Posts by B Jones
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Anyone who's worked retail at a certain time of year is likely to have issues with Christmas music. Someone did a horrific 90s boy band version of I'll be home for Christmas that was on high rotate in the mall I worked in. I'd pay to never have hear that again. That and Mariah Carey.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to jungle pickle,
Joe advisor is left to take care of it and is probably using Word to prepare the BIM and only knows how to "Save as PDF". Or in many cases, print the sucker then rescan it to get a PDF.
This, a thousand times, this! Hell, it's a good day when someone knows how to save something as a pdf. More often than not, people print, scan and file so that the document has a signature on it. Goodness knows what sort of an electronic legacy this will leave, but
we end up with a growing mountain of paper and inaccessible documents.
sounds about right. It's worth noting that these documents, even when they're only internal, are invisible to the kind of electronic file searches public servants do when they're answering a big OIA. If they're also filed in Admin or Miscellaneous with a name like report.doc, they'll never be seen again.
Jo Advisors who do this work don't know any better, aren't trained because their managers also don't know any better and admin functions aren't staffed sufficiently to look after this.
Izogi:
You can produce all the templates you like and provide standard filing mechanisms to keep the info in good order (very important for OIA responsibilities), but then it's necessary to convince people and managers, throughout an entire organisation, to use them instead of taking shortcuts that might make immediate tasks easier for themselves, and to file them properly.
Absolutely. Back office functions have front office implications. Technology has to be used to be useful.
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My two year old daughter greeted this critter politely ("hello robot, how are you?") on a recent trip to the hospital. I suppose it is a bit anthropomorphic.
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I read somewhere, perhaps it was in one of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, that if you eliminated aging etc as causes of death, people would probably make it to about 700 on average before some sort of accident got them, actuarially speaking. There's a lot about those books that reminds me of discussions here.
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Munted is a great word, but it sure sounds odd when it's repeated by a squeaky toddler voice from the back seat of the car, after you've just observed the results of an accident.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Some men make all sorts of wild claims about what they've seen women do, but you can't verify them because they neglected to record the serial numbers.
Bravo, sir!
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I did say "many men would agree..."
Many men might, but that wouldn't stop them from being wrong. Everyone thinks they only get attention when they don't need it; but the volume of popular culture that argues that women's availability/desperation is a massive turnoff for men* can't be ignored. There's an industry of self-help books telling women not to call first/put out on the first date/move in with a guy until he puts a ring on it, ya de ya.
*or alternatively, incitement for sexual assault. It's a catch-22.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I'm sure many men will agree that when you are "between relationships" women tend to avoid you like the plague, "There must be something wrong with that guy or he would be married or something". but when a guy is in a relationship women feel more free to engage.
Couldn't disagree more, unless you mean women are more prepared to be friendly when they know getting hit on is unlikely. I've had friendly misinterpreted by guys I've been making polite chat with, and it's embarrassing and awkward (especially when it's a former teacher, no less).
But the bus effect applies to both genders, although Wendy Cope expresses it as only one:
Bloody Men
Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.You look at them flashing their indicators
Offering you a ride.
You're trying to read the destinations,
You haven't much time to decide.If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze
While the cars, the taxis and the lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.by Wendy Cope
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OnPoint: Spending "Cap" is Fiscal Anorexia, in reply to bulbul,
Charting it shows that shows births have been going up since 2005 and are now at levels last seen during boomer periods. We may have another baby boom underway.
I don't think you're reading it right. Completed fertility for women born in the 1930s (who would have been having babies in the 1950s) peaked at over 3.5 kids. For women like me born in the 70s, it's around 2.1.
The number of kids born isn't that different, seeing as we have a higher population, but the rates are much lower.
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Fringe festival flags, 2004, Wellington waterfront, on the hill that's since been levelled. My first day out with a digital camera.
