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Admin
To he\ with social skills, I want a genius that can make what I ask for a reality. Text and discourse comprehension is enough!
Hum, and if avaliable, shower-savvy just made my short list of essential skills after reading this :-S
Admin
Everything stems from that really. He was probably so fat that it would be physically difficult, if not impossible unaided, for him to bathe. Hence he just didn't.
Admin
I had a friend in highschool that worked for an isp doing tech support. His boss had a habit of smoking in the office.
He had about 4 ashtrays full of butts in front of the computer and one side of his crt monitor was white while the other side was brown and yellow.
It was something you had to see to believe.
Admin
Admin
Was the keyboard as bad as this? [image]
Admin
The second paragraph in that Wikipedia article explains that the popular use of "begs the question" is to invite an obvious question. The citation given for why this is wrong is 25 years old.
How often do you use the proper definition of "begs the question"? Never, because saying "circular argument" is clearer and commonly understood.
When certain statements are made, there are questions that are raised and there questions that are begging to be asked. The style books need to be updated to reflect the fact that the modern usage is a better usage of the phrase.
Sorry for going off topic, but I don't want to think about that smelly, bug-infested topic anymore.
Admin
Admin
"I just wash up before the wife gets back from her modelling job."
I feel very sorry for your wife that the only time you are clean is in the brief evening hours when she spends time with you. I'm sure if she's any kind of glamour model she'd be appalled that you present yourself this way to your coworkers (and indirectly embarrass her in doing so!)
And don't kid yourself. You're in the corner because that's the only place they could put you without losing the rest of the staff (and their lunch). Congratulations on "scoring your own office".
Admin
Wow, that's pretty ironic
Admin
Sorry for not quoting the last post, I was referring to the irony of this:
Admin
I once worked at an institution which had a large number of students from Korea. As you may know, a major part of Korean cuisine is a delicacy called kimchee, which is fermented cabbage, often laden with copious amounts of garlic. Getting into an elevator with a half dozen Korean students who'd been chowing down on kimchee the night before could be an eye watering experience.
Of course, turnabout is fair play. One of the students confided in me once that he hated riding in an elevator full of Americans. Apparently we smell of "sour milk".
Admin
We have a mild case of the same type at our company right now. Luckily in my case, I'm in the office and he's in a cube. His cube neighbor has already complained, though, and he's had "the talk" with our boss. It worked for a while but the old habits are returning.
It's a tough situation because he's a nice guy and you don't want to make the working relationship toxic from an emotional standpoint; especially since we have a small development team. On the other hand things can become too toxic from a physical standpoint.
Admin
Admin
So how do you tell someone you work with that they smell so incredibly horrible? Or at least, how do you tell your boss that you can't bear it?
I don't know what the new guy eats, but his smell is unbearable. His breath smells of death and decay (at least from a distance it does, no way I'm getting that up close) If I enter the open plan area I can tell whether he has arrived at work already, and I can tell everywhere he has been in the last half an hour on the whole floor. He has got to be one of the least bright programmers I have ever seen as well.
Admin
Sigh. I don't like to be petty against people, but working in tightly packed environments makes you bless the day when the only smoking guy in your team is taken on another project (and he doesn't even smoke in the room) or a temp girl (cute, but ..yes, mightily fat) finally goes away - I'm not even sure how she manages it, she looks clean, but you walk into the office and smell her subtle presence immediately. Small things like that day in and day out are able to drive one crazy, but can you actually punish\discriminate in a workplace when it doesn't go into "outright offensive"? (But I wish I knew a good way to =)
Admin
I won't hire people who are fat just in case they smell. I can't imagine what I would do with an actual smelly employee.
Admin
Its not impedance, its resistance, because while a normally open circuit will offer effectively infinite resistance with a constant voltage applied across it, if the two sides of an open circuit are close enough to the insulating dialetric between them (capacitor), the impedance can be much less than infinite depending on the speed that the applied voltage varies (frequency) while the resistance to direct current would still be effectively infinite. Additionally, even the very smallest voltage will cause current to flow through skin because it is pretty much a passive conductor, voltage does not "break resistance" unless the device has a nonlinear characteristic, and the closest to this would be an actual INCREASE in resistance as your skin burns off the normally conductive elements due to dissipation of power caused by conversion of current into heat whenever current gets high enough (ie., you can tell this is occuring because smoke is emitting from the point of contact (or maybe it starts to hurt more lol)).
Admin
Admin
"No social butterflies?" That's Marketingneese for "do not draw out meeting to avoid real work" and "is unable to lie to customer", right?
Sorry if I didn't catch the nuances - I only recently started learning that language. Most IT folk admittedly don't bother when picking a made-up language to learn, they usually go for Volapük or Klingon, wich are, while slighly lest useful, at least connected to reality.
letatio? is that Esperanto for "I Rule"?
Admin
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I would have more sympathy for people insisting on the original meaning of "beg the question" if "beg the question" involved a question or begging.
Admin
This is the most brillantly-written article to appear on TDWTF. I got the point after the first couple sentences, the dude had bad hygiene. There is no need to repeat that 8000 times in different ways.
Its like reading a short story written by a grade 8 student who is about to fall asleep but needs to reach 2000 words because the assignment is due tommorow.
Admin
Awwwww hell yeah.
[image]
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onomatopoeia
Admin
I believe the word you were looking for was onomatopoeia.
Admin
I've had two bosses in the past several years like this guy.
One stunk to high heaven and liked to sit at his desk and trim his toenails. He wore sandals year-round and I don't think he washed them once in four years. We left a stick of deodorant on his desk once for a laugh and he pretended not to get the message. He had a nice car though, so he was a hit with the ladies. Really YOUNG ladies.
Guess nice-smelling programmers finish last.
The other was a breathy, chubby guy who never changed his tan-orange t-shirt or stained khakis. I think his problem was just BO and his penchant for eating Thai. Rotting tooth smells if he spoke too long in meetings, and boy did he like meetings.
I got a new job with a dress code, and I haven't looked back. It's a refreshing change.
Admin
Mineral Oil is non-conductive:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php.
Admin
I usually drink diet soda and got used to being able to just leave the cans out until I'd accumulated enough to make it worth a trip to the recycling center. One time when the vending machine was out of Diet Pepsi, I got a regular Coke instead, and forgot that that can would need to be rinsed out. Had quite a mess when I came in the next morning - fruit flies, and worse yet, a whole stream of ants on my desk. (Even after getting rid of the offending can, it took several days for those ants to disperse.)
Admin
This is one of the toughest conversations a manager can have, but it's important to address it. Personal odor is not a personal choice. Managers are responsible for team performace. Team performance is the sum of the direct report's performance. If someone's personal odor offends other team members, the manager is responsible for having that conversation. Normal people don't WANT to offend their co-workers. This leaves two situations: The person doesn't know he is being offensive, or the person doesn't care. If they don't know, this is an embarrassing conversation, but the person will likely make the change once they realize that their hygiene is a problem. If the person doesn't care that he is offensive, and it's affecting team performance, that isn't any different than any other bad habit that affects team performance (e.g. yelling, swearing, interrupting, bad attitude, abrasiveness, etc.) It needs to be documented, addressed on an improvement plan, and can eventually be used as grounds for firing.
The content of the conversation is uncomfortable because it's personal. The structure of the conversation is no different than any other performance affecting situation, though.
Admin
Which, ironically, is not spelled how it sounds.
Admin
We had a guy like this, normally okay but you got stuck in the lift or a store room with the guy and it was a nightmare.
Fortunately I was only there as a temp for a few weeks and when I went back a few months later he'd either moved or been moved on. There really is no excuse even if they are a genius (not that my one I met or this guy was anywhere near one).
Admin
Well, IBM mainframes up until 94-96 (we didn't have 4-digit years then) were water-cooled. I worked for a place that had one of those huge beasts until '97. At the time, whenever a new operator came in, we walked them through the different parts of their jobs (mounting tapes and cartridges, running backups, running production batches, etc), and one of the chores was to top up the water tank in the computer.
Their boss would tell them to bring a ladder, lean it against the mainframe, climb up with a pitcher of water, and then fill 'er up. This was the 90s so everyone had a computer at home, and they just couldn't believe that you actually put water in the computer. They thought it was some kind of hazing until they say their boss actually go up the ladder and pour water into the computer.
Then they were led to their next chore, which was to shred a 300 foot magnetic tape with a "top secret" label into pieces no more than an inch long using scissors. But that was really hazing and we let them off the hook after 5 minutes.
Admin
Both the lack of social graces and lack of technical competence are deal breakers. If either one is missing, you're gone no matter how good the other quality is.
Admin
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/social_butterfly
Admin
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/social_butterfly
Admin
So what you're saying is, it's a perfectly cromulent phrase?
Funny thing: lots of people saying the wrong thing doesn't make it right. Similarly, defending the wrong usage simply because it's widespread isn't clever, it's frustrating.
You know what's really annoying about "begs the question"? In order for someone to use it wrong, they have to be trying to sound intellectual to begin with.
Admin
Reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Matter_(short_story)
Admin
//XL = inductive reactance //XC = capacitive reactance //R = DC restance //Z = imedance Z=sqrt(pow(R,2)+pow((XC+XL),2));
where "Inductive Reactance" is positive and "Capacitive Reactance" is negative.
They can be quickly calculated by the XL=2pifreqL; //L = inductance in measured in "henries" XL=1/(2pifreqC); // C = capacitance in farads
They are graphed as such
XL | Z | / |/ |---------------------R | | | | XC
Admin
The other odors overloaded the fruit flies olefactory systems, causing them to be attracted to artificial sweeteners by mistake. Your first indication that the general odor level has reached this point, is when the flies and roaches leave.
Admin
That would be a black flag for me. If the people who are paid to clean up messes think the mess is too much then something needs to change. I would refuse to work in that office. It's an unhealthy workplace. It's an illegal workplace (in my country - YMMV).
B
Admin
Looking at this in a little more detail, with dry skin a value of 500,000 ohms is not uncommon. Thus with 208 V and 500,000 ohms only about 0.4 mA would be expected to flow. This is less than the typical threshold of perception. With wet hands, however, the resistance could drop to 500 ohms allowing about 400 mA to flow. This is well into the area of breathing paralysis. Thus, depending on environmental conditions current flow can easily go from not being sensed to a level that is possibly fatal.
9 volts at 500 ohms the current is 18 mA which should be enough to cause muscle contraction, though I've never felt a voltage less than 48 volts.
More on the subject, where I used to work there was a guy whose breath was painful. Even though I knew how bad it was, every time I spoke to him I wasn't prepared and I'd almost gag. I'd rather take a punch to the face.
Admin
Yes it does, language changes and evolves. It’s only definition is the one people actually use and understand since otherwise it’s useless. The only languages set in stone are dead ones and I somehow suspect those may be altered retroactively as historians learn more.
Get used to it or move into a cabin in the middle of Siberia, otherwise you’re in for a world of disappointment as the language around you moves about.
Admin
and, just because a citation is $years old tells us nothing about its validity. Yes, an older argument has had more time for someone to counter it, but if there is a counter-argument, give that.
Euclidean geometry (modulo Riemann et al) is still valid despite its age.
Captcha: dolor? sad money?
Admin
Dante wished he could go to lunch right then, but his colleague that he was going with was in a meeting until noon. He tried to keep his thoughts on other things, but couldn't stay focused.
sorry ... no.
but THE colleague that he was going with
or
but his colleague WITH WHOM he was going.
Admin
If you want to experience a wide range of human smells, drive a taxi. Some passengers, you can't keep the window closed. Some of them were fat, some just didn't wash that much. Sadly, I remember picking up a bandaged passenger from a cancer hospice, and she had a smell, which I supposed came from her disease.
Early Saturday nights were nice, lots of nice perfumes on women going out for the evening. Late Saturday night...other smells rolled in. Barf, eggs (from getting egged), grog...one guy took a dump in the car! (He covered it up by pointing out that "we were driving past a sewage treatment plant." I was unfamiliar with the area...)
Early Sunday morning, some of the passengers were returning home from liaisons, I guess. One woman had a strong smell on her breath suggesting recent amorous activity...I kept wishing she would look straight ahead when she spoke, and not at me!
Admin
This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put!
Admin
[quote user="Anon"][quote user="return of the spelling nazi"]Funny thing: lots of people saying the wrong thing doesn't make it right. [/quote]
Yes it does, language changes and evolves. It’s only definition is the one people actually use and understand since otherwise it’s useless.[/quote]
Get used to it or move into a cabin in the middle of Siberia, otherwise you’re in for a world of disappointment as the language around you moves about.[/quote]
That's a philosophically interesting thing about language as opposed to most other areas of knowledge.
No matter how many people agree that pi equals 4 or that chlorine is a noble gas won't make it so. You can hold all the votes and surveys you want and it won't change that reality.
But if someone started using, say, the word "yellow" to mean "pretty Irish girl", and in a few years everyone started to use it to mean this and soon no one even remembered the old definition, then by what standard would you say that that was not the "correct" meaning? How could you say, When I use this word, everyone understands it to have this meaning, everyone uses this word to convey this meaning, but that's not really what it means?
Admin
Yeah, but your reputation in the eyes of your colleagues plus your self-dignity is irrevocably lost. No office can replace that.
Admin
You should never anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Admin
This reminds me of my Maths teacher at school. He was famed for being a bit of a drinker, and his halitosis of a morning was truly scary - it literally took your breath away. This was a well-documented feature of the school, as was the fighting that broke out at the beginning of every term, to see who would get a desk at the back of the classroom...