Posts Tagged ‘thoughts’
Attack of the office zombie
Saturday, September 6th, 2008
September 6th 2008
You see them every day, moving slowly down the street. Drool and mucus from their lips and noses, and a thin coating of sweat covering their pale greenish complexion. They move without thought or care for human beings around them, and in contrast to zombies in the movies, they just need to touch something, or breathe a raspy moan to spread their disease.
Welcome to your work place
Presenteeism in todays society, is valued more than any individuals health. Thanks to the wonderful system of guilty until proven innocent, no one dares to take a day off work, out of fear of accusations of skiving off, or jokes about heavy drinking the night before.
They come in and spread their germs and viruses, and faster than you can say George A. Romero, you will find that it has spread across floors bringing down half the office.
How do you avoid of being bitten?
There are a few tricks of the trade. Simple steps to avoid infecting your fellow man are
- CALL IN SICK – call your manager and let them know you will not be in today. It is not only for your own good, but for the good of the company.
- Let people have their water cooler moment guessing if you are skiving off or not. Loose speculation is not worth the paper it is written on.
- Delegate your responsibilites. Delegate to someone you can trust have the work done by the time you are back. They will not want to take your job away from you.
- If you must – work from home. It is the 21st century, with high speed computer access available everywhere. Don’t over do it though. You are supposed to be resting.
How can you help an office zombie?
When you see them shuffling slowly down the corridor, instead of running, try and do the following.
- Tell them to GO HOME. You do not want their illness, and neither does anyone else.
- Volunteer to do an urgent task, to make it easier for them. Wouldn’t we all want to worry less?
- Eat garlic and bring in some greasy food if you sit next to them. Garlic will help your immune system, and the greasy food will probably smell so un appealing that they decide to knock off early.
The need for professionals
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
March 5th 2008
Since I have been around the block, both one or two times since the dawn of DTP, I have struggled to convince people that it is worth to pay for professional design. Fighting off clients’ meager attempts in Word or Publisher, to convince them that even if they CAN do it, it doesn’t mean that they SHOULD do it.
Of course, these days the same thing is happening on the web. Anyone can put together a webpage, and learn the basics of HTML, but it won’t make you a designer. Just like with DTP, the web is maturing, and surrounding knowledge of the medium is becoming increasingly important.
Where people in print realised that knowledge like typography, picking the right paper, and know how to layout a page was still a good sales arguement, in web it is just as important to have the same knowledge. And that is what set aside professionals from happy go lucky amateurs. What is the point to have a page that looks fantastically pretty if no one knows how to navigate it – or worse – cannot even find the page in the first place. Build a page incorrectly and it will most probably break, or load slowly, just to download a pretty header that takes up most of the content space above the fold.
After all, Web is just a medium and I think the content is still king – without proper content a site will die.
I will revisit this topic again in the near future.
