Tag: work

Office poetry

I’m about to share some office poetry with you.  To better understand it, here’s some context for you:

  • The whole office is non-smoking area.  Those who need to smoke, have to go on floor up (from where I am), to the balcony.
  • Most of the important things are discussed on that balcony and not in the meeting rooms, so even non-smoking people frequent it.
  • On Fridays, it is customary to have a long lunch somewhere out, with a pint or two.  After which people still come back to the office to finish the day’s work.

Now that you know everything you need to know, here is some poetry from the internal instant messenger exchange between me and a colleague of mine.  These are just from today.

Leonid Mamchenkov:
For all week’s troubles to dismay
We should have lunch at TGI Friday.
We’ll eat and drink and have a cheer
Not to forget a glass of beer.
It will be cold such as the ice
And overall it will be nice.
Mihai Milea:
Let’s get ready for a feast
Pull some ribbs out, like a beast
That’s how hungry now I feel
Let’s all eat and then we chill
Leonid Mamchenkov:
We are going out for lunch
With an Easy Forex bunch
We will eat and drink and laugh
Until everyone’s had enough
We’ll come back and work a bit
Until everyone will quit
Cause today is Friday’s rest
And I wish you all the best
Mihai Milea:
Poems, rhymes, that’s all we do
Let’s go out and get some food!!!!!!!!
Leonid Mamchenkov:
If we go up, you’ll have a smoke.
I don’t want to, so I’ll grab a coke.
Breeth some fresh air, rest the eyes.
It’s an hour or so until we say goodbye’s
here is a grim one :
While we are here, trying to pay the bills,
Why don’t we do upstairs something that kills?
There is no question that I’m looking to answer.
You, however, should be careful – smoking causes cancer.
Mihai is busy, Sam’s disappeared.
I’ll go alone – the air has cleared.
No more smell, no more smoke.
It sounds just fine, but something’s broke.
Mihai didn’t like the last one, complaining about the rhymes.   I tried to get away with this one then.
That was a dunk.
Because I am drunk.
But you aren’t too good,
You are breaking my mood.

 

Death by a thousand clicks

If you don’t know or remember the expression “death by a thousand cuts”, it refers to an ancient Chinese torture.

Slow slicing [..], also translated as the slow process, the lingering death, or death by a thousand cuts [..], was a form of execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until its abolition in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. The term língchí derives from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly. Lingchi was reserved for crimes viewed as especially severe, such as treason and killing one’s parents. The process involved tying the person to be executed to a wooden frame, usually in a public place. The flesh was then cut from the body in multiple slices in a process that was not specified in detail in Chinese law and therefore most likely varied. In later times, opium was sometimes administered either as an act of mercy or as a way of preventing fainting. The punishment worked on three levels: as a form of public humiliation, as a slow and lingering death, and as a punishment after death.

Then, of course, there is a modern day office variant – “death by a thousand papercuts”, which I won’t go into any detail – you can get the idea.

Well, today I discovered yet another, even more modern variation of that – death by a thousand mouse clicks. And even if you’ve heard that before in regards to a bad user interface, there is another meaning to it. Yesterday I paper cut my right index finger. While it’s not that bad on its own, when combined with a mouse button it is indeed a new form of torture.

Do you have any idea how many times you click, double-click and wheel-scroll every day? A lot! I tried to count but I don’t know a number that large. Except gadzillion, to which I don’t know how to count. Anyway, even if you don’t use your mouse so much, you still need to type, don’t you? And typing with the cut on the index finger is more annoying than with any other finger. All because of those little nobs they put on keys F and J so that you could find the home row. Good thing I’m not bleeding at least…

Office snapshots

The Web is full of inspiration office snapshots from the companies that care about their people – Google, Yahoo, and a few others.  However, until now, I’ve never thought of finding an index of such office designs.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a location-based and company-based indexes with pictures from all such office around the world?  I thought it would.  And, apparently, there is such a collection already.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Office Snapshots.  Have a look around the world and, for what it’s worth, don’t get too depressed about your own office.  You are in the majority here.

 

On the future of jobs

GigaOm covers the release of the new book by Seth Godin, which, this time instead of marketing talks more about the future of work.  And jobs.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created….

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

Seth Godin is a visionary.  And whether you agree with him or not, his thoughts are worth knowing about and considering.  I only started thinking in the same direction, spending more of my focus on education.  But I see where he goes and why.  The change is coming. And it’s coming fast.