Tech in the Trenches

Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Category: Links and Quotes Page 14 of 25

Shared from elsewhere.

Isolated Youth

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On April 20, 2016

In Links and Quotes

This could be the story of my childhood. I grew up in a small town in Northern Virginia. Berryville has about 2,000 people. My high school was 550 and my graduating class was 168.

We were near enough to Washington DC and Baltimore to pick up some music from outside the Christian and Country stations which ruled our airwaves. But it was still isolated where the goal was to get out.

“Basically, this story is a controlled experiment,” I continue. “Napoleon is a place that has remained static for decades. The economics, demographics, politics, and geography are the same as when I lived here. In the past twenty-five years, only one thing has changed: technology.”

This paragraph sums up Berryville. Static and isolated. The internet changed everything. I often hear how the internet made the world a smaller place, but for me, it made the world much larger.

Manton’s 30 Libraries

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On April 19, 2016

In Links and Quotes

Manton Reece visited 30 libraries in 30 days in Austin, TX.

They’re great, quiet places to work. You can scroll through his entire journey using his #newlibraries tag. There are some great pictures and thoughts about each library.

Names

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On April 19, 2016

In Links and Quotes

I’m always a sucker for advice pieces, especially when they are directed from adults to children. Unsolicited Advice for My Three Sons, In No Particular Order is full of greats bits of advice but one stuck out to me more than the rest.

Names are a door handle to a person; that small little effort opens them up.

This is great advice, and something I use as much as I can, especially when talking to people over the phone. I work in a help desk environment and people feel dehumanized by the entire process so it’s nice to converse using each others names and not just a caller/callee relationship.

We’re both people and it’s important to remember that. We have feelings and we are working towards the same outcome. But it’s important for life too.

I try to take note of anyone with a name tag and thank them using their name. It’s fun to see the surprise in their face when I use their name when they didn’t give it to me.

I had the same feeling one day and I asked a customer when I worked in retail how he knew my name, he motioned to my name tag and winked. I had totally forgotten I had my name on my chest.

Man sitting with a stylus and holding an iPad with graphs on it. From Unsplash.com - https://unsplash.com/photos/unRkg2jH1j0

Your co-workers are not your friends

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On April 12, 2016

In Links and Quotes

You may love your job and all the people you work with, but at the end of the day you are in a business environment where the goals of the organization are driven by business decisions.

Where I work, I am cordial and friendly with my co-workers. But I keep my outside life mostly out of work. I don’t invite them to my social media profiles. I don’t tell them about my blog. We are not friends. We are not going to get dinner or go see a movie. I keep them at arm’s length because we aren’t friends. We’re co-workers. We’re thrown together in work just as we all went through school with a random collection of people who just happened to be of similar ages.

I don’t wall them off because I want to talk smack about them online. I don’t talk about my co-workers online. I don’t blog about them. I don’t tweet about them. I don’t talk about them. It’s best practice not to because you never know who will find what you’ve said or will look you up. It’s a small world out there and you never know who’s reading or searching what you say. So be safe and don’t say it.

One of my favorite quotes from Maya Angelou is, “When people reveal themselves, believe them.”

I believe there is a division between work life and personal life. You may be friendly with co-workers. But they may have different goals and expectations as you. Be ready to always look out for yourself first. No one will take care of you like you.

Ford won’t let Tesla bring the SEXY back

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On April 1, 2016

In Links and Quotes

Joe Steel cracked the Tesla car code on Twitter earlier today.

Turns out he was right. USA Today reports:

CEO Elon Musk told shareholders Tuesday that a friend joked to him that with the S and the X, all Tesla needed was the E. “It kind of stuck even though we were just kidding.” The name Model E was talked about as the designation for the third model. Then, “Ford called and said they were going to sue us for using ‘Model E,'” Musk said. “They are killing SEX.”

Ford is no fun and has no sense of humor.

But, it’s still a shame that the S-E-X naming structure was never, um, consummated. Musk says the company even took a trademark on Model Y.

RIP SEXY car line. Long Live S3XY car line.

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