Reminiscing.

I was thinking of the time a well-meaning safety officer called me down off a crane to give me trouble for not using fall arrest protection where only fall restraint was required (there is a difference and the names say it all).

At times over the years I’ve paused while walking on a beam or hanging on a rope to look around at other work going on below and thought to myself that up above it all, I didn’t have to worry about anybody else’s screw-ups getting me killed.  

When you’re on a busy work site you can fall victim to your own mistakes as well as those of the people around you.  Working up high, you’re out of the bustle and if you were to be the victim of anybody’s incompetence it would most likely be your own; in that regard I think it’s safer to work aloft.

A basic truth about working at height is that if you can safely do something on a plank one foot off the ground then you can to it on a plank at any height; assuming that elevation is the only variable that changes.  Another aspect of that same truth is if you can’t do it a foot off the ground without falling even once in 30 years then you need to play it safe and tie off.

A stroll down amnesia lane.

A friend commented on Facebook about a friend whose been bitten by the MLM bug and is bothering him to join up.  It made me think…Once another friend, and roommate, was approached by one of these MLM fellows and invited him over to the apartment later on to talk about it in depth….and told me that I should stick around.

I was initially annoyed but my roommate had a plan:  He had no intention of joining up but rather wanted to punish this fellow for trying to recruit folks on the bus.  

Later on the MLM fellow came around and over coffee we spent two hours listening to his pitch and leading this guy back and forth with dumb questions(but not too dumb) about details of the operation and how it would work until he realized what was going on and abruptly left.

I felt I was in the presence of a troll king among men. 

 

To all you clerks out there.

I really hate to hear someone say, “don’t blame me, I just work here.”

At its very best it’s somebody taking an angry customer’s mood personally and at its worst it’s the voice of a lazy, dispassionate worker. When you’re working the front desk for a big business you ARE the company as far as anybody who comes in the door is concerned.

I used to be a delivery driver and sometimes my colleagues and I weren’t popular with customers because of reasons beyond our control or decisions and problems originating in other departments that have nothing to do with us.

I’d have some colleagues get defensive and angry with irate customers for blaming them for problems stemming from other parts of the company or bad weather in the Rockies and it just won’t do. Some didn’t care and didn’t react in a good or bad way and some of us dealt with the problems. I fixed what I could, and forwarded everything I couldn’t handle to people who could; I believe it’s called teamwork.

So, if a customer expresses dissatisfaction with your employer’s service don’t take it personally. Address any genuine rudeness, nobody should put up with that, but do your job. We’ll try to remember that you’re doing the best you can and that you just work here…just don’t let anybody hear YOU say it.

Literal or inflexible thinkers with authority.

I was talking with a Vancouver Island businessman today who had some opposition from his city council regarding handicap access to his storefront; his door wasn’t good enough.

What makes for a good accessible door? It should provide level entry or use a ramp (8.3% slope maximum, I believe) to provide access, have an automatic opener operated with a push button, and be at least 34 inches wide.

The problem the city had with him was the width of his door. Everything else was fine but somebody had the idea that his door needed to be EXACTLY 34 inches wide. The door in question is a garage door in the storefront and provides approximately 120″ inches of clear opening to the store.

Everything worked out fine in the end but if this bonehead(or, to be fair, regular person having a bonehead moment) had their way, there would be one less business in their city today.

Why I would never get Veterans’ Licence Plates.

I was talking with my new boss about my work experience and mentioned my military service…but only because he commented on a car with veteran licence plates on it was we drove down to do a job.

I’m not exactly sure what the requirements are to get veteran plates but I’m pretty sure if you did your trades training (QL3) then you’re eligible.

If that’s the case then it’s sort of cheapens it, doesn’t it? What I mean is that I’m proud of the service I performed, but there are guys who do peace keeping work and those who never leave town and specialize in drunken table-top dancing….I have to be honest and say that while I did a lot of good work, I’m closer to the table dancer end of the spectrum. Should I get the same recognition?

Gender roles.

I was talking with the landlord of my workshop tonight and his eyes nearly rolled out of his head when I said that my wife handles all the money; I just hand over anything I earn and she uses it to run the household.

He’s a conservative fellow and I think he couldn’t imagine handing that responsibility over to his wife but the way I see it is that managing the money is yet another responsibility and additional work I could do without; I happen to think that toiling for 60 hours a week is a lot less work and responsibility than running a house because at some point for me the work actually stops.

A marriage is a partnership and since there are two of you, there’s no point hogging all the work for the sake of honouring some outdated notions of appropriate gender roles.

For the record, I’m not sucking up to my wife but I’ll gladly take any brownie points this post may garner.

Thinking about waste again.

I was installing louver vents on a compressor shed today to help with a heat problem and thought about waste…A quick guess would be that with the compressor in the shed, there was at least 12 kilowatts of easily recoverable heat going through those louvers doing no other work than to heat the great outdoors.

It’s a shame about all that energy going out the vents. It could be put to useful work, if only to heat the office during the winter, but at least the shed isn’t so stuffy now….

It’s not my compressor, not my shed, and I don’t pay the electric bill so it shouldn’t be my problem. I wonder if the waste offends me on environmental grounds or it’s the cheapskate thing….

Making the best of waste.

I was eating lunch in Ikea the other day and had a funny conversation. I asked a cafeteria employee about waste and they said that it seemed the most obvious waste she saw was people taking too many maple syrup packages and leaving them unopened on their tray; they cannot be reused once they’ve been in the hands of a customer.

It seems that most of us are much more comfortable with taking too much and throwing half of it away than taking the risk of having to get more after sitting down; it’s sad.

I suggested that while they couldn’t serve the syrup to customers again, they could put it to use and make maple syrup hooch for their staff parties….they could even give it an Ikea-esque name like Tipply.

Making trouble.

I was doing some work in a large cooler at a blueberry farm last week. My coworker and I were outside on the deck truck getting our scissor lift ready while he smoked a cigarette and the owner offered a preemptive, “you can’t smoke inside.” My coworker said fine and we went about our business.

What came to mind was the optical sorter that was being operated in the cooler. What machine does is sort berries by colour. The berries are run into a channeled conveyor, single file, and a colour sensor checks that each berry is in spec. If a berry isn’t then a jet of compressed air blows it off the conveyor and into a reject bin.

While working in the cooler, I noticed the new air compressor supplying the sorting machine and wondered if they put food-safe oil in the compressor. Carry-over is a fact of life and if there’s oil in your air compressor then there’s oil in your compressed air; if only a trace….an though the air is blowing directly on rejects, one can’t be too cautious when processing food….

I really wanted to plant that thought in the owner’s head but after the smoking warning he gave it would seem cheeky….and it would be.

A saucy thought.

Whenever I’ve heard a fellow jokingly brag that he can have sex whenever his wife wants there’s always one fellow who says that he gets to have sex whenever HE wants to.

The poor guy doesn’t realize that the rule holds true and he’s just not keeping up.