You know, in my life, I've had quite a few jobs. Some were good. Some were bad. And from most of them, I was unceremoniously "let go" for one reason or another. Most of the time, it was something absolutely stupid, or I messed up in some way that they just sacked me over. However, for no reason in particular today, my mind wandered to what I consider to be one of the dumbest reasons I was ever fired.
For the Queen's sanity, I will note that my present job in not in the remotest bit of jeopardy.
Anyway, at the time in question, I had applied for a job via a temp agency and landed me a not half bad data entry position. At the time, it was a pretty decent job, so I was content enough to have gotten it. On my second day there, some kind of discussion started over jobs and such, and however the discussion got there, I remarked that there has to be a reason to fire you. Employers can't just up and fire you for no reason.
To prove they certainly could, they up and fired me for no reason. Seriously. The person from the temp agency asked what happened, and I told her about the discussion, and she said that as a temp, they could decide not to keep and basically fire me on a whim. So they did. Just to prove a point.
Obviously, the take away from this experience was never tell your employer what they can or can't do. They'll show you exactly just how much power they possess. I suppose it didn't help that I'd only been there a day when that discussion happened.
I promise you it never happened again. That's for sure.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Friday, October 25, 2013
How to Completely Derail a Problem Discussion
So, you're in a situation be it via email or conference call discussing some kind of problem which has arisen. The issue has been established, and people are working to get to the heart of the matter by attempting to sort out what needs to be done and who needs to do it. Somewhere, someone returns to the source of the original information in an attempt to figure out the intent or perhaps the mindset behind some level of advisement.
Then, out of no where, someone asks why, but it's a why something happened that can only be speculation and its answer has no bearing on the actual problem or its solution. It usually amounts to a bit of the blame game when it happens because someone asks why you asked so-n-so, or why someone did that thing they did. Where most questions to that point had flowed in a completely logical fashion, the right-field "why" kinks it all, and since no one wants to admit that they don't care, the conversation ends up completely derailed with guesswork and speculation.
When I'm looking to solve a problem, I keep it simple: what did you want it to do, or what sort of solution are you looking for? Never have I asked why they did it or why someone was bothered about it. Sometimes I wonder, but I know that it just comes off as accusatory and most of the time, it adds far more time to any discussion that I can spend doing something else.
The most recent eyeroller had to do with a discussion over how something worked, and really, it wasn't my specialty anyway. They had possibly misunderstood the original info and added the original people onto the email. The original person derailed the entire conversation by asking why the asker asked my group instead of, you know, just answering their question to him. Then the email string went off the deep end never returning to its original topic.
Seriously, there are questions with irrelevant answers. Some say there are no stupid questions, but I assure you there are. They are just trying to spark discussion when they say that. In fact, there are hosts of stupid, pointless and irrelevant questions that should never be asked in a group setting. If you are about to ask a question that will not, in any way, benefit the group, don't ask it. If you are asking a question that you are throwing out for the direct purpose of blaming someone else for something, don't ask it. If you feel like you have to lead the question with an apology, don't ask it. And finally, if you think your questions requires a disclaimer, either don't ask it or don't provide the disclaimer. Seriously, no one cares.
And finally, to clear up another fallacy: the customer is not always right. Ask anyone in technical support.
Then, out of no where, someone asks why, but it's a why something happened that can only be speculation and its answer has no bearing on the actual problem or its solution. It usually amounts to a bit of the blame game when it happens because someone asks why you asked so-n-so, or why someone did that thing they did. Where most questions to that point had flowed in a completely logical fashion, the right-field "why" kinks it all, and since no one wants to admit that they don't care, the conversation ends up completely derailed with guesswork and speculation.
When I'm looking to solve a problem, I keep it simple: what did you want it to do, or what sort of solution are you looking for? Never have I asked why they did it or why someone was bothered about it. Sometimes I wonder, but I know that it just comes off as accusatory and most of the time, it adds far more time to any discussion that I can spend doing something else.
The most recent eyeroller had to do with a discussion over how something worked, and really, it wasn't my specialty anyway. They had possibly misunderstood the original info and added the original people onto the email. The original person derailed the entire conversation by asking why the asker asked my group instead of, you know, just answering their question to him. Then the email string went off the deep end never returning to its original topic.
Seriously, there are questions with irrelevant answers. Some say there are no stupid questions, but I assure you there are. They are just trying to spark discussion when they say that. In fact, there are hosts of stupid, pointless and irrelevant questions that should never be asked in a group setting. If you are about to ask a question that will not, in any way, benefit the group, don't ask it. If you are asking a question that you are throwing out for the direct purpose of blaming someone else for something, don't ask it. If you feel like you have to lead the question with an apology, don't ask it. And finally, if you think your questions requires a disclaimer, either don't ask it or don't provide the disclaimer. Seriously, no one cares.
And finally, to clear up another fallacy: the customer is not always right. Ask anyone in technical support.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
The Turning Of A Page
You ever get something that is somewhat mundane in nature, and yet for reasons unexplained, the creators of said object have placed an inordinate amount of work into some feature that provides no real value or functionality? When you look at most things, everything serves some kind of purpose, even colors which provide some aesthetic value. Most of the time, companies won't waste their time in tossing in stuff that is completely pointless.
Today, I saw an email that contained a link to our annual benefits novel, which was provided as an online doc rather than cutting down a forest to send it to everyone (which I'm sure they've done anyway). It opened up in this e-reader, similar to what I've seen used by store ads online. I'm sure you've seen these before. You hover your mouse in the lower corner of the "page", the page reacts and you can drag it over like you're turning a real page (you know, instead of clicking the little right arrow at the bottom of the screen like a sane user).
I caught the sound out of the tinny speaker in the CPU (since I really don't care about sound on my work computer; that's what headphones are for). Yeah, in this benefits document that 90% of the users will read at work, they bothered to take the extra time and expense to include a page turning sound. I can't even imagine how many man-hours went into this extremely minor and utterly pointless detail. I suppose that's my insurance premiums at work.
Every since then, I've been looking for something to compare how absolutely pointless that sound is, and I got nothing. There is literally nothing I can think of off the top of my head that would hold less consumer value than the sound of a turning page in an online benefits manual. There's a new simile for you.
That's as useless as the sound of a turning page in an ebook. And yet, that page turn sound will still be more pointless than whatever you compared it to.
Today, I saw an email that contained a link to our annual benefits novel, which was provided as an online doc rather than cutting down a forest to send it to everyone (which I'm sure they've done anyway). It opened up in this e-reader, similar to what I've seen used by store ads online. I'm sure you've seen these before. You hover your mouse in the lower corner of the "page", the page reacts and you can drag it over like you're turning a real page (you know, instead of clicking the little right arrow at the bottom of the screen like a sane user).
I caught the sound out of the tinny speaker in the CPU (since I really don't care about sound on my work computer; that's what headphones are for). Yeah, in this benefits document that 90% of the users will read at work, they bothered to take the extra time and expense to include a page turning sound. I can't even imagine how many man-hours went into this extremely minor and utterly pointless detail. I suppose that's my insurance premiums at work.
Every since then, I've been looking for something to compare how absolutely pointless that sound is, and I got nothing. There is literally nothing I can think of off the top of my head that would hold less consumer value than the sound of a turning page in an online benefits manual. There's a new simile for you.
That's as useless as the sound of a turning page in an ebook. And yet, that page turn sound will still be more pointless than whatever you compared it to.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Two Ways To Play
In the world of video games, the spectrum spans between two types of players. There are the casual ones who will play a little of everything that comes into contact with their system, and when they play, they just go until they feel like stopping, and then move on. Then there are the hardcore ones who will start a game and play it to its absolute conclusion. This type does not play just any game, but carefully select their next conquest like a general surveying the enemy. Your average gamer will range somewhere between the two extremes tending towards hardcore on some types of games and casual on others.
I was recently friended by someone who I failed to note played video games and even asked me about the Xbox on a prior occasion. Obviously, this time, I gave him my tag and once he sent the request, I was able to stalk ... er, I mean review the games he has played. Where my list is at 99, his is sitting at 442. Obviously, a part of this is because he has had his Xbox for longer than I've had mine (I found his oldest achievement to be earned on November 20, 2006 vs my December 25, 2011), but based on how incomplete his list of games is, I would put him as a casual gamer.
His list of games is littered with sort of begun games all nestled down around a handful of achievements with less than half being above the fifty percent mark. His overall percentage is 37, which considering just how many games he has on his tag is not exactly terrible. I noted a few games here and there that he was really dedicated to, completing them into the 80 and 90 percentiles, and he did complete 20 of them. None of this is meant to put him down or cause any insult, I promise. It simply indicates what amounts to an overall casual gamer.
I have another friend who recently found the true achievement site, and is casually working to get a higher completion on some of his games, but he suffers from a lack of play time, and as such, many of his games are still fairly low, but he is fortunate to only have 27 of them on his list to work with, but he has completed 3 of them so far.
Personally, I was casual for about a year before I discovered a fascinating achievement site at trueachievements.com where I completely junked out over the games and became a bit more hardcore (though not before I had all the earmarks of casual on my gamertag). As such, I gathered a handful of just really stupid games that I had rented and really disliked, and if I want to bring my overall percentage up, I now have to revisit them. Of my 99 games, I have a completion percentage of 47.89, and my overall goal is to eventually hit 80. I do have 50% on more than half of them, and I hope to hit a 50% overall rating around the end of the month, though by the looks of it, it will be a few days into November before I hit it. That site has some sweet tracking tools that I easily obsess over.
When you think about it, I'm sure we all start out as the casual gamer type regardless of whether it is actual games or other things in life. We begin by exploring and trying different things and build up a little experience with this and that before finding what we like and settling in. When we find our hardcore, we generally focus that attention on a small subset of where we start, much like the friend with nearly 450 games. He tried a lot, but devoted his attention to a certain type of game that he finds himself good with.
There are people out there who have changed gamer tags when they've moved from casual to hardcore so that they can control their completion percentages and ensure that they fully complete everything they touch and more carefully screen their games. While this is possible in the Xbox world, it hides a little of the truth of one's past by painting them as a perfect player when they really aren't. If I went to a new gamertag just to get 100%, I would have to replay so many games that I would lose more time than I would gain by starting new stuff. Yes, my percentage would be higher, but at a cost I'm not willing to pay. My tag with all its ups and downs is an accurate reflection of my Xbox gaming history, and really, there is nothing wrong with it.
This also serves as a sort of life metaphor where you can never escape from your past or even hide it as it all becomes a part of you. Yes, you have that Yoostar game on there with 12 achievements you can never attain. Yes, Transformers: The Game is there will all its gloriously horrible play control, and you never want to see it again. And yes, Child of Eden will forever taunt you with its achievements that are so hard to get, its True Achievement ratings are some of the highest on the site. Yet, how does this differ from bad decisions made and learned from in real life? Maybe you should have done this or shouldn't have done that, and all you can do is move on.
Naturally, the biggest difference is that anyone can look at your Xbox gaming history in all its glorious detail where your mind can be a closed book keeping your history carefully hidden. But just like having the Michael Jackson Experience and Just Dance Kids 2 in your gaming history doesn't make you a dance game enthusiast (ok, yes, and that Dance Central 3 sitting at 94%, whatever), elements of your past do not necessarily define your person at present.
I kind of went down a philosophical rabbit hole on this post, but no matter. Your past can make you who are, but it doesn't necessarily define you. Be yourself.
I was recently friended by someone who I failed to note played video games and even asked me about the Xbox on a prior occasion. Obviously, this time, I gave him my tag and once he sent the request, I was able to stalk ... er, I mean review the games he has played. Where my list is at 99, his is sitting at 442. Obviously, a part of this is because he has had his Xbox for longer than I've had mine (I found his oldest achievement to be earned on November 20, 2006 vs my December 25, 2011), but based on how incomplete his list of games is, I would put him as a casual gamer.
His list of games is littered with sort of begun games all nestled down around a handful of achievements with less than half being above the fifty percent mark. His overall percentage is 37, which considering just how many games he has on his tag is not exactly terrible. I noted a few games here and there that he was really dedicated to, completing them into the 80 and 90 percentiles, and he did complete 20 of them. None of this is meant to put him down or cause any insult, I promise. It simply indicates what amounts to an overall casual gamer.
I have another friend who recently found the true achievement site, and is casually working to get a higher completion on some of his games, but he suffers from a lack of play time, and as such, many of his games are still fairly low, but he is fortunate to only have 27 of them on his list to work with, but he has completed 3 of them so far.
Personally, I was casual for about a year before I discovered a fascinating achievement site at trueachievements.com where I completely junked out over the games and became a bit more hardcore (though not before I had all the earmarks of casual on my gamertag). As such, I gathered a handful of just really stupid games that I had rented and really disliked, and if I want to bring my overall percentage up, I now have to revisit them. Of my 99 games, I have a completion percentage of 47.89, and my overall goal is to eventually hit 80. I do have 50% on more than half of them, and I hope to hit a 50% overall rating around the end of the month, though by the looks of it, it will be a few days into November before I hit it. That site has some sweet tracking tools that I easily obsess over.
When you think about it, I'm sure we all start out as the casual gamer type regardless of whether it is actual games or other things in life. We begin by exploring and trying different things and build up a little experience with this and that before finding what we like and settling in. When we find our hardcore, we generally focus that attention on a small subset of where we start, much like the friend with nearly 450 games. He tried a lot, but devoted his attention to a certain type of game that he finds himself good with.
There are people out there who have changed gamer tags when they've moved from casual to hardcore so that they can control their completion percentages and ensure that they fully complete everything they touch and more carefully screen their games. While this is possible in the Xbox world, it hides a little of the truth of one's past by painting them as a perfect player when they really aren't. If I went to a new gamertag just to get 100%, I would have to replay so many games that I would lose more time than I would gain by starting new stuff. Yes, my percentage would be higher, but at a cost I'm not willing to pay. My tag with all its ups and downs is an accurate reflection of my Xbox gaming history, and really, there is nothing wrong with it.
This also serves as a sort of life metaphor where you can never escape from your past or even hide it as it all becomes a part of you. Yes, you have that Yoostar game on there with 12 achievements you can never attain. Yes, Transformers: The Game is there will all its gloriously horrible play control, and you never want to see it again. And yes, Child of Eden will forever taunt you with its achievements that are so hard to get, its True Achievement ratings are some of the highest on the site. Yet, how does this differ from bad decisions made and learned from in real life? Maybe you should have done this or shouldn't have done that, and all you can do is move on.
Naturally, the biggest difference is that anyone can look at your Xbox gaming history in all its glorious detail where your mind can be a closed book keeping your history carefully hidden. But just like having the Michael Jackson Experience and Just Dance Kids 2 in your gaming history doesn't make you a dance game enthusiast (ok, yes, and that Dance Central 3 sitting at 94%, whatever), elements of your past do not necessarily define your person at present.
I kind of went down a philosophical rabbit hole on this post, but no matter. Your past can make you who are, but it doesn't necessarily define you. Be yourself.
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Relentless Updates
Here's something that came to mind as I sat down to another security alert from Java as it wants to make another update. Updates.
When a program is released, it is usually put out there "as good as it gets" for the moment until something surprising comes along to derail it, and the developer is forced to put out an update to fix whatever problem arose. These updates, or patches, are only possible because our computers are almost permanently online with a fairly speedy connection, where once upon a time, if a developer put out a program that required a patch, the consumer was screwed.
I recall one such game, called Riven (a sequel to Myst), that froze at a certain point of the game, and after some digging, I learned that the game was glitched and required a patch to fix it. I located said patch (I don't remember how) and popped that on a 3.5" disk to load into the game directory. It fixed the problem. Nowadays, your xBox or whatever would simply download the patch as soon as it was available and you'd never know there was a problem.
This ease of update has led to quite a bit of laziness on the part of some developers since they know once problems come up, they can instantly fix it and move on. This means that you, as a user, basically become unpaid beta testers of some companies' products since your instant feedback (read: ire over a crappy game) will enable the developers to correct issues they might never have found without months of more testing. One particularly heinous example was the release of the game Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. If you have the original Xbox or PS3 version of this game that came out on release day, you have a game that is can never be played without the update. The game was so badly glitched (all Lego games are inherently glitched, but this one was the worst) that the company was forced to replace all the game discs for the Wii owners since the Wii was not able to take game updates. If you're like me, however, and waited till the game went down to 19.99, then your disc is fine.
I use this update thing as a sort of gauge as to the worthiness of a particular product. For instance, Java (although supposedly in every product ever) seems to be one of the buggiest things out there. My computer gets updates almost daily for it meaning the developer finds something wrong with it almost daily.Oh sure, you might say, "well, they are improving it," and that is undoubtedly true some of the time, but developers would not update a product with newer and better stuff on a daily basis. A good portion of these are likely patches to fix bugs.
Another is Adobe Air. The Amazon Cloud Player uses this, and guess what has to update every single time I use it. Yeah. It tells me to close what I'm doing so it can make its update, so I let it finish what it is doing and then tell it to update. I figure it worked last time, and it'll work this time without their precious update. Obviously, the Air does something that the Cloud Player uses, but whatever that is has nothing to do with the updates it makes.
I know these are free, of course, but it still stinks that those developers can't just put out something that works the first (or even second) time without persistent updates that slow everything down while you wait for them to basically say, "Whoops, hang on a minute while I fix this."
When a program is released, it is usually put out there "as good as it gets" for the moment until something surprising comes along to derail it, and the developer is forced to put out an update to fix whatever problem arose. These updates, or patches, are only possible because our computers are almost permanently online with a fairly speedy connection, where once upon a time, if a developer put out a program that required a patch, the consumer was screwed.
I recall one such game, called Riven (a sequel to Myst), that froze at a certain point of the game, and after some digging, I learned that the game was glitched and required a patch to fix it. I located said patch (I don't remember how) and popped that on a 3.5" disk to load into the game directory. It fixed the problem. Nowadays, your xBox or whatever would simply download the patch as soon as it was available and you'd never know there was a problem.
This ease of update has led to quite a bit of laziness on the part of some developers since they know once problems come up, they can instantly fix it and move on. This means that you, as a user, basically become unpaid beta testers of some companies' products since your instant feedback (read: ire over a crappy game) will enable the developers to correct issues they might never have found without months of more testing. One particularly heinous example was the release of the game Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. If you have the original Xbox or PS3 version of this game that came out on release day, you have a game that is can never be played without the update. The game was so badly glitched (all Lego games are inherently glitched, but this one was the worst) that the company was forced to replace all the game discs for the Wii owners since the Wii was not able to take game updates. If you're like me, however, and waited till the game went down to 19.99, then your disc is fine.
I use this update thing as a sort of gauge as to the worthiness of a particular product. For instance, Java (although supposedly in every product ever) seems to be one of the buggiest things out there. My computer gets updates almost daily for it meaning the developer finds something wrong with it almost daily.Oh sure, you might say, "well, they are improving it," and that is undoubtedly true some of the time, but developers would not update a product with newer and better stuff on a daily basis. A good portion of these are likely patches to fix bugs.
Another is Adobe Air. The Amazon Cloud Player uses this, and guess what has to update every single time I use it. Yeah. It tells me to close what I'm doing so it can make its update, so I let it finish what it is doing and then tell it to update. I figure it worked last time, and it'll work this time without their precious update. Obviously, the Air does something that the Cloud Player uses, but whatever that is has nothing to do with the updates it makes.
I know these are free, of course, but it still stinks that those developers can't just put out something that works the first (or even second) time without persistent updates that slow everything down while you wait for them to basically say, "Whoops, hang on a minute while I fix this."
Monday, October 21, 2013
The Last Few Days
Well, this was a surprise, wasn't it? Go through a couple months of a post a day, and suddenly, I disappear. Well, I didn't disappear, but I did suffer from a lack of planning for not having anything ready for when I lose my mind and forget to look at the blog for a few days. You see, so far, I've been creating a post and setting the date for sometime after today, so I'd be posting every day, even if I wrote today's post yesterday. This time, though, I had nothing and forgot about it.
Oops.
The real bonus to writing this way is that inspiration can strike at any time, and I'm ready for it as opposed to sitting down at the computer one morning and staring at a blank screen, which is exactly what I did this morning, which is why I'm writing about writing instead of something more interesting because this is exactly what is on my mind at this moment.
The way I see it, though, it is better to have something rather than nothing so that you are aware I still exist and do not believe that the blog has fallen by the wayside. Again.
Oops.
The real bonus to writing this way is that inspiration can strike at any time, and I'm ready for it as opposed to sitting down at the computer one morning and staring at a blank screen, which is exactly what I did this morning, which is why I'm writing about writing instead of something more interesting because this is exactly what is on my mind at this moment.
The way I see it, though, it is better to have something rather than nothing so that you are aware I still exist and do not believe that the blog has fallen by the wayside. Again.
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