Sometimes, upper management is not well enough aware of their employees’ backgrounds that they’ll delegate a task ill-suited to the worker’s experience. In such cases, it’s easier for the employee to accept the new job responsibility than to respectfully refuse it on the basis of being under-qualified. Reasons for the ease of acceptance/difficulty of refusal:…
One of my ongoing projects is to work through end-of-chapter problems in my EE textbooks. The reminiscence of this activity to late nights spent making mentally taxing progress on homework during past school years is obvious, but now the problem solving is accompanied by an ever-present sense of accomplished inconsequence. The feeling is strongest when…
Opinions you have about anything are reinforced each time you share them with another person. Possibly because my working hours are spent deep inside an acronym mating ground, the titles I’ve decided on for the concepts responsible are Repetition Influenced Perspective (RIP) and Combative Human Assailed Stock Market (CHASM). RIP: Leave a prisoner confined to…
My driving instructor raced cars in Germany four decades ago. He teaches a very precision-oriented, methodical, and engineering-friendly approach to vehicle maneuvering known as reference point driving. Rather than be at the mercy of the optical illusions associated with gauging distance by looking at objects through windows and in mirrors, reference point driving uses the…
The characteristics of a person’s body, the fairness of the face they wear, the sound of their voice; while some variance is possible through diet, surgery, and smoking, these physical attributes are largely outside the realm of modification, and they at least partially inform the personality of the person to whom they belong. People run…
As a pedestrian, I find it amusing how impatient drivers will sometimes use their vehicles as vessels for expressing their frustration at having to wait for me to cross the street. Mostly, this happens with drivers who are going to be making a right turn, as illustrated in the picture below, where the blue line…
I’ll always be apprehensive about the nature of reality and the universe in general, but within this life my greatest fear is that I’m becoming a cold person due to lack of meaningful human contact. My meager warmth is sustained from one day to the next, as Oliver with his ration of porridge, by the…
If you go very long without speaking to anyone, only observing people speaking to each other, you’re likely to begin experiencing a bizarre sensation of isolation. It’s bizarre for its contradiction: feeling alone and invisible despite all the people around you. It’s like something out of The Martian Chronicles. The other day I was reassured…
I went to the writing center on campus and printed Bawd Blue Cohosh, but was dissatisfied with the results. It was readable, but not without some difficulty. The imprecision of the printer yielded blurred words. Simply throwing all the paper away seemed a wasteful and uncreative solution, so I walked across to the library, climbed…
Unless there is animosity between them, coworkers who happen to see each other by chance at the store, on the street, or elsewhere other than their workplace, will be inclined to smile. I think there are two things happening. 1. Identifying a familiar face from among the faces of countless strangers who populate a person’s…
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