The Workplace Safely and Insurance Board is a good idea. I mean, it makes sense, right? You need someone to arbitrate claims and stick up for the injured worker.

Unfortunately it may look good on paper, but fails in the real world, where employees can launch specious and even outright malicious claims against you.

We’ve been victim of this before, here. Someone working at home wrenches their back, claims it happened at work — it makes sense to do this, as WSIB payments are usually higher than EI payments — and gets a decision in his favour. He then recovers at home while the company’s premiums rise because it is now a much more dangerous place in the WSIB’s mind. If it can be said to have one.

After all this is over, you are required by law to hire that person back or be fined. But this is of course bad for everyone involved. The employee gets their job back but is probably disliked by management and will probably be given every shit job in the place. He’ll be stuck emptying garbage and cleaning out behind the silo. The employer on the other hand gets back a person who intentionally defrauded them and the government of (probably) a large sum of money. He might do it again, so you have to be extra-careful around him.

I wonder if there’s a better way to do the WSIB than it is right now?

• How do you motivate people to do something they don’t want to do? Say you’re moving someone from an executive to a more sales-oriented role. And they don’t want to do it. Let’s say they use every possible excuse to avoid their new job, keep finding ways to do their old job despite access restrictions, and in the meantime generally get in the way. Oh, and let’s say it’s in a company with only one level of management and that level of management is afraid of conflict. One more thing… it’s all family. How do you do that?
• Hiring family is generally a mistake. Nepotism has no place in business, not simply because it’s unfair, but because it’s destructive. Hiring family makes you weak: You have to choose, sometimes, between your family and your business. And of course you choose family. Hiring family makes hard choices much, much harder.
• I feel like playing Monopoly sometime soon. I don’t know why. I just developed a hankering for the game.
• Do you find that in-line spell checking makes you spell better? I don’t mean, does it help you make fewer mistakes. That’s pretty obvious. I mean, does it make you more likely to spell things right the first time? Do you dread that little wavy red line?
• I’ve finished drinking some coffee that John at church gave me. I’m not sure if it’s Panamanian or Columbian or what, but it’s pretty good stuff. My favourite by far is still the coffee I bought in Cuba, of all places. Who ever heard of good Cuban coffee?
• Speaking of good Cuban coffee, the cappuccinos Laura and I had in Cuba… wow. I don’t think I’ve ever had better coffee anywhere. I’m not kidding. We got up in the morning and stumbled bleary-eyed into the heat just to enjoy one of those bad boys. And it was worth it. No matter how swelteringly hot it was outside.
• I have been married for a year and one month. That’s… crazy. But awesome at the same time.
• God’s plans are so much better than my plans are. Even when he works through hard means. I can attest to this personally. He turns things to good.
• Mom just showed up at the office and is now fetching me a coffee — I hope. Either that or she forgot totally and I shall remain with no coffee left.
• How do you make a really good pulled pork dish anyways? I’ve made a few educated guesses, but I don’t really know.

• I don’t get stat holidays. I really don’t. If every person gets a certain number of days off per year for government-mandated vacation, why are there additional days off? I’ll probably understand this when I’m older and slower but for now they just annoy me. They throw a monkey wrench into my normally placid finances (I don’t have much money, but what money I do have is somewhat consistent), throw a hyena wrench into production at the shop (a four day week in which to do five days of work! hooray!), and just generally throw off my sense of time.
• Fourteen hours. I worked fourteen hours yesterday. Just to be clear, I’m not a workaholic, I actually don’t like doing that. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
• Why do we make word that end in “aholic” when we mean to say someone is addicted to something? It doesn’t make any sense. It should be “workic”, not “workaholic”. One of those has much less snap, of course.
• Clicking on the tag buttons is much easier than writing out tags. If they had keyboard shortcuts, it’d be even better.
• For the love of all that’s good, don’t keep apologising to me. Don’t be sorry, do your job properly. Then we’re both happy.
• Ever have a night of tossing and turning? I had one of those last night, only to roll out of bed and discover Laura slept like a babe in arms. I suppose that’s okay, though. I’ll give up my sleep for her in one of those mystical marital transactions that seem to happen with some frequency. We’re rarely both sick, or both hungry, or both interested in watching the same film; life is strange that way. People are strange that way.
• I’d like to observe that even lukewarm coffee is better than no coffee at all, which pretty much blows that whole “warm, cold, lukewarm” example of Paul’s out of the water. Of course, he didn’t really have coffee. I try to imagine Paul of caffeine, and I sort of imagine him like, “We’re going to North America, beeyotches!” I think he might get quite annoying, actually.
• Last night Laura and I read from Luke where Jesus talks about the end times, and I have to say that scripture confuses me sometimes. At one point the passage says that the end times (if it was actually talking about the end times) will come when people are eating and drinking and getting married, just like in the days of Lot and Noah… and says that these signs are like vultures gathered around a carcass. Which is nice imagery, but doesn’t help me much, because I see people eating and drinking and getting married right now. Maybe I’m just getting confused about nothing. I just don’t get it.
• I love Talkdemonic’s “In the Machinery of Night”. It’s like they took equal parts IDM, hip-hop drumming, and awesome and mixed it all together to get an amazing song. Note my use of superlatives here.
• The Dilbert comic about the guy who has no skills but compensates by “raising issues” resonates with me this morning. I won’t tell you why because that would be mean.

We got a new machine today — a very nice, sturdy piece of well-needed equipment, I might add — that everyone has been looking forward to for quite some time.

I walked into the shop to catch a glimpse of… the American flag. No, wait, two American flags. And what appeared to be bunting. All over our new machine.

Now, I’m no anti-American zealot. I love Americans as one might love one’s gun-toting, Bible-thumping, gas-guzzling, war-loving older brother. But I don’t want the flag plastered all over my workplace. We’re not that way in Canada.

It puzzles me to think of exporting something with your country’s flag plastered on the front. Sure, “Made in America” somewhere on the packaging is a nice touch, a sign of quality, perhaps even a testimony to decent engineering. Maybe a little flag somewhere near the ingredients. But on a stationary box that someone’s going to place in the middle of their shop? Isn’t that just a little… rude?

Want to drive yourself batty? Of course you do. The following list will show you how to do exactly that in clear, easy, and practical steps.

1. Acquire an extensive portfolio of duties and responsibilities. The amount of work to be done always expands, right? It’s like a vacuum. No matter how much time you have, you’ll find some way to fill it. What you want to do here is be a vacuum so large you attract work like brown biscuits attract flies.
2. Make yourself indispensable. If you’re in a room full of people and you can’t point to at least five of them that absolutely depend on you to do something, you’re doing something wrong. You need to be that critical junction, that cog without which no-one else can function.
3. Make a mental list of your most critical jobs. You need to know what you need to be doing if you want to be properly driven batty. Make a list.
4. Ignore the list. Look, the work isn’t going to do itself. Of is it? You won’t know until you’ve properly ignored it.
5. Do somebody else’s work. Co-worker unpacking a bunch of boxes? Go help. Technical documents need that fourth-draft polish? Get out the buffer. Carpets need cleaning? Tweezers.
6. Invent work. All that stuff you always wanted to do but never had time? Don’t procrastinate! Invent that new device. Figure out how to make a space elevator. Write a manual for something only you use. Anything you can defend as useful that is at the same time completely useless.
7. Review the list you made earlier. By now there should be some extremely pressing concerns. People screaming, that sort of thing. If people aren’t screaming, you’re doing it wrong.
8. Waste time. Get a blog. Get on Facebook.
9. Let the list of important stuff intrude of your every waking hour. Don’t stop fretting about the list. The list is the only thing you’re allowed to worry about. But don’t do anything about it. Maybe chip at the edges if you must, but allow the list to remain at the centre of your thoughts.
10. Suffer a breakdown. The weight of these important things you can never seem to get to should be, by now, right on your shoulders. And, like a burned-out star, you should be ready to collapse into a black hole of stress and depression.
11. Take a vacation. Let someone else deal with it. Seriously. If you play your cards right, you’ll win some sort of VIP award, or at least a cash settlement from the lawsuit.

Please do remember that you use this list at your own risk. Also not it can be adapted, with a little imagination, to almost any scenario involving responsibility.

We hired a new girl recently. She started this week to general satisfaction of most of the office staff. They’ve been overworked, obviously overworked, and have needed a general labourer for a while.

She’s not the first. In fact, she’s the third person we’ve hired recently to do just this job. This simple job. This ridiculously easy, stupendously uncomplicated job.

The third person. It boggles my mind.

Yet she’s managing to screw up, and not in small things. In gigantic things. In the most elementary of computing processes that most five-year-olds on this planet can handle with ease. Such as not deleting top level directories full of technical drawings that only get backed up every weekend. Such as not simply ignoring warning dialogues and simply clicking “OK”. Such as watching, listening, learning, and doing.

I just… can’t handle it any more. I can’t handle whatever idiots we’re hiring from the idiot factory to do jobs that idiots are supposed to be able to do. I can’t stand the far more idiotic hiring policies that allow these IQ-challenged people into the office. I can’t keep explaining, keep trying to address the fundamental point of failure, keep understanding why they’re not understanding.

If you’re not competent, get a job at Tim Hortons or at a gas station somewhere. And if the skill level of the job offering is higher than pouring coffee and swiping credit cards, seek higher-level employees.

I’m surrounded by almost $50,000 of high-grade computing equipment. We’ll throw down money for these things if there’s even a hint that we might need to have another computer. We buy high-tech machines at the drop of a hat. We still, however, baulk at hiring competent people. We baulk at paying real money for really good people.

How stupid, how ass-backwards is that?

It’s intolerable. I’m a smart guy. Maybe even a really smart guy: I don’t know. And I do a superhuman amount of work around here. Ten hour days, that kind of stuff. And even when I’m at the very end of my tether, there’s more to be done, more that I could do if I wanted. At the end of that tunnel of blase work is the light of the things I would like to be doing. Do I ever get there? No.

I’ve often asked for someone to help me out here. Just to give me a leg up on the stuff that I need to get done. To help me, if you will, get over the hump so I can see level ground again.

Still, I find myself wondering if, should I get my wish, I’ll end up getting what I wanted and hating it. I can only imagine what poor Rebekah must be going through trying valiantly to make something worthwhile from the material she’s given.

If I had to deal with that on top of my work, I don’t know what I’d do.

It wouldn’t be nice, I bet, whatever it was.

At work, there are certain things we do all the time. We do these certain things every day. Most people here have developed a method of doing these things, a way of (for instance), writing descriptions for tools of different sorts. After a while there’s a sort of community lexicon for these things.

There are, however, a few people who resist change. Though I should say they resist changing by constantly changing. Or, they cannot seem to do the same thing the same way twice. They’re immune to the community lexicon no matter how long they work here.

I alternately find this annoying and fascinating (I have a deep ambivalence to caring about such things) and sometimes wonder: why do some people settle into patterns and adopt informal standardisations while other people seem to resist them at the atomic level?

Let me make something crystal clear.

There are costs associated with every single manufacturing process. If the tooling produced in these processes is sold below those costs, money is effectively being burned.

In almost all circumstances, it’s better to not sell the tooling at all than to sell it under cost. And also to not produce tooling in such small quantities that the costs threaten to overwhelm the remotest possibility of making a profit.

Businesses exist — in the end — to make profit. If there was no profit, there would be few businesses. What we do is almost tangential to the fact that there must be a profit. If there is no profit, things must go, such as jobs and perks and eventually the business itself. If you cannot understand the costs associated with production, understand this: when you sell tools below cost, you’re effectively robbing yourself of your job. You’re robbing your heart to spite your little toe.

This seems, to my mind, pretty elementary. Yet I’ve found many, many people who simple can’t grasp the idea. Look, a multi-million dollar machining centre and what it produces don’t just appear out of nowhere. They have to be bought. And in order to be paid for, they have to break even. And in order to pay for all the other surrounding things such as lights and air and employees and heating and material and computers and all that stuff it has to do more than break even. And at the end of the day, after all those stakeholders are paid, the profit is that little bit of fat the people who worked hard to create the company get to do with as they wish.

Simplified? Yes. Yet, it’s still too complicated for some people.

I want to say something about genetics and the film Idiocracy, but I won’t.

We got a new Walter Helitronic 600 the other day, and we’ve been getting it running lately (to good effect, mostly). The only weird thing is that Walter Grinders changed the control from whatever it was to a Fanuc control. This will supposedly give better MTTF, as Fanuc controls are said to be less likely to fail on a yearly basis like the old controls.

Unfortunately, this means that the entire front panel layout has changed. Unfortunately because the front panel has been mostly unchanged for the seven years I’ve been around them and everyone here is used to the old layout. When it came in, I was like, “Wow, that’s going to be inconvenient.”

As it happens, it’s expensive, too. And I’m not at all blaming Walter for this (if I did, they might just call me up and kvetch), but one of our guys just drove the X-axis into a spindle. Which means we need a new spindle, and no one here is very happy about that, especially the guy who just signed all those paycheques.

• I feel like I just can’t get anything done at work. I can’t make promises to customers more than two days in the future, because I’m not really in control of production. If anything, I make suggestions and those higher up than me decide to ignore them. Honestly, it’s incredibly depressing, and I’m beginning to wonder why I keep trying; it’d be a lot easier and probably a lot better if I didn’t. Because if I can, every day, just, almost get what I need to get done done, I’ll never get any help. I’ll just get a snowballing workload. I’ll be my own Katamari Damacy, except at the end of the day I won’t be creating new stars. I’ll be the hollowed, burnt-out husk of one.
• I have to say that technology has taught me at least a few lessons. In view of the price drop on iPhones yesterday, in view of any version of Windows’ security and functionality before at least two service packs, and in view of the data one can lose using alpha software, I have learned that Early adopters are idiots. Sadly, early adoption is something of an internal mechanism, a natural function that can hardly be denied. Or you could put it this way: I’m an idiot, too.
• I’ll end my sentences with prepositions if I bloody well please, thank you and please come again.
• Don’t assume that anyone you know is pronouncing a Japanese word or phrase properly. According to my research, there’s about a 92% chance a Japanese person would laugh at them. Politely. On the inside.
• I like the taste of creamer. I hate myself for this.
• Interesting thought here. According to classical evolutionary biology (forgive me for accepting the premise for a moment), there is no over-arching design in evolution, there is no God meddling in the process, there is only survival of the fittest. But then, there’s no such thing of survival of the fittest, is there? It doesn’t really matter if a method of adaptation is optimal or not, only that it sucks the least. So maybe it should be Survival of the Least Awful, eh? The point is this: evolution isn’t a linear progression and you can’t say something is “better” in any real sense because it is more complex. Also, evolution can’t be said in any meaningful sense to select for truth. (Consider how your eye vibrates, for instance, and the images it ignores, it simply deletes in those moments; consider how very little of actual reality we can see with our eyes, all the spectrum that’s simply invisible to us; consider that there’s little reason that there aren’t ten senses and we’ve only evolved into five.) In that sense, we could, technically, be living in a dream world that doesn’t actually represent reality, if that dream world somehow gave humans an evolutionary advantage. What does this all mean? Well, let me put it this way: if evolution doesn’t select for truth, merely for adequacy, and your brain is a product of that process, how can you say evolution is true, since it’s a product of said possibly faulty brains? Thus you can reasonably say that classical evolution is self-defeating; any evolutionist that trusts his own reasoning tacitly believes at least some sort of a guiding force
• With that out of my head, I can finally get back to my sea of paperwork. Yay!