Mine combines both – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
Wrong both ways. It’s Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.
Keep copies of EVERYTHING! It will often save you time and occasionally save your ass.
As soon as my partner is up in the air on an airplane, one of the servers will fail in some way. By the time he is on the ground, the problem will have been resolved. If he’s just sitting in his chair in front of the computer, not minding the servers at all, they will work just fine.
Everybody surfs.
Don’t call attention to it.
My job entails not only working with my own client, but their direct customer as well.
If client has lied to customer and customer is upset, I must make client look good no matter what…even if he is blaming his error or dishonesty on me.
I frequently need information or to obtain a legal document from someone else. The more important said information or document is, the more likely it is that the person who has it will be new, cranky, or just plain stupid and will make my life a living hell.
Third law of job dynamics: The amount of money I make on a transaction will invariably be inversely proportional to the amount of time, effort, blood/sweat/tears I have put in to it.
Special Seasonal Rule for my First Christmas Here:
In addition to the regular Secret Santa program, everyone will bring in some small, nice gift for all their coworkers. Well, everyone but me, this year.
You can do something differently from the way you were told to, but it had better work. If it doesn’t, it’s your ass.
The sales guys don’t care if the product works - only whether or not they can beat the competitors’ prices. Don’t be afraid to tell them that something won’t work. Better you tell them now than the customer telling them next year.
Question everything. I don’t care how highly regarded the author of a reference work is – check the facts, the footnotes, the endnotes, and even look under his or her cat for any info they’ve forgotten to plug into their summarisation.
Everyone is fallible.
Boss: “did you see what happened?”
Workers: “I know nothing.”
Answering the phone after 4:00 will only cause you misery. And no one is to tell the customers that we have caller ID.
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Never, ever, ask for a raise. If you want more money, you must ask for a “pay adjustment.”
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Everything’s “expenseable,” except for anything you submit.
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Our client’s employees will break their equipment on a Holiday so they won’t have to work, necessitating a technician to make an on-site service call. On the Holiday.
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The client with equipment that “won’t calibrate” all day long will wait until midnight to call a technician, necessitating a 2:00 AM service call, wherein the equipment will either calibrate for the technician on the first try, or need a part that you can’t order until 7:30 AM when Parts Support opens, and the client screams at you.
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The client that wants a service technician on-site at 6:00 AM for a 10 minute job invariably won’t actually need said technician’s help until 6:00 PM that evening.
5b. The 10 minute job turns into a 10 hour job, requiring Tech and Parts Support, which closed at 6:00 PM.
- The client that has signed up for regular, periodic inspections of their equipment will still never know why you’re there when you arrive, and want you to come back later.
6b. When you come back later, they angrily demand to know why you weren’t there earlier.
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The client will invariably ask you to servicve equipment your company doesn’t even make, sell, or support. And then get huffy when you can’t or won’t.
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The dispatcher that sends you on a service call will nonetheless call you up and want to know where you are.
8b. The dispatcher that sends you on a service call 30 miles away will nonetheless call you up five minutes later wanting to know why you aren’t on-site yet, even though you told him the first time it’d take 30 to 45 minutes or more to get there.
8c. The dispatchers will never answer the phone when you need them.
- All after-hours Service Calls take place outside, in the weather, in total darkness, and require special tools and parts which you don’t have, or even stock.
My company: If you have food to put in the refrigerator, there’s no room. If you want something to eat, the refrigerator’s empty.
My profession (technical writing):
[ol]
[li]If you do n edits to a document, it needed n+1.[/li][li]The last revision comes in 1 minute after you published the book.[/li][li]If a non-writer edits your text for grammar, the edit is wrong. Conversely, the[/li]same reviewer misses at least one grammar mistake.
[li]Single-sourcing is the future, and it’s corollary: Single-sourcing is not the future. [/li][li]Schroedinger’s Law of Help Authoring Tools: Robohelp is neither dead nor not dead.[/li][li]If you distribute a document to n reviewers, then n/3 reviewers will return it without comments, 2**n*/3 - 1 will return it a day before the deadline, and the 1 remaining reviewer will return it a day after the deadline, and have the most changes.[/li][li]FrameMaker will not crash until you have completed exactly 50%+1 of the necessary changes.[/li][li]If a document is in really bad shape, it was written in MS Word. Without using styles.[/li][/ol]
:rolleyes:
Look everything up first. It’s not that people deliberately lie, just that their perception of things can and often does differ greatly from reality.
If you submit a proof to a customer, it will invariably come back with either new changes, or reversing changes made on the last proof.
Always leave small imperfections in all you design to distract the customer so the customer may correct them and feel as if they’ve contributed, otherwise, they’ll dismantle and destroy all your hard work to make it theirs.
C.Y.A. at all times.
LiQUiDBuD
For teaching:
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Don’t fight the new paradigm. Just roll with it and wait it out. I’ve seen “Standardized Testing” 3 times so far. “Authentic Assessment” is just around the corner.
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Corrolary to #1 - For every EdD, there is an equal and opposite EdD.
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The worst parents are teacher parents. Conversely, so are the best parents.
There will be technical difficulties on press day, approximately one hour before the paper goes to the press. Somebody will need to reboot. There will be swearing and frantic phone calls to IT, who have all mysteriously vanished. The problem will be a font conflict.
Freelancers will send their manuscripts late: Not late enough to warrant a phone call and cussing out, but late enough for the editor to put in OT to get things in shape. They will blame it on technical difficulties.
From a corporate travel guru…
1-People have no idea of the cost of their travel until they’re paying for it out-of-pocket. That is, they’ve never worried how much they spend when the company is paying for it. But, come time to book their own vacation… and they all of a sudden have a budget that’s unreasonably low.
2-If the phone rings at 5 minutes before the time I walk out of the door, it’ll be our company’s legal counsel wanting to “look at some options” about travel he “may or may not” make. Invariably, this will take the better part of a half-hour.
2b-Legal counsel seems put-off that this action is going to take more than five minutes because, it seems, his quitting time is the same as mine.
2c-Legal will see no humor in me asking if he has an alarm that screams “CALL GRIZZ” at T-minus-five-minutes.
3-If a client says “that’s a good price” to a quote I’ve given, and yet fails to have the tickets issued today; the fare WILL increase by the time he calls back to book it.
4-Since the advent of easier access to information over the internet, people have found that the easiest way to annoy a travel professional is to follow the next three steps.
a-Claim that information I give is incorrect (fares too high, hotel sold out, etc)
b-Tell me that you’ll research it yourself.
c-Return a few days later and say “You know what?.. you were RIGHT!”
5-Refuse to book vacation travel. and NEVER book for family and friends. No matter how good you are, they’ll whine that the price is too high, or that’s too far from the theme park, or the rental car company won’t give them ‘points’ on their credit card.
These aren’t strictly unwritten because they became so popular we did eventually decide to write them down, but…
Couple of jobs back I used to run a large mailroom. We had the “Bill Paxton” clause, which guaranteed delivery of any item unless a disaster as befalls Bill Paxton in any of his films should strike - e.g. mailvan hits and iceberg, is attacked by acid-blooded alien monsters, carried off along with cows in runaway tornado. These things, or their metaphorical equivalents, will happen.
We had that in writing beside the mailroom door.
We aso had the “wrath-of-Insane-O-Man” clause. Insane-O-Man was this courier van driver who was prone to flipping out at the slightest of infractions on a consignementnote (e.g. written in blue pen) and would storm out of the building shouting vile oaths. if a parcel incurred the wrath of Insane-O-Man, we were not liable for it’s non-delivery. And you will incur the wrath of Insane-O-Man.
We had that in writing just inside the mailroom door. This is because we didn’t Insane-O-Man to see it, as deliberately provoking Insane-O-Man violated our non-liability
and the third clause was the “Acts of God notwithstanding clause” which usually covered any other event or failure not covered by the previous two clauses. Because sh*t happens, you know.
mm
More I&TS rules:
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When you go out to fix one person’s computer, as you leave, someone else in the office will being a sentence with "As long as you’re here, can you . . . . "
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If you ask someone if they’ve done something, they will always say “yes.” (“Did you reboot your computer?” “Yes.”)
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People do not know the difference between a slash and a backslash. If you tell them, “the backslash” is the key just above the Enter Key, an appreciable percentage will still press the slash.
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People will click on any attachment. You could spread a virus with an e-mail saying, “Click on this attachement to infect your computer and all of your friends’,”
4a. People will also click on any IM link.
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People believe the “From:” field of an e-mail is always the actual sender. It a virus goes around saying their e-mail account is being cancelled, they will flame you for cancelling their account like that.
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People are proud to say, “I’m a computer illiterate.”
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Software and hardware that users want in classrooms and which “doesn’t require I&TS support” will require more I&TS support time than anything else.
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People will resent any attempt on the part of I&TS to manage their computers and will insist on being administrators. However, if they have problems because of this, it is up to I&TS to bail them out.
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If it’s attached to the computer, I&TS is responsible for any problems. This is even if the device has its own support. For instance, people install Blackberries. When the e-mail isn’t forwarded, it’s up to I&TS (which has no Blackberries) to solve the problem, even with the issue is clearly with their phone provider.