Open Door Policy

Okay, time for a light hearted entry- This one is more for the guys.

I'm wanting to talk about basic toilet etiquette. When you work in an office, there are always a cubical of toilets. All with doors. Good working doors.

However, some guys still think its okay to just walk in, leave the door open, do their business while standing and finish up, turn and walk out unobstructed and leave.

In principal this is fine because all the sensitive details are facing away from the gaping door. And 9 times out of 10 people know your in there.

However the whole thing becomes very tricky in situations known as "accidental walk in's"

It's happened to us all:
- You decide that its time to go
- You walk into the bathroom select a cubical at random and head for it
- You walk in
- You look up from the floor which you've been staring at to realise, in horror, that there is someone already in here.

It all happens very quickly, but for a second this is all you are thinking:

"There are twice as many people in this cubical than what there should be, and one of us has his pants down. Maybe if I close my eyes he won't see me."

Now if you lucky you can bolt out of there before there are any awkward moments. Last thing you want is for him to turn around. The last thing.
If you are unlucky, in your haste to turn around you slip end up face down in a cubical with a work colleague. Bad news.

So folks, moral of the story is close the door, that way everyone stays innocent.

Back in my day

I love old people.

With a sense of achievement they tell you they called and left a message on your VHS player. And of course they still get frustrated when they think the phones engaged because we're on the internet.

But what's even better than old people that fumble with technology is middle-aged adults who just straight up suck.

Working in the technology industry I've seen plenty of mind-benders.

These people make browsing the internet look as complicated as diffusing a bomb.

These peoples fingers have only just developed enough speed and strength to double click in the last few years.

These are the type of people that leave a faceprint on your digi cam because they're still trying to look through the viewfinder. You know the ones.

Anyway, when I see these people floundering I can't help but think "Will I be like this one day?"

I wonder if the technology of the future will render me helpless?

I started to think..

At some stage for these middle agers, the world was manageable. Letters, Newspapers, Telephones, Wristwatches, Telegrams. It was a world they understood and it was a world that to a certain degree worked.

But it changed, and it changed fast. eMail, RSS feeds, internet, smartphones, bluetooth, skype, megapixels.

There were two types of people,

- The people who chose to learn and make the effort to keep up

- The people who thought, the way I do things works why would I change? I don't need email anyway.

Almost without fail, it's the people who decided that they didn't need to change that are the ones struggling now when they realise that change gets to a point where it becomes non-optional.

I came to this conclusion.

As long as I continue to be open to new ways of doing things, not bagging new ideas and technology, but instead giving everything a go, then hopefully I'll stay ahead of the wave.

Twitter is a great example, if I'd followed my gut feeling I would have dismissed it as a pointless, useless technology. One that I could live without.

But against those feelings I got involved, and now it's something that I use all the time.(Follow me it will do wonders for my selfesteem www.twitter.com/jiwanrai)

What will come next? After facebook, after twitter, after tumblr, and what will your response be?

- Choose to learn and keep up? or

- Not bother with them, The way I do things works for me...

Procrasti-pedia

I used to take hyperlinks for granted.

That was before I stumbled across a machine that would reinvigorate my passion for link clicking, Wikipedia.

Like a can of Pringles, once you get started it can be hard to stop.

How often have I innocently looked up the definition of a long word (like Promulgation) and found myself hours later, reading up on the Greek philosophy.

Okay, so It's not like encyclopedias (these came before Wikipedia) haven't been around forever. So why then is there this sudden lust for knowledge or pseudo-enjoyment of scrolling through pages of information?

I'd hazard to say that the leading cause of wikipediaitis is procrastination.

Nothing beats doing work like not doing work.

Almost subconsciously we fall into infinite loops of wiki-surfing, fooled by the feeling of learning that we are actually being productive.

My prediction on the secondary reason for wikipediaitis is because we like having dumb facts to talk about. The good old "Did you know..." is a great convo starter, well at least in the I.T industry where new useless information is like a sweet perfume.

If I want to appear smarter than I really am, I'll just plug into Wikipedia for a quick top up of intellectual info then unleash on the uneducated masses.

Of course it has it's dangers, we've all heard the warnings about accuracy and misinformation, with University's not accepting Wikipedia as a valid reference for research.

But who cares?

If we had to wait for validated, approved and agreed information on everything, we'd be a bunch of waiting people, always waiting for things.

Of course there is great value in having multiple sources of information, and coming to our own conclusions. But you've got to start somewhere right?

Do you think we need to be more careful about not being wiki-washed?

eFail

...and send. wait....

NO! DONT SEND! UNDO UNDO! CONTROL Z!

We've all had those moment right. I call them efails, that is to say - electronic fails.

Sending an email to the wrong person, posting something in the wrong place, predictive text misinterpretations to dialing the wrong number are all well inside the scope of efailure.

They happen all the time, to the most unsuspecting people causing the most unexpected and brilliant results.

We've all heard the stories, here a links to a few email examples:

http://pcworld.about.com/news/Apr292002id93283.htm

But my worst ever electronic moment was not so long ago. Let me fill you in...

I had just scored my first ever girlfriend (yes, not so long ago), and this was to be my first ever text contact as her boyfriend.

Time for operation 'smooth'. So I punched out a heart-melting message starting with "Hey girlfriend!" and some other fluffy candy floss like prose.

Checked it once, checked it twice, then confidently sent it

... to one of my best guy mates.

As if teleported into the sahara, I instantaneously broke out in a cold sweat.

Tapping through to my sent items, I was hoping that maybe I'd just been seeing things.

I had been seeing things, unfortunately the things I had been seeing were correct.

I didn't know what to do with myself although there was a balcony that was suddenly looking pretty tempting.

In the end I got the message to the right person, and that person ended up being my wife, and the lucky guy who received the misdirected text ended up asking me to be his best man.

So maybe failures aren't so bad after all, although resonably uncomfortable at the time.

What are your stories?

Your Attention Please

Okay, let's be honest.

When we see a page filled with text the first thing that comes to mind is "How can I avoid reading this?" often accompanied with a dull aching sensation around the heart region.

On who can we blame this disposition? Obviously not ourselves, because we are all innocent victims of society.... right?

Truth be told, the reason I ask is because someone suggested to me that my blogs were a bit on the lengthy side.

So after we'd finished our fist fight and cleaned up some of the more serious wounds, I came to the realisation that perhaps they were right.

Why is it that the virtue of concentration is rapidly evaporating from our culture? I even struggle with two-part text messages, let alone encyclopedic blog entries. It's not uncommon for my mind to wander off while speaking with someone, and don't get me started on con-calls. (http://jiwanrai.blogspot.com/2010/02/state-your-name-after-tone.html)

Have we been conditioned to think and process in short messages? Since using twitter, I've started to think and experience in 160 character thoughts.
And if I have to click the "more" button on someones Facebook I think thoughts like "Why didn't they just publish a novel instead"

Maybe if we spent more time concentrating on a few things, we'd learn a whole lot more than just skimming through 100 of them!

Now that I'm in my 7th paragraph I realise I've already lost about 80% of my readers, so to you who are left -

Thank-you and congratulations.

Feeling Nosey

What ever happened to red nose day?

Allow me to delve into my childhood memories...

I still vividly remember the teacher at school handing out transparent plastic packages to each of us who signed up. It was an exciting time, but so was most of childhood really.

Each of us would eagerly unwrap the plastic packaging and pull out a impeccably sculpted piece of plastic that would be the home for our childhood noses for an entire day.

I still remember the sweet aroma of mass produced plastic greeting my nostrils as I attached the red nose to my face.

I also remember the condensation. Let's just say sharing noses was a no-no.

While I clearly remember the elation of looking like a clown for the day, I had to do some serious racking to recall exactly what the actual reason behind Red Nose day was.

Once I realised that my brain was not proving to be good reference material, I turned to my friend - the Internet (I have the Internet installed on my computer).

Red Nose Day in New Zealand (not to be confused with the British and American version) was all about raising awareness of Cot Death and funding for Cot Death research. The technical term for Cot Death is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or SIDS, of which there still seems to be a great deal of uncertainty as to the cause.

As to when or why Red Nose day got the boot? I'm not sure, if anyone can enlighten us then by all means do so.

I'm not sure how Red Nose Day would go down with our new generation of children.

I'd imagine before it even got to the kids you'd have health and safety groups ranting about blocking airways, you'd have environmentalists complaining about plastic waste and there would be people claiming that red noses were racist.

Not like the good old days when OSH didn't exist and we were free to jump off large playground and break bones as we pleased, the days where we could still put skyrockets in a jar and set them off, having to guess which direction they would fire off into.

No no, these are much safer times. No dangerous playgrounds, no skyrockets, and certainly no red plastic nasal blocking accessories.

Maybe the next red nose day will be done via facebook and iPhone apps. Who Nose?

Fine By Me

Have you ever received an involuntary donation form from our friends at the Auckland City Council?

They are usually found most conspicuously placed underneath your front windscreen wiper blade, neatly folded like a gift waiting to be opened. Only difference being that if you don't like it, you can't re-gift it to your Nana next Christmas.

We've all felt the sting of the parking ticket, and no matter how in the wrong you are (i.e. parking in a loading zone), you can't help but feel victimised.

In my early years as an Auckland City parker I was convinced that the parking wardens would hide in the bushes with stopwatches, eagerly waiting for my time to expire. I could see them (in my imagination) bounding across the road, with a crazed maniacal expression, madly punching numbers into their PDAs and triumphantly smirking as they heard the sound of my windscreen wiper slapping back against the glass.

I soon worked this out - if its possible to get a parking ticket (i.e. your time has expired by even as much as a minute), then you most likely will.

I collected over 20 donation forms in my first year of city employment, coming to a crescendo on that fateful day that I got multi-owned. I'm talking more than one in the space of 2 hours.

The first was like a punch to the guts, painful but tolerable. But the second was like a kick to the jewels of India.

Who could I trust now? I looked around, but couldn't see any wardens. I checked the bush, but there was no sign of them, or their stopwatches. Maybe they were undercover? Disguised as lampposts or something...

Either way, I've written about as many letters to the Auckland City Council as I have received tickets. In fact I think I've developed a mild case of RSI because of it.

While the outcome may not be certain, one thing definitely is - It'll take about 10 years before you get a reply. They draw out the process, like some form of mental torture, trying to break your spirit, until you think "oh what the heck, I'll just pay it".

BUT NOT SO! I always wait, because I know how to play the game. I've now avoided close to $500 worth of (possibly) unjustified infringements.

It's a jungle out there folks, but if you get tangled don't give in.

Rung Out

I work in an open plan office. While it's always a joy to look around the room and marvel at everyone hunched over laptop computers, there is a down side.

Mobile phones. When you put 200 people in a (large) room, each with a mobile device loaded with some of the most heinous tunes known to man, all during a working day, the odds are against you.

If your phone is ringing - everyone knows about it.

When I first started at this job, everyone had the same phone issued to them. Each phone had a staggering number of ring-tone options - 3.

I work at a technology company, however most employees can't read small text (i.e. a mobile screen)by virtue of the fact that they have burnt out their retinas by staring at screens all day.

The net result was that 90% of employees left the default ring tone on their phone.

Every time someones phone went off, at least 3 people in close proximity would scramble for their phone. Now you can't pay for this type of entertainment.

But those were the good days. Things have changed, people have moved on, technology waits for no man.

Somewhere along the way, people figured out that they could load their own music or ringtones onto their phones. And like small children everyone updated their phones with these new, hip, slamming tunes.

Now we have Coldplay going off every 10 minutes, TV Show themes being blasted from every angle, The Red Hot Chili Peppers gracing the airwaves, not to mention all forms of techno and house music. It's like being at the big day out, except you're inside, and there are no queues for the girls toilets.

The very worst thing that has happened is this. Someone has loaded a soundclip of them saying their name, which repeats painfully until the phone is answered (or smashed into pieces by fellow employees). "Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane... Hello this is Jane". In the words of my teenage companions - OMG.

I personally have opted for the office friendly traditional phone ring, no techno, no pop music, no mind-bending sound clips, just plain, tried and true ringing.

Only 50 CC's are tasting like these.

Scooting is one of the best things that has ever happened to me... when it comes to driving in Auckland City that is.

Anyone who's had the displeasure of getting behind the wheel in the city of snails can tell you that a simple commute around town takes you one step closer to a mental breakdown. Most of the problems seen on the road are completely attributable to driver incompetence.

The problem is, when you are in the drivers seat the best you can do is sit back and watch it all unfold in front of you. Just to name a few:

- People who wait about 20 seconds before taking off at a green light (by which time the light is amber)

- People who insist on making a U turn on main roads in peak hour traffic.

- People who drive 35 in 50.

- People who slam on their brakes straight after a round about because someone vaguely looks as though they are going to use the pedestrian crossing.

- People who slow down as they approach a green light? (Still don't understand this..)

- People who swerve into the middle of the lane, then slow down to basically stopped before they turn into their side street.

Obviously this is the tip of a titanic sinking iceberg...

But frustration is transformed into entertainment the moment you jump on the scooter.

With a stealthy capability to sneak in and around traffic, and the peak-hour defeating ability to use the bus lane, the world of scooting is one of blissful freedom.

Suddenly all those people that were holding you up, causing you grief, ruining your flow become objects of amusement as you glide on by them.

Sure, it has it's downs. Like when people drive into you.
But arms and legs grow back eventually, and it's a small price to pay for the emotional benefits.

If peak hour traffic is getting you down, I suggest investing in 50cc's of life-giving freedom.

Blogless in Mt Roskill

It's been silent in cyberspace lately...

The Facebook guilt I spoke of in one of my opening blogs has now spread into the pages of blogging.

Every time I hear about a blog, I remember the one I haven't updated in over a week.
As if trying to please an unseen audience, I feel them jeering at me now like I'm a struggling stand-up comedian.

But the show will go on. Sure life has been busy, but there is plenty to write about!

So this is a message of hope to those who have lost it on my behalf. There are more unwritten chapters lurking about.

Stay tuned....