Last year, I was invite to give a talk to grade six student on career day about my work. A student asked me what is the working hours like. I told him engineers work flexible hours. They don’t understand what’s flexible hours, so the teacher explained to them that I can come to work any time I like, go home any time I like and take breaks as much as I want. The idea of flexible hours seems novel to the students and they all say that’s cool. Then the teacher use the chance to teach them the importance of time management. Maybe I should tell the students, flexible hours is not cool in reality.
Flexible hours does not mean shorter hours, in fact it is often longer hours. Engineers’ work is project based, as long as we meet the dead line and show up in the meeting, to some extend we have the freedom of when and where to work. In other nine to five jobs, they have day in day out tasks. If you take a day off or have a sick day, someone have already covered your work for you. But in our job, if you take a day off, your tasks are still sitting there waiting for you come back and finish them. I end up working extra hours before my vacation so I can get all my the tasks out of my way. The only time I enjoy flexible hours is down time between projects. I can take the benefit of flexible hours by having a shorter work day if I don’t have much to do.
Mold grows on the windows frame rail is very hard to clean. The steam cleaner helps me a lot by blasting them out, but the problem becomes what to do with the flying debris. I first tried to use a cloth covering area I am blasting, but I found the cloth get soak up with dirt pretty fast. I spent more time walking back and forth between the window and the sink to rinse the cleaning cloth. Then I remember when I went to see my dentist, he has some kind of vacuum sucking the water from the tooth drill and the loosen plagues form my month, I could use a similar idea. The only problem is regular household vacuum cleaner can not handle water, since the water in the air may short circuit the fan. I got myself a wet/dry shop vacuum for this task. A shop vacuum use negative pressure to create suction, so the air does not flow through the fan directly. My only complain is the hose of the shop vacuum is pretty heavy. I have to put it around my neck and let my shoulder carry some weight. Now I work very efficiently with a steam cleaner and a shop vacuum and somehow I think I look like a dentist.
Stapleless stapler is pretty neat, see the photo below on how it works. You can staple a few pages together without using any staple. Pages stapled together with the stapeless stapler is not as firm as using a normal staple. It won’t survive continuous flipping of the pages. It is good enough to hold up to 8-10 pages together for document to exchange hands. The beauty of the stapeless stapler is when you want to remove the staple. No more broken nail or looking around for the staple remover, you simply torn the papers knot apart. It works really good on document you need to shred. You can feed the whole pile to the shredder without worrying removing staples or it may break the shredder. I got mine from eBay for only $2.5 including shipping. Highly recommend this little innovative stationary for office or home use. It’s cheap and useful, it comes it different colors and pattern, it could be a perfect X’mas gift for friends.
