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Thursday, July 26, 2012
The Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)
July 26th, 2012Top StoryThe Worst Coworkers and Workplace Annoyances (and How to Deal with Them)By Thorin Klosowski
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
Solution: Moldy CamouflageOne 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:
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:
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
Solution: Hint HintIf 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:
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
Solution: Stand Up and Schedule for BrevityUnless 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:
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
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:
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
Solution: Enforce the Whisky RuleOne 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
Solution: Cut Yourself OffWe'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 StoryHow To Make A Boring Street Car A Competitive Race CarBy Jason Torchinsky
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. 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. 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
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