I was a lad it was all the rage to have a big fat bar across your steering wheel to make sure that if someone got into your car, they couldn't actually drive it away.
I've a feeling these will be making a comeback!
I'd certainly be investing in one if I had a big fat expensive car. Or even one of those little Hondas..
I'd like to think that WFH would become the new normal. The organisation I work for (a small company) has changed all the office based contracts to be remote. The team I'm in meet once a month in the office. And that seems to be working for us (obviously lots of video chats etc etc).
Many people I talk to say that if a role is not at least mostly remote then they aren't going to be interested. And if they are forced back into the office they'll leave.
It will be interesting to see who will actually votes with their feet.
I think it would be a crying shame to go back to 100% office based working. The benefits of not are far greater for the worker and the environment. It's just managers who can't manage who they can't see we need to work on..
Many years back when I worked for a large UK retailer and still did oncall, the oncall team had agreed that Christmas Day we wouldn't have calls. The person on Christmas Eve nights would sort everything out overnight and we could all have a quiet Christmas Day. The few things that might go wrong on Christmas day we'd leave for Boxing Day.
Only no-one told the operators.
They made not a single call on Christmas Eve thinking they were doing that person a favour.
Christmas Eve oncall thought it had been a bit quiet but didn't question it. I mean out of 800 stores there was always something that went wrong but well, maybe not tonight..
I then got a mountain of calls to sort out at 8am on Christmas day. I spent the entire day logged on via a modem from the in-laws fixing shizzle.
Oh happy days.. Made a fortune in cash though. Every little helps as we used to say...
"Chat" is a good addition to the communications tool bag but I think the biggest problem is people use it wrong.
If you've got a quick question you need to know the answer to now, then by all means ping me with it. If the answer is quick and simple I'll tell you. If it's not, then I'm going to call you and give you the answer. If you've got queries to my quick answer then you should phone me, not post reams of text into the chat, which then leads to the aforementioned 10 hour chat.
If it's more involved than a quick question then call me. If you don't need to know then send me an email and I'll get round to it.
I think with IP telephony (which is good) and many people now having no desk phone (or desk for that mater!), people forget they can just use their computer to call, and fall back on chat.
And then people perpetually complain that they get too many emails and so ignore everything. Hence pushing people to chat to get a response.
It's chat all the down..
Then there was also the time when a colleague was testing our in house incident system. They were on the test system and raised a P1 stating that "<other colleague> is a C**t" unaware that P1s automatically emailed to a list of people. That list contained the live emails of a number of the very senior managers.
Yup, bad system design and all that, but quite amusing when it happened.
I was shocked the other day to learn just how American health insurance works. I assumed you paid each month, and then when ill, they paid out.
Turns out that's not so.
If you've got something they cover, you pay out your deductions first ($2k-5k apparently), and then they pay out ~80% of the cost of the treatment. You still end up having to shell out a fair amount.
I always wondered what people were complaining about and where all the bankruptcies were coming from. I assumed it was people without insurances. Turns out it's not.
It's a terrible system and I can not say a word against the NHS, even on the rare occasions when things haven't gone swimmingly. The amount of work they do, for those that need it, at the price you pay at the point of delivery is phenomenal.
This is no different from the warehouse picking and packing I used to do for Tesco. You got a sheet with a load of stickers on it and off you trundled round the warehouse to collect everything in a certain amount of time.
OK, we had trucks to carry the three cages you had to fill but you still had to lift all the crap onto it. Let me tell you once you've hefted 80 6 bottle cases of 2L coke you were glad for the 2 minute rest you got while you drove the truck to the loading bay. And then you picked up the next job and did it all again.
Welcome to the world. It's called work. Suck it up.
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