All archaeology is the study of what people leave behind. Generally, what they leave behind is trash. Privies were used as trash dumps as well as excrement repositories and are treasure troves of artifacts that we use to either support or detract from the written historical record.
A great example of this an excavation of a pony express station I worked on a few years ago. According to the written documentation of the station (and there was quite a bit), the station was officially “dry.” However, when we excavated the privy, the single most common artifact we found were whiskey bottles. Obviously, there was some discrepancy between the official documentation of station activity and what was actually happening there.
No, I don’t like bossing people around. I just have strong organizational and administrative skills, and feel that I can currently give the best service by supporting the people who deliver the service as well as I possibly can. I serve them; they don’t serve me.
I am not well-dressed and -groomed because I am uptight in nature. Dressing for work is one of the worst parts of my job. I do it because the expectation is there, and believe me it can be a challenge trying to find clothing that you can take to a boardroom at a moment’s notice but still carry a pager, office keys, and a pen in.
Yes, I expect you all to behave like professionals, since you all have professional designations, are governed by professional associations and colleges, etc. etc. This means that I expect you to behave like adults and not children in conducting your business, and it also means that in the event of any dispute I will take only one side: the patient’s. Get used to it.
The union giveth, and the union taketh away. Don’t expect me to be sympathetic when a collective agreement doesn’t make your world sunshine and roses. And don’t think you are immune from discipline and/or dismissal because you belong to a union. I have ways.
I work for a video game company. No, we don’t sit around all day playing games. And no, it’s not the funnest job ever. We actually do have an HR department, IT department, legal department, facilities department, etc., just like a lot of other companies. You’ll rarely find anyone outside of the testers and maybe a few developers and producers actually playing any games. After I get the usual, “It must be so fun working there,” response, I tell them I just deal with clients and get the “Oh” treatment like I’ve just let them down.
gigi, me too! Means I get 3 squares and a roof over my head, and that the customers aren’t breaking their brains trying to figure out what the original dev meant when they wrote this. (just means I get to break my brain first on the spec, is all.)
Whaddya mean, ‘sometimes’?
Yes, I’d neglected to mention Marketing (and by extension, Legal) in my original post. In my workplace, we have to work pretty closely with them to ensure that we can communicate their latest naming scheme as clearly and cleanly as possible from the start. Makes things fun for everyone concerned when it comes to backcompat and explaining the differences. sigh I wasn’t sure if the level of interdependency was the same outside large corporate environments, but it sounds like it’s pretty close to.
