It looks like it’s time for this clip:
That’s an interesting one to me because “up” doesn’t necessarily mean north to me. It can, depending on context, but I naturally say “I’m going up the street” when I’m actually going south (or even east or west.) Generally, I do think of as “up” as “south” around here when it comes to directions, but it’s a subliminal thing – I have no idea whether I’m consistent about it. Because I live on the south side of town here in Chicago, the street numbers go up as you head further south, and most of the places I regularly visited growing up were south of me. I would say I’m going “down to the city”, even though that’s northeast of me. That said, I’m probably equally likely to say somebody lives “up” or “down” the street from me no matter the direction, but probably more likely to say up for north on my particular street because it’s a one way going north. Were it the other way, I’d probably say “south.”
So, that’s my long way of saying “up” and “down” don’t have any firm directional associations to me. Others I’ve met from outside the area strongly associate “up” with north and “down” with south; others associate “up” with a direction that indicates towards the higher point in their geography, and “down” with a lower point. I only say all this because my wife sometimes gets confused when I say “up” and I mean “south.” She’s from upstate New York (well, Western New York) and spent a few years in NYC where “uptown” and “downtown” generally align with north-ish and south-ish.
20% off what? The original price or the 30% off price?
For yuks.
The already discounted price, when I worked at Sears.
The difference between vector and raster graphics is a bit more advanced than the difference between left and right.
I edit a lot of lectures, and I also record most of them for the presenters, so we can get segments ruined by background noise or the presenter freezing due to an internet blip rerecorded immediately. However, for some reason people have been largely self recording video segments for an upcoming grant submission. They were not happy to learn that the dog barking in one of their clips can’t be removed because the audio range of dogs barking and human speech almost entirely overlap. I’m a good editor but I can’t pull off miracles, people.
I’m left handed and my sense of direction is so poor it’s awe inspiring. But I haven’t had to think about left/right since first grade.
True, but you’d expect someone who works at Kinko’s and is in charge of printing posters would understand it.
Ah, yes, fond memories of needing the aerial photo of the client’s building for the 4x8 foot banner, and the CEO says “We lost that one. Can’t you just take the one off our web site?” (where it’s 3x4"@72 pixels per inch, of course)
I said “Well, we’ve now gone from pixels per inch to inches per pixel…”
I had designed a logo for one of the divisions of a large hospital, and the head of the division wanted to know how she could change the primary font in the logo. I explained to her that once the design was finalized, the font could never be changed; that’s what makes it a logo. I even converted the font to outlines, so it could not be changed (a normal procedure).
Fortunately, she was replaced by someone more reasonable.
This is not universal. Where I live, red channel markers and lighthouses are on the port side when returning to harbour. So in Europe you would have to remember “red left return”.
New York, New York, a helluva town
The Bronx is up, but the Battery’s down
The people ride in a hole in the groun’
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!
Oh, God, I get this all the time.
I’m not a designer at all, but (like every company) the firm for which I work has its branding. And there are approved typefaces and templates for promotional materials, and the firm has a logo, and there’s a theme that carries through all printed materials.
And every now and then we’ll get some lawyer, or more likely someone in the business development (i.e., marketing) department, who wants to change it a bit, to “make it pop,” make it a bit more, well, whatever they’re thinking of. Or use a different color scheme than the approved scheme.
And they cannot understand, and often get temperamental, when told that they just can’t do that.
“D-D-D-D- Don’t quote me regulations. I co-chaired the committee that reviewed the recommendation to revise the color of the book that regulation’s in… We kept it grey!”
Ugh, this reminds me, branding leadership at my company once changed fonts/colors/logos twice in two years. I let them know what it cost my department in time to rework all the slides and graphics, and then told them to multiply those hours by thousands because mine was a smaller department, and then I multiplied that by some (completely fake, unverifiable*) employee cost to arrive at a Large Final Cost.
I wasn’t remotely the first person to complain to them, but I was the first to actually assign a dollar amount, which they’d never thought about.
‘*’ I mean, most of my folks were salaried, so it was really just extra hours and frictional cost, but whatever, it was a pain in the ass
When you are a salaried employee there is no such thing as “comp time” if you do your job and put in some hours (in the week) you get paid period. You salaried not hourly so there is no requirement for 40 hours a week.
OK I get why ordinary workers who don’t know labor laws blindly go by what their boss incorrectly says but managers should know the rules. But having to explain this to our HR rep? I was surprised you don’t know the basic rules of how exempt and non-exempt work.
I was on a business trip with a new staffer once and found out that he didn’t know what a “service road” was Frontage road - Wikipedia (he didn’t know it by the name “frontage road” either). Not a big deal, but still a little bit of a surprise for me.
Yeah, I didn’t know about these until I visited Houston earlier this year. I mean, there are plenty here in Florida, but I never knew they had a name.
~Max
It’s true that generally speaking , if an exempt employee works any hours in a week, they get paid for the full week - but it’s also true that employers can have whatever policy they want regarding required work hours for exempt employees as long as they don’t involve docking pay. They are free to require exempt employees to work a minimum number of hours per week or per pay period and use PTO for the difference - if they require 40 hours a week, they can require an employee who only works 30 to use 10 hours of PTO. They are free to fire an employee who has exhausted their PTO and only works 30 hours in a particular week, as long as they pay the full salary for the week. An employer is absolutely free to offer paid time off ( comp time) to exempt employees for hours worked beyond the normal workweek.
Employers are also fully within their rights to pile a workload on an exempt employee such that no human being could do it in less than 60 hours every week. Then fire said worker if the work’s not getting done or if there’s any hint of complaint about the arrangements.
I managed Purchasing at a prior job. We hired a new purchasing guy. The first thing I asked him to do was to see how much cost reduction he could negotiate on the “widgets” that cost us the most.
So I gave him a spreadsheet that looked like this:
| Part name | $/unit | Units/year | $/yr |
|---|---|---|---|
| Widget 5 | $3.53 | 162500 | $573,625.00 |
| Widget 2 | $2.63 | 155000 | $407,650.00 |
| Widget 3 | $6.65 | 35000 | $232,750.00 |
| Widget 1 | $14.31 | 1200 | $17,172.00 |
| Widget 4 | $18.12 | 852 | $15,438.24 |
A week later we met to discuss his progress. He had calls in to the vendors who sold us widgets 4 and 1. Those were the only two to whom he had reached out.
I looked at his copy of the spreadsheet, which now looked like this:
| Part name | $/unit | Units/year | $/yr |
|---|---|---|---|
| Widget 4 | $18.12 | 852 | $15,438.24 |
| Widget 1 | $14.31 | 1200 | $17,172.00 |
| Widget 3 | $6.65 | 35000 | $232,750.00 |
| Widget 5 | $3.53 | 162500 | $573,625.00 |
| Widget 2 | $2.63 | 155000 | $407,650.00 |
It took about a half hour to explain that the biggest bang for the buck didn’t come from reducing the cost of something that we use very few of, even though it was the highest cost-per-unit widget.
The biggest bang for the buck was in achieving cost reductions for the things that cost us most each year based on unit cost and annual units used.
He … didn’t last.