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?

WSIB Claims… and You! originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-09-17.

Bullet Points for a Tuesday Noon Hour originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-09-09.

Bullet points for a Wednesday Morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-02-20.

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?

Oh say can you see by the shop’s dirty light… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-22.

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.

A Short Guide to Driving Yourself Batty originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-11.

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.

Excuse me while I vent. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-02.

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?

Method and madness. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-28.

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.

Why not to sell things for super cheap and instead try to make a profit. For dummies. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-14.

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.

Well isn’t that just dandy. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-13.

Bullet points for a Thursday morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-06.

Addendum:

• When you specify a tolerance to the fourth decimal place and then find it undersize to to the fifth decimal place by three hundred-thousandths of an inch, I’m going to explain to you the concept of rounding up, and how, if you want to specify five decimal tolerances, you can twenty thousand dollars per tool. Then you can either take the tool and use it, or throw it in the garbage and see if anyone else will kowtow. I tell you, I should not be in customer service.
• Language is important. It’s the language of deity, the great divider between humans and animals. This is why, when I hear people talking in hillbilly/hiphop slang, I think they’re stupid. They may not be, but they’re acting like it. Intelligence and language go hand in hand.

Bullet points for a Thursday morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-26.

Especially when it’s urgent.

Communicate. Try it. It’s everything it’s cracked up to be! originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-25.

Assertion: If only the most incompetent people are promoted, so as to limit the damage they can do, they will inevitably be incompetent, period.

Conclusion: Management is always incompetent.

An observation about management. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-07-05.

We have three salesmen, where we once had no salesmen. These are people dedicated to getting us work, and they do. Unfortunately, Ed and Jerry both used to help around the office, but now spend most of their time actually selling stuff. So I’ve lost those two helping hands. Elyssa is pregnant, and leaving in a few weeks. So I’ve lost that set of helping hands. Margaret helps out a lot, and there’s still Rebekah. So basically there are two people to handle all the grunt work. Where once there were at least four, and sometimes five.

I have no one to delegate to. I have to do everything myself. I have no help to do things that need to be done but are secondary tasks. I have no associates, no team, no nothing to help me get the work done. Not a living, breathing soul to keep me accountable, to make sure that I’m actually getting stuff done, to work with me to eliminate errors.

It’s not that these people are hard to find. Office workers are pretty much a dime a dozen, if you’re willing to train them. It’s not like they’re terribly expensive either. I mean, I understand that your human cost is high in any company, but it’s a necessary cost, you know? Eliminating jobs by attrition may be good for the bottom line, but I doubt it’s a very good strategy overall.

So I don’t know what I’m going to do around here. I can’t keep saying, “Well, that didn’t get done because I didn’t have enough time in the day to do it,” because that’s starting to sound like a line, I say it so often. I work ten hours a day here, regularly. I’m not stupid. I’m not working dumb.

And it’s not just me. Everybody here is pretty much either underpaid or overworked, and sometime both.

I’m still not sure how to make this work, you know? I’m getting extremely stressed out with the amount of work I have waiting for me. It’s like this huge thing, always trailing behind me. And it’s really getting on my nerves.

Stress. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-05-31.

To recap my morning so far… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-05-23.

Now, I like to give people a chance, so I agree to make some tools for him. Four pieces of Tool 1 and four pieces of Tool 2. We made the tools in exactly those amounts, and sent them over. They worked alright. To be absolutely clear, I looked at the the tools myself before sending them out. Everything was good.

This morning I get a call from him that he’s short two tools. Nay, he claims we have given him six pieces of Tool 1, and two pieces of Tool 2. Which is of course impossible: not only did I inspect the tools before they went out (4 of one, 4 of the other), but I dropped them off myself.

These are not similar tools, either. The shank size is the same, but they’re radically different on the front end. In fact, one of them is much smaller than the other. So we have a choice: either someone is lying to him, or he is lying to me, or the space/time continuum itself has ruptured and the world is not as it seems.

But I think he’s lying to me. Such is his reputation. And so this guy joins that group of customers who, when quoted, get the “as if made out of diamond” pricing, as they’re not even close to worth dealing with.

There are good customers and there are chokable customers. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-05-01.

Here’s something I hate. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-02-02.

This is, of course, enough to get them off hold for minor orders and such. However, this afternoon, I get a call from an Indian gentleman who I have a unique working relationship with (as he and I both are unique individuals, he being the sort of unique individual who repeats everything at least a thousand times). He places a giant order with multiple items and an astronomical price tag. Couple this with the phone and his repetition habit; I was stuck at my desk for just under 15 minutes.

While he’s talking, the timing of the order seems a little… fishy. Something is not right in the state of Denmark. So I check, and sure enough, they’re off hold till Monday, at which point they’ll be back on hold again, unable to buy anything from us, or procure any of our invaluable services.

This just to say we’re not stupid. If you place a gigantic order almost exactly equal to the amount you’ll be paying in a few days, you might as well have not paid at all. And frankly, we like our money. Nay, we need our money, much like you need our tools.

An amusing anecdote. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2006-12-08.

This morning I dropped off some tools in Mississauga; I walked through the shipping receiving door, and was greeted by the smiling face of a 70-year-old man in a turban. So he was Sikh. But that’s not what this story is about, so much as how the English Bits of his brain seemed to be malfunctioning: he began gabbing at me (not to me, but at me), making hand motions whilst spewing out words that, while being words that I know and love, weren’t arranged in any particular order and seemed to be chosen quite at random. All of this together isn’t so strange. Old men do sometimes get a little batty, and sometimes their employers continue to issue paycheques through some fluke of the system or some misguided sense of duty. What was strange, however, was when he hopped onto a fork life – that’s right, a fork lift – and drove it Evil Knievel-style across the plant floor. At which point another, younger man called across the shop for me to not “pay any attention to him”. But he’s driving a forklift!

It was my mother’s birthday yesterday, or at least the celebrations thereof. We ended up going to an all-you-can-engorge-buffet where we, true to our genes, engorged all we could. But it was good. Though of course my mother gave herself a birthday present and commanded no alcohol be consumed. We ended up giddy with laughter anyways, between Elyssa and her banana-flavoured natural remedies, me and the five-axis Imperial March, Rebekah with her trademark mix of clueless humour and pop-culture references, and Kristin asking me what she considered “hard questions”.

I like it when people surprise me. Like, when one of you asks me a question I didn’t see coming. Something stunningly out of the ordinary. Something unexpected. Yet for the life of me, I can only think of three times in my life I’ve been knocked on my ass, hard. In the same breath, I only like being surprised after the fact; I like to see things coming.

The Kahvi Collective rules. A netlabel, all electronica, all free. Some of it is repetitive, some of it is boring, some of it is just plain bad, but the majority of tunes on Kahvi are quite listenable. Plus, you can download in both OGG and MP3 if you like.

Do you ever drink from the keg of victory? I have, today. There are a lot of jobs on time: this has a lot to do with the company quoting more realistic time frames to customers, not to mention implementing processes that facilitate streamlining and reveal untapped synergies. Someone, tell me what that means.

You’re surrounded by technology every single day. Do you know how to use it? Why not? I’m not asking if you know how to program in C or write and embedded OS or name for me the top three web application platforms. Just, do you know how to use it?

I wish I could be another person for a day, so I could watch myself. Have you ever felt like you would annoy yourself greatly? I want to find out if I would. Or, if there was some way to videotape myself. But then, I already like watching my videoblogs enough (I know, I’m Narcissus), and I have a feeling I’d be too entranced watching the video of my life to care enough about being annoyed with my foibles. This is not to say that I’m perfect, or don’t annoy anyone; it’s simply to say that I have an ego the size of Kansas.

On that note, I watched Dark Side of the Rainbow, and I seriously don’t get what the fuss is. If anyone sees connections between the song and movie, it’s got to be in their mind. Weird how humans are wired to find patterns where there are none; or perhaps how the universe is wired to create patterns.

The creation vs evolution debate: how important is it to you?

No one’s said anything funny today. It’s a shame. We’ve all been terribly work-oriented and probably just a little bit bloated.

It occurs to me that the photos of people eating cake below are all of my relatives. Rebekah is my sister, Elyssa is my sister, Steve is my cousin by marriage, Stu in my uncle by marriage, and Jerry is my uncle by marriage. The odd thing is that both Steve and Stu were not dating their wives (did they even know them? Someone clear this up.) when they started working here. So, Matthew Reckman, how are you planning to wedge yourself into my family? I wonder.

This calculator comes with a manual the size of small novel. I don’t want to calculate pi to the 1,000th digit guys (I’m not that white and nerdy). I just want to do some basic trig, and some arithmetic.

That’s it. I’m back to work, doing thangs. Please remember that I value and will try to respond to your comments!

It’s one of those Fridays. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2006-11-03.

Jay-Z, here’s the thing; when you come out of retirement after the mostly-pure-gold that was The Black Album, people are expecting things of you. Like that you’d be, you know, good. Your latest song? It’s meh. It’s meh, and you’re recycling your lyrics.

Last night I worked till 6:30 just getting parcels out the door (this is not normal). Do you ever get an adrenaline rush from getting something done just under the wire? I know, it’s weird, and silly, but there you have it.

Pretty much every morning I have a venti bold at Starbucks. I like stopping off there and talking to the people, like TCG, and TAG. (Tasty Coffee Girl and Tiny Asian Guy.)

Now, to the batcave.

A few notes. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2006-10-18.