| ??? 09/10/09 21:08 Read: times |
#168843 - This is what's evolved over the decades. Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Jan Waclawek said:
I do dislike the land-line one. With cell, I and my colleagues usually walk out off the room. While the POTS is not that plain old anymore and it has a wireless handset, if it rings it usually means trouble. The friends never call the POTS, they call through the cell, so it's usually our (mostly English speaking) customers. This is similar to your attitude to FAX: our experience is that those who can't write and read e-mail and prefer to call us, have usually trouble to express themselves clearly through the phone and don't understand the directions either, plus we of course have that language barrier; so the conversations tend to be lengthy with unsatisfactory outcome to both parties and a great likelihood of repeated calls. We usually leave it ringing until the secretary picks it up: not that she can handle the majority of the calls, but at least she gives a bit of hard time having the caller explain her clearly and slowly what or whom does he want ;-). While I agree with some of what you say, it's the personal phone traffic that I want to avoid in the office. The people who are in the office long-term are usually paid for time rather than for production, and I don't prefer that, and they're the ones I don't want chatting with their friends when I want them to be working. If they're paid for the work they produce, it's a different story. We don't have smokers, earphone addicts, and cellphones in the office. If a guy wants to go outside and place a call or check messages, well, I can tolerate that, so long as he accounts for the time away from his workstation. I can put up with the time taken to refill the coffee cup or go to the toilet. I can even put up with conversation about useful work. It's the other time-wasting that bothers me. We are three of us in a room and the doors to the two neighbouring rooms are most of the time wide open. Music is never present, but the overall noise is unavoidable - the multitude of PCs take its toll, the offices are next to a railway and the local airport's runway is just about 5 km apart. I also find the lack of natural illumination and the permanently lit fluorescent light very tiresome, but I cannot do anything about it. ... and it's the annoyances caused by the presence of others that I want to avoid, both for me and for the others. Consequently, I assign them work, and send them off to do it. That's worked for a remarkably long time, and continues to work. In my previous job, in a similarly sized room, for a couple of years we had a certain machine running 24/7 for testing, with some slowly but permanently rotating parts, and some other parts producing a certain set of movements roughly once in a minute - which was mildly annoying but manageable. But when a colleague across the room started to listen music through earphones, it distracted me so severely that I had to ask her to stop it, even if the "acoustic pressure" of the music must have been close to or below the permanent noise of the machine. There must be something individual in this, as my other colleague in the same room never complained about any noise, even if the lady played the music through speakers (that bad cheap plastic "PC type") when I was not present. I generally have some neutral background music, typically classical or baroque, playing in the background, just for the purpose of suppressing noise, not that there is much. When I turn on the TM5000 boxes, well, that does make some ac-fan noise. The oscilloscope and, even more so, the logic analyzer makes a fair amount of fan noise, too. I suppose that if they were all running, which does happen from time to time, one might want to turn up the background music. Fortunately, the lab at the new location is quite small, having about 10% the space of the previous facility. That accomodates few people. I think there must be lots of very different workplaces around. I would most probably have hard time to accommodate to a cubicle-based office with more than just a few people.
Of course, the ideal situation is, when you're the boss; then you can arrange the workplace to your liking. I wish I would be able to do that one day. Jan I guess that's been my position for the last 30+ years, though I have, from time to time, taken positions as an employee, and I do exactly that. The fact that I appreciate that not everyone likes the same sort of environment is the reason I've opted to send my colleagues off on their own rather than forcing them to endure the environs I prefer. I've almost always worked with people over 45 years of age, even when I was in my early 30's. They seem to be more tolerant and settled in their ways and, most importantly, work habits. I must seem to be a terrible tyrant, but ... keeping track of the loose ends is one of the things that keeps a business alive. If the boss isn't around while there are paid-by-the-minute employees, the expenses get away pretty quickly. I prefer people who know how to get from one end of a job to the other, and can be relied upon to do so without frequent supervision. Most of them have MS or PhD in their field and therefore have developed very stabile work habits and discipline over the years. I freely admit there are smart and disciplined youngsters out there ... somewhere. I just don't want to take the risk associated with them. I'd rather pay extra for the reliability of the solid, seasoned worker ... you know ... the guy with the short hair, short-sleeved dress shirt, neatly pressed pants, and well-worn wingtips, than to tolerate the erratic nature of the sorts of under-40 engineering types I've encountered on my visits to the outside world. I do see others, rarely, but I don't steal productive help from my clients. RE |
