That sheet of polyurethane that you wrapped the cab of the customer’s brand, spanking, new pickup truck will not stop the sand from the sandblaster with which your are sandblasting his old welding bed.
That was 35 years ago. I assume it’s still good advice.
Do not beat up the copier because you’re frustrated. I got a warning for that once. Instead yell “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
(Note: Do the latter after work and well away from your workplace.)
Teaching: if you have a worksheet that the students don’t need to keep (like a reading exercise or a quiz), laminate it and collect it to use again. This works even if they need to write on the worksheet, if you provide them with felt-tip pens.
I used to take votes in a similar way: give each student a blank sheet of laminated paper and a felt-tip and have them write their response and hold it up.
That also works for multiple-choice questions. Ask a question, ask the students to write A, B, C etc and hold it up. You can instantly see how many people have got it right and whether or not you need to go over the material some more.
If you have a class that never has pens, provide crappy ones for them to use and have a container for them that shows instantly if there are any remaining. I made one out of an old container of McCains Microchips - these are fries that you heat up in the microwave, with each fry in its own little slot. I’m sure other areas have some similar item they can adapt.
That way, when you collect in the pens, or, better, have a student collect them for you (works well with bright, hyperactive students) and you and they can instantly see if any are missing.
Ideally, of course, all the students would bring their own pens, but in some classes that’s a battle not worth fighting. Plus, many students would suddenly remember their own pen rather than use the tiny Ikea pencil or Argos pen I gave them.
Note that this can backfire if you’re coming into an office that already has an established culture of inefficiency. If Alice schmoozes for three hours a day but is always able to complain about her full queue, while Brenda clears her queue before schmoozing for two hours a day, Brenda can gain a reputation for being slipshod and lazy while Alice is considered a hard worker with so much on her plate that she can never catch up. What a world, what a world.
SELECT
bigasstablename1.column1,
bigasstablename1.column2,
bigasstablename1.column3,
bigasstablename2.column1,
bigasstablename2.column2,
bigasstablename3.column1
FROM
bigasstablename1, bigasstablename2, bigasstablename3
WHERE
bigasstablename1.key=bigasstablename2.key AND
bigasstablename1.key=bigasstablename3.key
Write this instead:
SELECT
a.column1,
a.column2,
a.column3,
b.column1,
b.column2,
c.column1
FROM
bigasstablename1 a, bigasstablename2 b, bigasstablename3 c
WHERE
a.key=b.key AND a.key=c.key
See how much less typing you have to do?
If your queries are running slowly, limit what you’re working with in the FROM section. If you’re only interested in a few columns of a jimongous table, use something like: FROM (SELECT column1, column2, column3 FROM jimongoustable) a. That way it’s not choking on the huge entire table while it’s working on your filters and joins and everything.
If someone sends you a request to provide information to a third party, send the info to both the requestor and the third party yourself. That way the third party knows who actually did it and the requestor won’t steal your credit.
When you leave a voice mail, say your name and return number SLOWLY and REPEAT it. Sometimes I don’t call back because I can’t fucking understand a number said once at auctioneer speed even though I replay the message six times.
CYA. Always leave a paper trail. If you need something important from someone, or one of your assignments is being shifted to another person, always send an email to confirm the action. This can be evidence later if something goes wrong. I’ve had this happen quite a bit, where you ask someone to complete a section of a project then later they deny ever being notified. It’s not always a nefarious action on their part; sometimes they forget. This way, you’re covered.
Not all of this is work-related, but anyway…
Don’t add extra/special info into regular emails or reports that are predominantly recycled text / formatting from previous mails/reports, unless you want to guarantee that nobody actually reads or even notices that info. If there’s some special situation or information you need to inform people about, don’t do it in your normal weekly report; send it in a separate email or file a separate report.
Don’t take a managerial position unless you know you have authority for hiring/firing. You never want to be on the hook for someone else’s lousy hiring skills.
Never, ever change currency at your hotel service desk. It’s almost always cheaper to use your debit card to withdraw from an ATM when overseas, but check your card’s fees for foreign currency purchases. Some credit cards are even better than debit cards, but read the fine print for your card - and don’t assume that ‘no fees!’ means it’s cheaper; they’re probably just sticking you with a ridiculously wide bid/ask spread.
Do yourself and your wife/kids a favor: Always check TripAdvisor before booking any hotel or event.
Husbands - cook one Sunday dinner a month. Trust me on this.
Good god, never do this. If you need to resort to writing your own references, you clearly have far more pressing issues to deal with.
Since BobLibDem mentioned database stuff…
One of the easiest of the low hanging fruit available when tuning a database is to create indexes on all foreign key columns (as always, there are exceptions).
If you have a table DEPT with departments and EMP with employees, and the EMP table has a foreign key to DEPT, you normally have a column DEPT_ID in your EMP table with a foreign key constraint making sure that all DEPT_ID values exist in the parent table. But you usually won’t have an index on that column unless you explicitly put one there.
Oracle doesn’t automatically index the child table’s foreign key column when you create a foreign key.
This means that for huge child tables queries that do things like “Give me all employees in department X” run slowly, as do cascade deletes and cascade updates of the parent table.
The less information you provide, the fewer questions you will have to answer.
Kind of related to this, from the “perception is everything” dept. : If you come to work early, no one notices, but if you also LEAVE early, they sure as hell do! Even if ok’d by the boss, you’ll save yourself alot of resentment from coworkers if you can adhere to the same schedule as everyone else. Not fair, & depends on the setting of course, but seems to be just the way it is, ymmv. Additionally, I’ve also worked in places where there was active pressure from coworkers to not do too much so the boss wouldn’t then expect then expect that level of productivity from everyone else. You’d be perceived as a brown noser for ruining it for everyone else if you were seen as too much of a go getter. Indeed a crazy world!
I have a friend who used to work at TI/Raytheon missile systems back about 12 years ago as a tech writer, and he’d routinely get frustrated beyond words at this kind of thing.
My buddy, being the conscientious, hardworking sort that companies ought to value, would budget his time, work roughly 8 hour days, and turn his deliverables in on time.
Other people in his department would screw around for weeks on end, showing up at 9:30, leaving at 3, and taking 2 hour lunches, and then go into “crunch time” mode for the last couple weeks and make big noise about how tough the project was, how stressed out they were, and how much time they were putting in including all-nighters, etc… ad nauseam.
Then they’d turn in something adequate, and TPTB would somehow overlook my buddy and his work, in favor of Mr. Drama Queen when it came time for raises and promotions because you know, my buddy didn’t pull all-nighters to get the job done.
(never mind that he didn’t pull all nighters because he’s not a total idiot and did the task in the alloted time)
If you’re using Microsoft Word and it’s behaving in unexpected or unusual ways, turn off all of the automatic formatting options and clear all tracked changes. This will fix about 95% of weird formatting issues, in my experience.
For chrissake, don’t use a, b, and c! I use abbreviations - in this table I’d call them bat1, bat2, and bat3. It’s just as short, but it’s easier to read and write because you know which column is coming from which table without having to think “Ok, a is table bigasstable1, …” And a month later when you’re trying to figure out why you’re getting a certain value, it will be a lot easier to decode.
My example:
select a.name, b.name, a.id
from employee a, department b where a.dept = b.dept
versus
select e.name, d.name, e.id from employee e, department d where e.dept = d.dept.
Same number of letters, but you’ll easily read the the third field as employee id.
Corollary: if there’s ten people who are on a schedule, and two who are on a different one, there will be a lot less trouble with this. The problem is when one person who’s not the boss is on a different schedule as everybody else.
There are a small number of original manufacturers for some basic products in the US. You may think you are buying a product that is different but all that has been changed is the labeling. There may be minor specification changes but the craft blend of your favorite item on the store shelf can be identical to the major brand. Costco/Kirkland toilet paper and paper towels are really Georgia Pacific Angel Soft TP and Brawny towels. The vodka is Grey Goose. The machines are never turned off, just the packaging is changed. Same with pet food, tuna, cooking oils, etc.
I used to make pet food and often the same product would go into packaging of competing brands. Only the labels were changed to protect the innocent. Remember that when you walk down the pet food aisle of your local supermarket.
Most of the extra salt and sugar in your food is not added in order to addict people to the product. Some is there because it tastes good, but the majority is added to control what is referred to in food science as “water activity.” The salt and sugar tie up the water that is available for spoilage so that the shelf life is increased and the product can be kept at a higher, more tender moisture, and a lighter packaging. If you wish to avoid added salt and sugar you should make your food out of fresh ingredients. Processed foods have the additions because they are cheap and they work.
Salmon do not return to the stream of their birth, that is a myth. They return to the general watershed or estuary and will spawn in any of the available streams in that area. They do not have a magical ability to find their way home to the exact spot. And having a larger number of returning fish to spawn is not necessarily a great idea either. The spawning beds, called “reds” that the first fish make in the gravel get destroyed by the next group that comes in to spawn. What you end up with in the end is the last group of fish to spawn leaving undisturbed beds and this might not be the most desirable outcome for the future generation.
Same here (not a tech writer – Word geek). I’ve sometimes thought I should start an “ask the Word expert” thread and see what comes of it. . .
While true in some cases, and definitely worth mentioning, it’s not consistent enough to base your purchasing activity by. Unless we had a list…say, from a guy who was on the inside? 
So they’re just a preservative? Way easier to have just said the added salt and sugar is the tastiest available preservative. But your way sounds smarter. Also, I think that while true in many cases, this isn’t true in every case, and shouldn’t be taken as a blanket “fact”.
And this one…may I ask what particular job lended you this secret? Sounds interesting and outdoors-y.
The trick is to do little things that won’t be noticed/traced to you. Open 'er up and give something inside a nice satisfying snap.
A wise elder once told me that 99% of all reports do not get read by management, but that 100% of them must be turned in. So if you have a report due you better get it in on time, but don’t worry if there are errors because there’s a good chance it won’t get read.
The customer is not always right.