One specific example of this I realized recently: I was applying for a job, and was about to attach a file named “resume.pdf”. Which is partly descriptive, of course, but how many others are doing the same thing? So I put my name in the filename, too.
Yeah, a lot of HR departments probably have software that automatically renames everything and sorts it all out neatly into sudirectories, and in that case, it won’t make any difference. But at least some of the time, it’s going to be just one person doing it by hand, and I want to make things easier on that person.
Another thing to try is to turn on hidden characters (paragraph marks, spaces, and such), copy all of the document but the very last paragraph mark, and paste it into a new document. This is known as a “maggie” (named after the editor who popularized, but did not invent, the maneuver). If there are section breaks in the doc, you must do the same thing for each section (copy each section, omitting the last paragraph mark, and paste). It’s a Hail Mary move, but it often works.
If you are bidding on a Federal contract as a sub-contractor, and the Prime contractor has an expensive list of esoteric Insurance Riders and Additional Insured cites and Subrogation waiver, etc. that they are demanding of you: Those are all allowable expenses under the FAR, and you can list them separately so as not to have them counted against you in the pricing war. Never roll your insurance costs into your overall OverHead rate.
Always inflate you OH rate by 3% on the first bid you send in. When they start to haggle, offer to lower it if they leave the rest of your carefully built pricing tables alone. You lose nothing, and the Prime’s purchasing agent (or Subk Admin) ooks like a genius.
Never assume that the word of the Program Manager means anything. In large corporations, the SOX roles prevent the purchaser and the requester on any task be separate people. Find out who has the purchasing arrant and keep that person informed at every stage of the discussion.
The Subcontracts Administrator is your friend. We will sometimes even hurt our own careers to get you paid on time, or force a PM to use discretionary funds to cover the work you performed at their request. We also decide who goes on the list for the next RFP we send out. . .
Always send in a bid. If you don’t have time to price it properly, price it outrageously, and let the Subk Admin know why. They need three bid in order to achieve “competition” and will be relieved to see anything come back. (Just warn them so they don’t assume you’re lazy.)
People screaming at me about things completely out of my control or leagues above my pay grade always piss me off. Ok, you’re angry about something. I CAN’T CHANGE OR FIX IT. Sure, I’ll listen to you vent, and maybe we’ll both be happy in the end. But I swear to god if you make it personally about me - and refuse to listen to me telling you it isn’t about me - neither of us is going to have a fun day. Yes, that’s a personal choice on my end. Some people can put up with it. I can listen to you scream about other things all day long with a smile. You start insulting me and blaming me for our company’s policies, you can go fuck yourself.
If you use Word and use a lot of common pieces of text in your emails, for Og’s sake, use QuickParts. I send the same emails over and over with just a change of the name and a few details. For example of something I send 1-20 times a day;
Hi ManagerName,
As RequestorName’s manager, we need your approval on this request.
Thanks,
Drop that into the email with a few keystrokes, replace ManagerName with the manager’s name and RequestorName with the person who made the request and done. Hell, even if they give me their information in 60 point pink Comic Sans, I can copy it, then double click on the replacement word above (to highlight it), right click on it and Paste [A], which keeps MY formatting and font. I’ve got about 25-30 parts ready for about everything I do. And if I forget to replace one of the fields above, it still has a default value, even if it looks a bit odd.
When I started here, they had 40 emails in Drafts and they expected you to copy/paste them into your own email, sometimes 30 times a day on a really busy day. Now we have like 15 drafts saved only to maintain a common format when things change. My team lead looked things over and said last week that he didn’t want us using quick parts because then if things changed we’d be using the wrong format. I showed him how quickly I can change and save my quick parts, how much time it saved me to use them, and why my co-worker and I had subtly different formats (so we’d recognize who owned them instantly). Sold!
I always name my attachments something like Smith_Resume, Smith_Cover_Letter, etc. I would hate to lose out on a job because of an unorganized person handling the paperwork. I also think it could give you a point or two by making the person’s life easier.
I like this suggestion, not so I can get more coffee; but because I drink my coffee without a lid; and that gives a little slosh room.
As a person who writes quite a bit in Word; if I were to list 1 favorite tip, it’d be <shift>F7 which opens up a thesaurus on the word where your cursor is located.
It’s funny, in my office it’s not that way at all. In my office a colleague of mine is the first one in the office in the morning. He’s also the first one to leave in the afternoon. The perception is that he gets here WAY earlier than everyone else. I’m usually the 2nd one in, in the mornings; but occasionally get here first. It doesn’t matter though because the office perception is that my colleague arrived first, and very early; and that I just arrived; right before the next person in the office.
I have two tips to share.
Don’t report problems to superiors without a possible resolutions or additional information to indicate you’re taking responsibility for the problem.
bad: Boss, the databases didn’t backup last night.
good: Boss, the databases didn’t backup last night. I noticed the error log said it was a storage allocation error. I’ve opened a ticket with the storage team to look at. I’ll keep you apprised.
I’m surprised at how many times I receive emails similar to the bad example above. I want to reply back and say: “OK, What do you want ME to do about it?” Sometimes I want to yell at subordinates and tell them to take some initiative!
Tip #2. Today is the first time I’ve used the Multi-Quote feature on these boards. It’s Amazing! When reading a thread, where you want to comment on several posts, you can mark those posts by clicking quotation mark button on the right hand side of the post; when you’re done click on the reply button; and all of the previously highlighted posts are placed in the reply window for you.
If you’re in a call menu and the company, in an effort to be more humanizing, tells you to “say” your selection, you can just press the number corresponding to the order the options were given so you don’t feel like an idiot talking to a machine.
Radian or Degree mode? Is your exponent expression in parentheses? Did you round Syntax error? Did you use the minus sign instead of the negative sign? Don’t just quit. Goto. Webwork? Does it specify sig figs, digits to round to, or as a fraction?
I worked for about 30 years for a company that made both pet food flavors, and trout and salmon feed for the state and federal hatchery system. I worked in management where we dealt with a lot of customer input and research. I also did feed formulation work which lead to the part about salt, sugar, and water activity.
So I dealt with a lot of hatchery people, reports, input. The salmon returning to the general area and not the exact stream comes from the information in the wire tags that are inserted into hatchery fish before release.
Salmon smolts have a little piece of wire shot into their nose before they are released. The adipose fin is also clipped to let sport fishermen know if they are allowed to keep the fish, or it must be released if it has a full adipose fin, because it is wild.
The little, and it is little, wire tag is coded with information about the fish. Something like a bar code etched into wire. The Fish & Wildlife people recover these tags from fish that do return to the hatchery where they were released. They also walk along the other streams in the area with a metal detector and cut the nose off of other salmon that have spawned naturally in streams that are never stocked at all.
They found that many of these newly “wild” fish are just wrong-way hatchery fish that were released elsewhere. Which leads into the politically and emotionally charged issue of are there really any wild salmon left in the Columbia or are we protecting 2nd, 3rd generation hatchery wrong-ways, or some combination.
It was interesting work but I am no longer in that industry.
I wanted to thank you for the quote advice - I was wondering how to do that for a while now without actually having the interest to look into it! The only shame is, I wish I could show you my new mastery of it with this quoting, but there’s nothing left to quote, folks!
In a restaurant or chain store, a member of management can reduce a price by up to 20% without having to file a report or justify their action. (Actual number may vary, but that’s common).
So if you close to being able to afford something, but can’t quite, it doesn’t hurt to ask. If you are nice about it and the manager doesn’t have anything going on, it’s worth a try.
Do NOT take this as advice to haggle over everything all the time no matter how long the line is.
For God’s sake, make “reply to all” hard to click on in your email program. If you can remove it completely from your banner/ribbon/whatever do it. You need to have “reply to all” set so you have to drop down a menu, find a sub-menu then click on it.
Oh, God I’ve seen so many careers ruined by someone clicking on “reply to all”.
And when you select “Command wide” or “Business Wide” or “Whole Universe of People I work With” email accounts to send an email to, slap yourself and delete the message unless you are a. The Boss, b. Head of HR c. Head of Training.
Any letter/spreadsheet/file that contains personnel/medical/SSAN information should be in appropriately secured / passworded/ limited access locations.
And who are the idiots that set up passworded access that can be bypassed by clicking "Cancel’ over and over until you have access to files. Do you really mean to password it? Or is it just set up that way?
I need to send my resume several times a month. I keep the filename in the format NavaOct13: my name so it’s easy for recruiters to locate, month/year so I can look at the filename and see whether it’s a recent one or old enough to toss. Additional cryptic lettering helps identify other information: NavaOct13T would be one for a translation job, NavaOct13QC would be for a Quality job at a company whose name begins by C.
One more: Any report or presentation you prepare at work, put your name, date and file location somewhere (obviously unobtrusively; small text in a footer works for me). You’ll be glad you did. Trust me on this.
The sysadmin is bored. Bored bored bored bored bored. He’ll do anything you ask, provided it gives him a iota of entertainment.
Also : just because that lazy fat fuck isn’t ostensibly doing anything much of the time, doesn’t mean he’s not indispensible to the good running of the company. Fire at your own (extensive) risk.
You can attach a thermite grenade to the front of a claymore mine with electrical tape.
[/QUOTE]
I used it against VietCong and members of the North Vietnam Army. Black or dark green electrical tape is less likely to be seen in natural foliage than silver/gray duct tape. And at that time, duct tape was only available in silver/gray. Remember the OT? It did say “Jobs, Past and Present”.
And while I’m at it:
When riding in the back of a UH-1D, hold your rifle between your knees with the muzzle down.
Tape a battle dressing in it’s package to one of the suspender straps in front.
Take the c-ration cans out of the box they came in and stuff them in tube socks. That way they don’t rattle and clink together.
If you find something you can use as a wick, you can burn the oil on top of the peanut butter you get in c-rations as an oil lamp. You can’t read by its light or boil water with it, but it’s handy for drying out a pair of damp socks.
Handy things you can keep in your helmet band: a spare magazine loading tool, a spare grenade pin, and safety pins.
If you need to book a hotel room, it’s best to do it either directly through the property or through their brand website. Book through third parties at your own risk–it’s a huge pain in the ass if you need to change anything about your reservation. *Especially *if it’s prepaid. Most of them are prepaid.
And do not do not do not ever use Expedia. They suck harder than most third party reservation sites. They actively go out of their way to waste everyone’s time and their customer service is horrible. I cannot tell you how many people I deal withe every week who get pissed off at Expedia because they can’t change, cancel or fix mistakes on their reservation.