Canopyflyer
@Canopyflyer@lemmy.world
- Comment on The longer I'm alive, the more I feel that people make things complicated to feel important. 3 months ago:
Sometimes the complication is a smoke screen too.
Case in point… I picked up a contract to be the corporate Change Manager for a manufacturing company just before COVID. It’s the type of company that makes appliances and other things that are destined for the garbage pile. Not really anything of note.
The guy I was taking over for had put in his notice and was moving on and had 2 days to train me. Fortunately, the ITIL system they used was ServiceNow, which I already had a lot of experience with. He got to the monthly report and in his own words he called the method of generating it “byzantine” and it was a horrible process that took almost an entire day to finish. Fortunately, he gave me step by step instructions that were accurate.
Side note, the process for generating came from my boss. She was one of these people that had just enough intelligence to be dangerous and the rest of the time she got away on her looks. Which were fading fast and that gave her a huge chip on her shoulder to boot. Yeah, this contract was a fun one.
So I used my decades of reporting experience and broke down how all the reports were generated. It turned out that the Director had never really learned how to use Pivot tables and that was why there were dozens of steps in generating about 7 different reports. I took about two days to write an Excel spreadsheet (because SNOW Reporting was not capable of generating some of these reports) and automated the entire thing. I ran the original process concurrently with my new spreadsheet for another month and they both generated the exact same numbers, I canned the old process.
But I did NOT tell a soul about it. Everyone, including my boss, thought I was still taking a full day to generate those stupid reports, when I was actually doing it in 5 minutes. 4 of which were waiting for ServiceNow to run its report and download it into a CSV file.
Oh I had tried to let my boss know that I had made myself a lot more efficient, she just got angry and actually yelled at me for a couple of minutes, then she promptly forgot about it. So I just kept it to myself after that. My plan was to just pass on the old process to the next poor schmuck to get this contract, but instead the reporting part of it was handed over to someone I actually liked. She told me flat out when she found out she was taking the Change Reporting piece that she was terrified of that process. So I had her sit with me at my desk and showed her the new spreadsheet. You would have thought I bought her a puppy.
So sometimes the complications in the business world are defense mechanisms for people’s time.
- Comment on Draw! 3 months ago:
I am unable due to having signed an NDA.
But let’s just say the world is still here. You’re welcome.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 4 months ago:
Je ne parle pas Francais.
- Comment on genius 4 months ago:
Not my video, but I did ride it that year at the World Freefall Convention.
- Comment on genius 4 months ago:
One time, this was back in my skydiving days so a very long time ago, the drop zone’s CASA 212 was down due to a bad hydraulic pump. The pump finally arrived and the DZO asked me to help him install it. He was a certified A&P, I just had a lot of experience wrenching on cars but it allowed me to get a lot of free jumps due to helping him out on things like this.
He handed me the pump, which was a LOT lighter than I expected and told me with a smile: “Don’t drop it.”
In inquired as to how much it cost and he replied: “$10,000.”
I was holding a pump in my hands that weighed barely 10 pounds that cost more than my car (this was circa 1998 or so).
A couple years later the igniter box on the port engine died and I helped him replace it… That was a cool $15000. The engines were about $250,000 a piece back in those days.
- Comment on I can still smell them 4 months ago:
I can smell them too.
It was fun to take a hammer and hit the entire roll at once. They actually made quite the noise.
For reference, I was born in 1970 so yeah I grew up with those things.
- Comment on genius 4 months ago:
You are ready to own an airplane if you can wake up in the morning, burn a $100 bill and flush it down the toilet without feeling anything.
You are ready to own a helicopter when you can do the same thing, except with ten $100 bills.
- Comment on What is something your dad told you growing up that you will now tell your kids? 1 year ago:
This is a common saying, but I heard it from my Dad first:
Never cheap out on things that separate your backside from the ground.
He was specifically talking about tires and brakes on a car, but it’s good advice all the way around.
- Comment on Can I use any windshield washer fluid I want for my car? 1 year ago:
Use what you want.
What you want to use is RainX. Or at least use RainX’s additive to what ever washer fluid you do use.
If you live in a cold climate, just make sure the fluid you use won’t freeze.