Ad Augusta per Angusta

(This is probably going to sound like a rant, and indeed it may be. I just don't quite know why the majority of my posts seem to be poorly-worded diatribes, when I'm generally regarded as such an optimistic person...for that matter I have no idea why I'm so optimistic. I am, after all, a fat, bald, single, 33 year old anglophone in Quebec with no full-time career. Woohoo...good thing I'm super intelligent eh?)

I don't care what job(s) people pick for themselves. Really. I don't. I never look down on people based on the job they've chosen to work at, however I will contemn a person fully and completely when they choose to be negligent in their duties or when 'substandard' becomes synonymous with 'satisfactory'.

Honestly, we spend 2000 hours a year working at these jobs...almost a full third of the amount of time we spend awake each year. It seems to me that there should be no excuse but for us to actually take the time to do a good and conscientious job. This is why I spend 45 minutes interviewing even the 16 year old that I might put on a cash register...I have to weed out people with the attributes that will lead to substandard work, and it'll cost me a lot less to spend the time interviewing them out up front than it will if I hire them and then we have to go through the necessary paper trail to get rid of them later (after we've potentially had to put up with weeks or months of wasted time).

Why am I upset about this today? Well, this is actually on the forefront of my thinking most of the time...as I travel through my day and witness stupidity after incompetence after complacency ad nauseum. People I work with...'developers' (wow am I playing fast and loose with that term) who write applications that I *sincerely* hope they're keeping as far from their resumes as possible. Stores I shop at...where staff and managers alike seem to be equally incompetent, but worse, seem to have no desire to change that sorry fact.

Folks, if it's in the purview of your job description, know it! Or at the very least be prepared to learn it when you need to.

Find out what your employer expects from you, and then aim to do more. (Note to my poor union-caged friends here...this could get you in trouble...I have never found a union that I liked.)

Accept criticism (well, constructive criticism) for what it is. Peer review can be one of the best methods to improve your own performance.

Learn more than your little pigeon hole in the business. Not only does it make you more valuable to the business, but customers/clients perceive you as a more conscientious person.

My ambulance instructor, a crazy Irish paramedic named Kelly Shepperd, once taught me his description of truly knowing a job inside out. We had been working with our airway equipment: oxygen tanks, valves, masks, airways, bag valve masks, suction kits ... and practicing with all different ways to assemble and configure all this stuff. To get truly good at proper assembly of it all can take hours and hours over many days (bag valve masks - the thing they squeeze on ER to get air into you - actually have 25 or so parts...little rubber gaskets, valves, connectors, etc.). So my group had spent all these days with this stuff and we thought we knew it inside out and backward. That was, until Kelly took it all apart, stuck us in a closed room, and turned off all the lights, and then timed us putting it back together. His notion: you don't really know something until you can do it with one of the senses that you normally require for that task removed.

With computers I try to be the same way...when Canadian Tire calls me about something if I can't talk them through the procedure cold, over the phone, with no screen in front of me, then I don't know that task well enough.

So that leads me to my final point: know your job right to the fringes, all the weird stuff that may never happen...because then the day to day stuff will not only seem simple, but you'll be perceived as an absolute expert.

Now, I'm in a big glass house here. Certainly I haven't aspired to all of these goals in every job I've ever done...but I'd like to believe that I gave 120% effort to every employer. Even if I haven't always done that I'm committed to learning about things. I make tons of little post-its about things I don't know an answer to and then I tackle them whenever I have some spare time. The gist of what I'm trying to get at is that I just don't understand the sloppy work concept. I don't understand why people do it. I don't understand why managers accept it. And all the while, the rest of the world suffers from it.