I’m a criminal defense attorney, and there’s two things that are obvious to me which others may not know:
If you are arrested and brought to a police station and put into an empty room, you are almost certainly being recorded, and the law says that you have no expectation of privacy. (In other words, don’t mumble that you killed her, as one of my clients did). All jail calls are recorded, too - don’t talk about your case on the phone (“I should have just called a cab at the bar!” - No!!)
The reason that it is recommended that you always have a lawyer with you when you are being questioned is because lawyers understand that agreeing to answer any one question does not obligate you to answer any other question, and that you can decide to stop answering questions at any time. That’s it, really. We don’t otherwise have magic powers over interrogators.
What about you? What have you come to learn or understand by virtue of your job/career that us other people might not realize or have considered?
What causes software bugs; non-coders seem to assume it is typos, when more commonly it’s a situation that was overlooked when designing the system, or some kind of logical flaw. Typos are caught by the compiler (although bugs where the wrong variable is used do happen).
Learning a programming language is nothing like learning a spoken language.
Picture a healthy forest… Picture how far apart the trees are (10’ - 20’)…
Any trees closer then that either had to be removed, or were killed by many years of intense competition that weakened all the tree involved. Your few acres of 8 ft tall saplings at 1’ spacing are hurting more than helping.
Produce PLU codes are universal in the grocery industry, and if you can memorize the big ones - 4011 for bananas, 4012 for naval oranges, 4093 for yellow onions, 4065 for green bell peppers, 4061 for iceberg lettuce, etc. - it’ll be a lot easier to deal with the self-checkout machine at any store.
-A lawyer’s skills are in not so much in knowing the law as it’s knowing what and where to look something up and understanding it’s meaning as relates to your case. It’s very likely that at the first meeting I have no idea about what the law is on your case.
-The amount of time I deal with you directly or the volume of written stuff I produce for you has no relation with the time I spent on it. The simple “yes” or “no” I gave you on reply to your email query? Yeah, I spent several days in figuring out both the yes or no part and whether I needed to include a provision. The 200 page document you got? I had a template and just added your details and the date.
-Chances are that a mistaken which is causing is causing us problems was made months or even years ago, by someone else.
Which is why I am being so careful, I don’t want my mistake to haunt today’s first graders when they become lawyers and deal with this case.
I know when you are lying to me. It’s amusing/annoying. Nothing you can say is going to be new to me. Tell me and maybe we can deal with it.
Yes, you are subject to host nation law and the host nation can and will put your ass in their prison.
Yes, the Bill of Rights applies to the military too.
Next career involves linguistics:
3. No language is “the best for love”.
4. No language is “the best for science”.
5. There is no such thing as “untranslatable”. Just because one language might use one word to express a concept, it does not mean that another language using a phrase to express the same concept makes the word untranslatable.
You have to respect the chemicals. You just have to. Under no circumstances will they respect you. They will just do what they do. The situation is similar with electricity. Follow the rules & everything will be fine. If you don’t follow the rules, you can expect that the situation will not be fine.
Just yesterday, I caught one of my operators […] long story. I always end these situations with, “You know that I love you… but, you just can’t do these things. It won’t end well.”