Yesterday I was commiserating with my DBA about the lack of common sense everyone in my building seems to have. I mean, we’re brilliant here in The Engineering Building, but some of the stuff that happens just makes you wonder.
Take for example John Dilbert, who has been complaining to facilities for weeks that his area is too cold. Facilities of course comes out on the weekend, verifies the heat/thermostat work, and probably laugh at the guy for being such a pussy about the temperature. In he comes Monday morning, and again by the end of the day his entire area is freezing. He and the seven other guys in his area are calling facilities all the time trying to figure out what’s going on, and finally facilities comes out during the work day to check out the issue. You know what they found? Yeah. This genius has been hanging his coat over the thermostat when he comes into work in the morning. So the coat was “tricking” the thermostat into thinking it was much, much warmer than it actually was…I just can’t believe no one thought to check the thermostat at all, at any time, before calling facilities – if they had ONCE looked at the thermostat, they would have realized that idiot had his coat over the damn thing.
Out of curiocity, how many countries can you name in five minutes? I got 79 guessed, 116 remaining. If I had known how to actually spell some of them, I would have gotten a few more. I couldn’t spell Uruguay, Azerbaijan, Luxembourg or Philippines, among others. I’ll bet my mother gets at least 95%, Catherine too.
I got to 58 when the time was up. I had just worked through Europe, North Africa and part of West Africa and half of the countries of Southern America. I had not seen the end of the time limit coming, that was a bit frustrating, because I was sure I know at least twice as many countries as that. (I do know the United States of America, I just hadn’t come to typing that one). But the rules are the rules I guess.
(I also felt a bit disadvantaged by having to enter the names of the countries in a foreign language).
What is your first language? That is a definite disadvantage. If I had to enter them in, say, French…well, I wouldn’t have gotten 56, let’s put it that way.
I’m from the Netherlands; my first language is Dutch. Strictly speaking, that is not true, because I grew up with a regional language, Frisian (or West Frisian, officially), which is spoken by some half a million people in the North. But I use that language only within my family, and express myself better in Dutch.
Of course, I also had an advantage, because I live in Europe. There are simply more (albeit smaller) countries in that part of the world. I think there are more than a dozen independent countries within a 500 mile radius of where I live.
Have you any idea how many of the Americans know the answer to this question?
Johan Lont´s last blog post..jclont: @shortyawards I nominate NL Cabinet Minister @MaximeVerhagen in the #politics category, because he uses Twitter to involve the public.
The word “this question” in my previous comment is supposed to link here: http://twitter.com/jclont/statuses/993104322 (it didn’t seem to work)
Johan Lont´s last blog post..jclont: @shortyawards I nominate NL Cabinet Minister @MaximeVerhagen in the #politics category, because he uses Twitter to involve the public.
I feel a lot safer that the same guy hanging his coat over the thermostat, unable to determine the cause of the temperature shift is maybe checking jet engines for tolerance and usability.
Actually he is a performance guy, so he makes sure core air flow/pressure etc. are all on the mark and the engine exceeds expectations…OK that’s a little scary, but in their defense performance guys tend to be BRILLIANT…just no common sense!!