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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Ed O'Neill Officially Joins 'Modern Family' Cast Lawsuit


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The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)

July 26th, 2012Top Story

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)

By Thorin Klosowski

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)The workplace chatterbox. The lunch thief. All those pointless meetings. We've all dealt with annoying workplaces and coworkers at some point. Here's how to actually confront those problems and make your workplace better for everyone.

Earlier this week we asked you for your biggest workplace annoyances. Many of you shared an abundance of horror stories. We've tallied a few of the most common themes and suggested a few ways you might deal with them. Let's take care of those annoying coworkers.

Problem: The Lunch Thief

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)Office kitchens are great when you don't want to spend money going out to eat every day, but it seems like every office has a thief who pops in and steals someone's lunch. It stinks when it happens to you. A lunch theft can even ruin a perfectly good day when you realize you have to pay for a meal at a restaurant.

Solution: Moldy Camouflage

One of the best ways to counter an office lunch thief is to make their job harder. Cooking blog The Kitchn shares their strategy that's likely more effective than a note left on your lunch:

Swiping an already-made sandwich is one thing, but stealing all the fixings is another. Try keeping the components and ingredients for your lunch separate and then assembling on the spot.

If you're still having problems, you might also consider an anti-theft lunch bag that makes your sandwich look moldy at a glance. If passive-aggressive is more your flavor, food blog, Chow suggests leaving a tearjerker of a note:

"To whomever ate my eggplant sandwich yesterday, I got up a half hour early so I could make a healthy lunch. When I discovered it missing, I had to spend half my lunch hour going to the deli for a $7 sandwich I couldn't afford. I don't mean to be a jerk, but times are tough right now, and I don't have much to spread around. Sincerely …"

With a little effort you can hopefully stop your coworkers from hijacking your lunch and get a nice meal in the middle of the day.

Problem: The Hoverer

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)If you've ever had to deal with a desk-hoverer you know the true pain of this complaint. It's the person who stops by to ask a question, and then sticks around for no reason. That's bad enough as it is, but the heavyweight version is even worse: they also look over your shoulder as you work.

Solution: Hint Hint

If for some reason you can't tell a coworker that you you need to get back to work, then offer a few subtle cues that the conversation is over. We've outlined a a few of these cues before, including: ask your chatty coworker to pick up some of your slack, talk about topics they don't know, or be as uninteresting as possible.

If your coworker is just standing around staring at you while you work, NPR offers up one more subtle sign that the conversation is over in the form of humming a song:

You can hum the song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police whenever your boss stands too close to you. This is obviously more likely to be effective with a boss who knows the song, gets the reference and takes the hint. However, even a boss who doesn't know the song could potentially be conditioned to keep a bit more distance if you're humming is a direct function of his or her proximity.

If none of the above work, change your body posture signifigantly, make your cubicle uninviting by covering any extra chairs, or if all else fails, politely tell them you have work to do. Photo by John.

Problem: Endless Meetings

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)Nobody really likes meetings as it is. When they drag on and devolve into chit-chat they're even worse. Perhaps the cause is the person who comes in eating their lunch. Or the coworker who insists on going over everything with a fine tooth comb for a second time because they weren't paying attention the first time. A lot of time gets wasted in meetings, and that makes your day unproductive.

Solution: Stand Up and Schedule for Brevity

Unless you're running the meeting yourself you can't start imposing all types of rules and limits. However, you can suggest a few changes to your boss if you're not in charge. One easy fix is to implement standing meetings. Not only are they good for your health, they also speed things up because people don't want to stand around for an hour.

Another trick is to make your meetings short by default. The 22-minute limit is handy to keep meetings short. If that's too long, 10 minutes might be enough, provided everyone prepares ahead of time. The idea is that when you set a short time limit you force everyone to show up on time and stay on task throughout the meeting. To do this, send out meeting materials ahead of time, get rid of phones, and focus on the topic at hand.

If nothing else, focus on tackling problems directly in meetings. As Signals vs. Noise points out, when you begin with a specific problem, meetings flow more smoothly:

Meetings are wild horses that always try to run off course. Yoke the meeting to a specific problem. "Improve the flow on the New Entry page" is better than "Talk about New Entry page."

The point with all of these tips is to make meetings efficient by actually tackling a problem in a short amount of time. Some meetings will have to go on longer, but if you focus the purpose of the meeting they move smoothly. Photo by Audin Malmin.

Problem: The Obnoxious, Noisy Coworker

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)We've all had to sit next to the loud person at work. Maybe they're as subtle as chewing gum with their mouth open, or they're as obnoxious as always using their speakerphone even when nobody else is on the call. Regardless, it's disruptive to your work and your focus.

Solution: Tackle it Head On (or with Headphones)

Sometimes the best solution is the most direct. In this case, it's probably best to start by simply talking with your coworker about their volume. The New York Times talked with career coach J.T. O'Donnell about dealing with a loud coworker:

"Saying something like, 'I have real trouble focusing when there are loud voices,' goes a lot further than coming out and saying, 'You talk too loudly,' " Ms. Callis said. "If you make it a personal issue, you'll come off as more of an assistant than an adversary, which is always a better way to go."

If that doesn't do the trick, your next best option is to block the noise. Headphones or earplugs work in a pinch. You can also take NPR's advice and use a pink noise generator like Simply Noise to drown out the noise. Photo by flattop341.

Problem: The Chronically Late Coworker

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)Whether coworkers are late for meetings, back late from lunch, or they're simply 20 minutes late every day, chronically late people disrupt everyone's schedule. The problem, of course, is that you're not always their boss so you can't tell them what to do directly.

Solution: Enforce the Whisky Rule

One excellent solution is the the Whisky Rule: if someone is late to a meeting, they have to buy their counterpart a bottle of whisky. The idea is that you punish tardiness in a way that also holds you accountable in the long run.

For other situations, your best bet is to remain silent if tardiness doesn't affect you directly. If it does (say, them being late means you take lunch later in the day), contact them and talk about it. If you don't know how to handle the conversation, approach it in three parts: take them aside privately, put yourself in their shoes, and offer to help (this also works for stinky coworkers). Photo by Evan.

Problem: You're Always-On Call

The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)You accepted that work smartphone and put your work email on it. Now, your bosses and coworkers expect immediate responses to email. It doesn't matter if you've left for the day, you're out for the weekend, or you're on vacation.

Solution: Cut Yourself Off

We've tackled this problem before, and your best bet is to approach your boss directly. Tell them you can't be expected to answer questions on your days off, and that you should only be contacted in an emergency. The occasional overtime is often expected, but if it's happening all the time you're going to end up unproductive. Turn off your email, and enjoy your weekend.

If being disconnected really isn't an option, try and form a system where you and your coworkers take turns being available. The New York times suggests one way to do this is to make one team member available one evening a week. If something is an emergency, they will get in touch with you. If not, you're clear until you return to work. Photo by Leo Chen.


People get annoyed at all types of things at work, but that doesn't mean you can't try to make the workplace better for everyone involved. Approach the above situations with a level head, don't stress too much over annoyances, and stay calm. When you do, you might dread work a little less.

Title image remixed from Leremy (Shutterstock).

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How To Make A Boring Street Car A Competitive Race Car

July 26th, 2012Top Story

How To Make A Boring Street Car A Competitive Race Car

By Jason Torchinsky

How To Make A Boring Street Car A Competitive Race CarA couple weeks back ex-Jalop legend Murilee Martin was judging the Buttonwillow Lemons race, when he texted me some sad news. The car I helped build and run back in '08 finally met its end.

An overzealous driver flipped the car on one of the turns. No one was hurt, but the ex-Make:Way car was no more. But I'm not here to bury a car, I'm here to tell you how to turn something as wimpy as an old Escort into a reasonably competitive race car.

I had pretty mixed feelings about the news. This was the first (and so far only, but I'm not going to admit that) purpose-built racecar I'd had a part in creating and running, so I had a lot of sentiment tied up in the car. On the other hand, I'm still a bit stunned the thing has been raced consistently since our run at Altamont in '08. This is a good death for a racecar, especially one as improbable as the Escort. I'm sure 99.99% of the of the automatic four-door 1993 Escorts met or will meet their ends rusting and molding away, forgotten in some alley. A death on a racetrack mid-race is the most exciting, honorable death any econobox can dream of.

The slushbox Escort's 2 liter mill made a very nostalgic 88 lazy horses. It was owned by a former high school music teacher (we found a conductor's baton in the car) who drove the car pretty gently and gave it up after a small accident convinced him he was too old. This car was, in no way whatsoever, a good candidate for a racing car.

What it was, however, was $300 and in remarkably good shape. I was being sponsored by Make: magazine, so they were more interested in playing by the rules and the process anyway, so we figured something as boring and common as that Escort would actually be perfect to show that you can race anything if you really want to.

How To Make A Boring Street Car A Competitive Race Car

We knew the car wouldn't ever really be fast, given our time, skill, and budget constraints. But that was okay, because in an endurance race like the 24 Hours of Lemons, there's another way to make a decent showing even if your car is slow as mucus sliding down drywall: stay on the track.

So that was our plan. If we were going to have a tortoise, that turtle would keep on going, no matter what. We'd do what we could to make the most out of the power we had (lighten like hell, unrestrict intake and exhaust) but our big hacks and mods were all about durability. And, for a race at Altamont in the middle of summer, durability means keeping cool.

Heat kills hard-working cars, and endurance racers are certainly being worked hard. Automatic transmissions are especially susceptible to death by cooking, meaning we had two big hot metal lumps to try and keep cool. Here's the hacks we used:

• Ventilate the hood, add fans: The Escort was an entry-level econobox, and not designed with specialized cooling ducting or anything exotic like that. As my teammate Tom said of the stock airflow "the stock fan sort of mashes the air in, like an infant shitting its diapers, until it leaks out around the leg openings."

Nice.

We gave that air a map and a shove. We cut big holes in the hood's skin and installed wire mesh to keep the squirrels from getting mulched. On top of the hood we added two more big fans, in addition to the radiator fan. The radiator fan sucked air into the engine, the hood-top fans sucked it out. Even stuck in slow race traffic on the hairpin or at the chicane, our car would have plenty of cool air, and hot air would be asked to leave, firmly.

• Don't overwork the water pump: We thought two radiators would be badass and solve everything. We were stupid. The stock water pump can pump water to the single radiator in its stock location, and if you try to move it an inch more it'll fold faster than a robot origamist.

• Make an overkill transmission cooler from an A/C condenser: This was our big hack, and the one that likely is responsible for the car's long racing career. The stock tranny cooler is this joke of a little loop of pipe inside the radiator. It'll never get really cool, because it's already inside the hot radiator, and all it really does is let the transmission die a much slower, dignified death. We would have fried that slushbox the first day with it. What we did was pipe in a condenser from a car's air conditioning system. It's much, much bigger than the stock trans cooler but not quite as big as a full-size radiator. It's perfect for this, and you can use the input/output of the original inadequate trans cooler. We mounted ours right on top of the hood, with its own fan to suck air up through it.

We installed a temperature sensor on the hood, and checked the temps mid-race with an IR thermometer. Everything was right in the middle. It wasn't even getting hot, and we were driving that car harder and longer than it ever had been driven. It was great. We were only off the track for mechanical reasons once, when I lost a front left tire in a turn. The center of the wheel just ripped out, and I just kind of stopped.

With our spare on, we kept racking up lap after lap, ending up in 33rd place out of a field of nearly 100 cars. Not too bad for a boring and slow old Escort.

How To Make A Boring Street Car A Competitive Race Car

We had some other good hacks as well. For example, want a huge, Chaparral-style wing for your car? Try an old surfboard. It's light and easy to work with. Need to protect and insulate long runs of wiring? Use a garden hose. We relocated the wiring harness inboard on the car, to protect from the frequent contact with other cars. We used old, slit garden hose to insulate and protect, and it proved incredibly durable.

That car had a very boring life that got exciting fast. After we raced it, and before we sold it to the other team to keep racing it, it had a bit part in the wildly popular OK Go Rube Goldberg video, which one of my teammates, Brett, worked on.

I'm sure everyone's Lemons car is packed full of great hacks, and I'd love to hear about them. But today, let's decant a quart of 10W-40 on the ground for a fallen friend. I'm sure she's keeping faster cars back in the afterlife's next-to-crappiest racetrack now.

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Skip Schumaker Got Fisted By A Teammate After The Cardinals' Walk-Off Win

July 26th, 2012Top Story

Skip Schumaker Got Fisted By A Teammate After The Cardinals' Walk-Off Win

By Erik Malinowski

Skip Schumaker Got Fisted By A Teammate After The Cardinals' Walk-Off Win The Cardinals were, understandably, very excited about with their 3-2 walk-off win over the Dodgers tonight. Unfortunately, Skip Schumaker, who had no part to play in the outcome other than striking out in the bottom of the 12th, was on the receiving end of a pumped-up Kyle Lohse, who pitched seven strong innings. (At least, that's who we think it is.) You can bet Schumaker won't be so quick to join the celebratory scrum after the next dramatic Cards win.

Thanks Brian F. and Andrew J. for the tip.

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