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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
After spending far more time flying in the last seven or eight months than I’ve ever done, I’m in a bit of a position to offer some comments on the behaviour/attitude of flight attendants.
The Korean Air ones can’t be beat. They are unfailingly polite, will do an enormous amount for you and look fresh as daisies all the time. And their uniform is great and suitable for people working in cramped conditions. On top of this they work almost constantly during the up to twelve hour flights. Exhausting for them (as well as us!)
Korean Air flight attendant
The ones on Ryanair, one of the cheap flights we went on at least three times, are so busy having to sell stuff to the passengers that they don’t really have time for much service
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I read somewhere the other day that sixty-year-olds are now considered to be merely middle-aged. It’s only when you become a nonagenarian that you’re beginning to be considered old. In that case I’m merely on the liminality of middle-age. If anyone accuses me of being an old fogey I can tell them where to get off!
The downside – and there’s always a downside to such ‘progress’ – is that the pension age is gradually creeping up. A few years ago, us blokes could retire at sixty and get our much-deserved state income. Now I have to wait till I’m sixty-five. In England the age limit is gradually creeping up for women as well. Over ten years they’ll have made their retirement age 65 – only those who are already hitting the early sixties will escape having to wait longer.
The problem is there are just too many old people and so the government can’t afford to pay us so readily. But the upside is that all that experience and expertise is being kept in the work force for longer. And older people aren’t made to feel as though they’re no longer necessary, which had somewhat become the case.
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One of the major difficulties older people like myself face is that of trying to inculcate into younger people (and not necessarily just twenty-somethings) what it means to do an honest day’s work. People from the late teens to the late thirties and sometimes even older, seem to think that being paid for a job means you turn up, and later in the day, go home. What you do in between times is an irrelevancy.
Sure, some of them work when pushed, such as when a customer requires their attention (and the manager happens to be looking on), or when the phone is ringing or an urgent email has just arrived, or a patient needs attending to. But the idea of finding work when work isn’t finding you is beyond the reach of some people’s understanding. Surely that’s the time to twiddle my thumbs (figuratively) by reading the paper, or a magazine, or playing on the Internet. Going off and doing those annoying tidying-up jobs? Come on, I’m not paid to use initiative!
On a slightly different but still related tack, you have to wonder how those young men, the first borns of families with pedigrees, got on if they weren’t of a mind to work hard at what landed in their laps. To some of them, primogeniture must have been a burden rather than a blessing. Certainly benefits came with the ‘job’. They inherited everything, but that also meant they inherited the hard work. And, like the young millennials of today, they must have often thought: I’m sure I wasn’t born to work this hard
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I note that Jaqian has a section in his profile on Flickr.com (why did they leave the ‘e’ out?) called Maimed Photographer. It relates to how much risk the photographer takes to get a shot, such as photographing while riding a bicycle, driving, battling a bear (yeah, right), walking a tightrope. Maybe a little tongue-in-cheek there.
But in today’s local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, there was a photo of a Japanese video cameraman lying on the ground in Myamar, wounded (mortally, as it turned out), taking a photograph of a group of fleeing citizens who were being shot at and beaten by the local gendarmes.
There’s some debate as to whether the cameraman, Nagai Kenji, was killed by a stray bullet, or shot at point blank range. My suspicion is that if it was the latter he wouldn’t have been doing much shooting himself, but some people have enormous courage
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Their ambassadors would plead, supplicate, cajole, threaten, lobby, or bribe the bureaucrats who were administering the licenses and quotas.
This is a quote from a book on economic reforms in India. Why do I quote it? Because one job I’ve never quite understood is that of an ambassador.
In the past, ambassadors seem to play a fairly humble role, merely doing what they were told and getting on with it. Then they became something more, often putting their lives at risk to bring about peace between two warring groups
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Sometimes sites use Acronyms and don’t explain what they mean. For instance, the Prophix site talks about bpm, but I couldn’t see where it explained the words behind those initials. I presume it means ‘business performance management’ since that was a phrase that seemed to match, but I wasn’t sure.
So what, you say? Well, it just means to me that the company has assumed I’ll know something because I’m visiting their site. In fact, I think they should regard most visitors as possible ignoramuses, and work from that base.
Anyway, Prophix is one of these spreadsheet-type pieces of online software. It claims to be more efficient than using Excel, where mistakes can be made in terms of formulae and so on. Prophix locks its formulae in and only the administrator can change them
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Today’s post has two words in it, since I missed doing one on Friday. Too busy working on writing some music at the moment to keep up with everything. I’d like to put on another concert – maybe this year if there’s enough time – and present some new music in it. I’ve finished the first of a group of piano pieces, and have some other ideas of what I’ll do. But I’ve also started writing some pieces for brass band, mostly as an experiment, to see if I can get the thing to work. The first piece is done, and a second is well on its way. Thank God for the Sibelius program. It makes light work of all that copying, and makes it easy to work on large scores.
That’s just a tranche of what I’ve been doing, because the renovating around our house proceeds at a pace. The painting is pretty well finished, so yesterday we spent pulling up old carpet and dumping it outside. Very dusty job, and tiring being down on your knees removing old staples. One room has a newer system laid in it: fitted lengths of wood with nails on the top. These hold the carpet in place, and exclude the need for staples. Much better arrangement.
Yesterday was boiling hot here in Dunedin; I couldn’t stay outside for more than a few minutes, and working upstairs, where the sun shines in most of the day, was like working in a hothouse. I had to remonstrate with my wife, and get her to keep on taking breaks downstairs where it was cooler. Otherwise she would have been a little melted pool on the floor, rather like the witch in the Wizard of Oz.
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Spoiling your car
One of the odd things about modern cars is that after having paid good money for one of them, the customer then goes out and adds a car spoiler to it. The word itself seems ironic, as if it meant the owner was ‘spoiling’ his vehicle by sticking things on it.
Spoilers come in all shapes and sizes, apparently. As I’ve just learned. One good thing about writing posts like this is that you come across information which adds to the sum total of your trivia baggage.
There are factory style spoilers, custom spoilers, lip spoilers, rear deck spoilers and rear roof wings. I like the idea of a lip spoiler, myself. It conjures up a picture of that crazy character in the cartoon, Zits, who has all manner of paraphernalia hanging from his body, but most of all inside and around his mouth
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I’ve just begun reading Philip Jenkins’ God’s Continent Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis. It’s the sort of book I start with enthusiasm but then tend to drop when something else more easy to read comes along. Mr Jenkins has a great enthusiasm for quoting everyone in sight in terms of his arguments, which makes me suspect he has a very good research team to back up his work, rather like James Michener used to. It was the only way he could get his great fat novels off the ground.
Mr Jenkins’ team of workers must be very adept, as the text is littered with footnotes (as I’ve mentioned on my other blog, Webitz.net). These researchers must be pertinacious in their approach to research as they seem to have picked up every possible reference to the subject in sight.
My aim is to read the book right through (more than half the books I start never get past the half way mark or less – including the most recent one I thought would be great called Reading Lolita in Tehran), but even if I don’t I’ll have already learnt half a dozen new words, two of which I’ve remembered: dhimmitude and Eurosecularity. Ain’t they great
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I’ve never had any animal that was mimetic, unless you count one of my cats you thought that he’d get more attention if he sprawled over my work table, spreading papers and books in all directions. I don’t exactly sprawl on tables and spread books and papers, but I do sometime think I could do with more attention and as a result get rather ridiculous about it.
The nearest we had to a mimetic pet was a cockatiel. In his later years, after his first companion had died, and after the other two women who came into his life and nearly killed him with their combined admiration for him had been moved on, he used to whistle. Suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, he would begin this high pitched whistling. I can’t say it was a tune (although he had been taught some musical phrase by my uncle, his former owner); it was more like a celebratory rave. The whistling would rise higher and higher and then he’d stop for breath for a brief moment, and then off he’d go again with such zest and enthusiasm that you couldn’t ignore him. He lifted your spirits more than a little, and proved the power of music in a remarkable way.
Since he was a bloke, we couldn’t name him Joy, but that’s what he gave us. Not just pleasure at the sound, but true Joy
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Well, my great intention to write something here each day that included the word I’d been sent from Dictionary.com hasn’t got off to a good start. For those who’ve just joined, what I’m going to do is include in this post the word that’s arrived in an email from Dictionary.com, and let you guess what the word is. However, today there’ll be two words, so keep your eyes peeled.
Part of the problem is that I’m spending almost all day in front of a computer at the moment, and last night I actually took a break from it when I got home. I did ten pages of proofreading for an evangelist who’s done some writing on the problems with evolution, and some other odds and ends but in the end my brain was feeling a bit friable so I left off earlier than normal.
During the day at work I’m having to scrabble to get to grips with the various programs I’ve mentioned in earlier posts: Adobe InDesign, PowerPoint, Access and Excel (which I think I’ve spelt as Xcel previously because I had an idea in my head that that was the correct spelling). I’m closer to understanding them now than I was, but as always it’s getting fluent in them that’s the trick, and I’m certainly not that at the moment
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Since yesterday I’ve been getting a daily email from Doctor Dictionary at Dictionary.com. In these a particular and less commonly used word is focused on, and several examples (usually quite literate ones) are given of its proper use – or its varied uses, as the case may be.
Yesterday it was obdurate and today it’s lacunae. They’re both words that are familiar to me, although I’m not sure that I would have been able to define lacunae as well as obdurate.
Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to write a post each (as well as what ever else I might write) on the words that turn up in these emails, and perhaps not focus on the word as such but use it somewhere without necessarily informing readers what it is. Might be intriguing to see if people could guess the correct word each day
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365 Posts dating from December 2006
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