A dream written down with a date becomes a goal.
A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan.
A plan, backed by action, becomes reality.
Highly Annoyed
I’m annoyed with an organization with which I’ve not worked for three years. Apart from the abrupt concealment of our open-source contributions shortly before my departure, it seems they also weren’t entirely forthright with me about my role (I should redact this post). According to the records they had released to TheWorkNumber, the title I had prior to the layoff wasn’t an official title — but was a title that was a few years old.
And why the date discrepancies? Might it be that my resumé only addresses roles held in the past ten years? Are they looking for my complete history back to 1985?
And then there’s a curious issue with my degree from 2002. Granted, the school no longer exists, but HireRight seems to have established contact with DTC, which then reported that they haven’t any history of my attendance.
Okay, here’s a copy of my diploma and, while unofficial, here’s the transcript that I’d received from DeVry/DTC a few years ago.
HireRight, doing a background check, has marked my background with discrepancies, which, no doubt, will result in an abrupt retraction of an offer that an employer had made.
—
Highly Annoyed
Well, Crap…
I started feeling poorly very rapidly the evening of the last day of AMT school.
And the day after, here’s the very, very positive test.
Yes, there absolutely can be false-positives. But this doesn’t feel like any illness I’ve endured before. So, yep, positive.
I can only imagine how catastrophic it would’ve been had I not already been fully vaccinated with two additional boosters.
There
And now, for something completely different.
Ever notice that elevators have more buttons than floors they stop at?
You might think that the fewer the floors, the fewer the buttons. You’d be incorrect. The fewer the floors, the more buttons it would have, up to a ratio of 5:2 (buttons:floors).
Consider a building with two floors — there are commercial buildings (even some private homes) that have an elevator that only services two floors. But why so many buttons?
At a minimum, there would be buttons for 1, 2, Door-Open, Door-Close, and an Emergency Call button.
An elevator in a two-floor building really only needs to have ONE button. And that button would be labeled:
There
You know which floor you’re on — and the elevator will even tell you (sometimes verbally) which floor you’re on.
It would never make sense to be on the first floor and have a button that says “1” (or First, or similar). Likewise, if you’re on the second floor, then why would you have a button that says “2”?
It need only have a single button that says, “There”.
If I’m on One, then I want to go There. If I’m on Two, I want to go There.
But what if you want to hold the door open?
Consider in the case that you wish to hold the door open. It already has safety interlocks that prevent it from closing on somebody. They may be IR-emitters or even a physical safety bar with a microswitch to indicate that there’s a hand in the doorway.
Just wave your hand in the doorway.
But what about to tell it to close? What do we do then, Mr. Genius?
Easy. Just wait.
So, that’s three buttons out of five that we’ve eliminated.
I know what you’re thinking, “Surely, we can’t get rid of the Emergency Call button!”
Want to bet?
We already do the same thing with iPhones. If you press the Sleep button repeatedly, it’ll display emergency information or, in some cases, call your emergency contact.
In an elevator? We just push the There button repeatedly to do the same thing.
Oh, you didn’t mean to call help?
Press the There button to continue there.
Changing Careers?
I’ve mentioned Purpose a few times, but a followup question might be “when” to change careers.
Here’s a quick chart that illustrates the important bits:
That said, I still have a few things to get sorted while I’m getting the certifications in order. But, it’s in progress.
the rest of me 