When Time Doesn’t Pass

There are times in the office when it feels like tiiiiiime juuuuuuust does not paaaaaaassssss. Time draaaaaaags by so slowly that you wish someone would give you a fly swatter so you can swat away flies (human flies or otherwise). Just make sure you ignore the fly that settles on Big H.’s* head.The result of hitting that fly might not be that funny.

Also, you start thinking about the summer holidays from November, and you think of lunch from 8.15 a.m. Then after lunch, you return to your office all full and sated, and stay close to the phone, lest someone out there needs you, then when that phone finally rings, and you excitedly pick it up, the person on the other end says, “Mimo? Oh sorry…wrong number.”

Here are some tips on how to kill time in the office;

1. CONSULT DR. GOOGLE. Google “bored”…If you’re still bored, google, “I’m very bored”…If you’re still bored, google, “I’m very very very very bored”…

2. SOLITAIRE CHAMPION. I know playing solitaire is one of the oldest tricks in the book. But the new idea is that when you win for the umpteenth time (since you can probably play it in your sleep by now) and it asks you, “Do you want to play again?” answer “No.” Then close the screen, go to the start menu and open it again. Repeat this process every single time you play, and that shall help time pass you by.

3. PRINTING DELAY. When you’re given a 10-page assignment or a 30-page report to finish, work on it quickly. However, when it comes to printing, print it one page at a time so you have a reason to spring off your chair every minute and rush to the printer. This will give the impression that you’re a very busy person even though you’re actually printing the same document. Also, intentionally causing paper jams will get you more time as you’d need to call the technician for help.

4. GET DIZZY (NOT BUSY). Take off your shoes, go around and around and around in your swivel chair, until you get dizzy and have an excuse to go home early.

5. EMAIL FORWARD VERIFICATION. Verify all the email forwards you receive by checking how true they are on TruthOrFiction.com

6. ACT WEIRD. Make a long chain out of paper clips, and when someone asks you what you’re doing, tell them to, “Shhhhh! I’m working on a piece of art here.” When you’re done with your chain, make shapes out of it.

7. ACT WEIRDER. Make paper airplanes and throw them around in the office. (Again, avoid Big H.’s head). (NOTE: if you do steps (6) and (7), most probably, you might be granted official leave on the grounds that you need to take a trip to a mental institution).

8. COUNT COMB TEETH. Get a comb like the one below and count how many teeth it has. The closer the teeth are to each other, the more time this process shall take, since most probably you’ll lose count, and you’ll start counting again and again and again. 

9. COUNT YOUR OWN TEETH. Don’t ask me what the purpose of this exercise is; just check if all your teeth are still there, maybe.

10. CHANGE OFFICE TIMINGS. Sneak into the office at night and move the hands of all the wall clocks backwards, then use it as a permanent excuse to answer why you’re always late.If someone points out their computer screen time, tell them, “It’s 10 a.m.? Really? It says 8 a.m. on my wristwatch. I’m sorry, but I’m a little bit old-fashioned, and my wristwatch is calibrated to the wall clock so…” shrug. During lunch hour, move the hands of all wall clocks forward. Repeat this exercise everyday.

PLEASE NOTE THAT IDEAS ON THIS BLOG ARE TO BE TAKEN AT YOUR OWN RISK.

*terminology introduced in The New Kid In The Block Syndrome (Part 1).

Engineeringly Incorrect Statements

For the past few months, I’ve been receiving bloggable engineeringly incorrect statements from people at our level (the inexperienced) working among experienced engineers. Being the engineer’s voice for whom literal meanings are quite important , I thought to organize them into dialogues as examples to define the term “engineeringly incorrect statement.”

Example [1]

EE* (1): This needs to be done by tomorrow.

IEE* asks EE (1): How do I do this calculation?

EE (1): It’s not as easy as it seems.

IEE: Since it’s not as easy as it seems (and I don’t have the experience that you have), I can’t do this by tomorrow.

Then EE (2) appears out of nowhere, and shows IEE that the only extra thing that IEE needed to know was to calculate; T x sin 60.

Say again, It’s not as easy as it seems?

Example [2]

For IEE to do a calculation (which involves a force unit), she needs an input from the EE. So a number is thrown her way, “370.”

IEE asks two EE engineers the same question: “What’s the unit?”

EE (1) says kg, and EE(2) says N

That’s a factor of 9.81, people. If they can’t decide on an answer, aren’t they both engineeringly incorrect statements?

Example [3],

IEE: “What does this value mean?”

EE: “This is how you calculate it.”

IEE (inner voice): I don’t want to know how to calculate it. I want to know what it really means…as in, the concept, in real life, what does the number correspond to, but do I get that?

What do you think?

Example [4]

Reference drawings are given, and they have obvious discrepancies in the reference axes (that’s X, Y, Z), so which one shall IEE use? In one drawing, the 2-D plane drawing shows X and Y, and on the other, the same 2-D plane shows X and Z. IEE asks more than one EE which dimensions should be used for the given analysis, and guess what? Again, two different answers.

If they can’t decide on an answer, aren’t they both engineeringly incorrect statements?

Example [5]

A calculation was being made, and the answer did not make any sense according to the drawings given, and when asked, the EE said, “Ask the calculator.”

*UFF! Engineeringly Incorrect Statement! You don’t ask the calculator, you ask the person who issued the drawing what does the number mean*

Add to that, the “Assume anything” from an EnginE-eeer’s Life, and you got IEE imagining the following scenario:

IEE: “Can you please open the window?”

EE: “Why? Are you cold?”

IEE: “No, no, I might need to jump out the window before the place blows up because of these engineeringly incorrect statements, because then I’d get blamed for them.”

*IEE: Inexperienced engineer

EE: Experienced engineer

The Social Outcast

One thing about the work experience is that it tends to remove the social outcasts from their shell. In university, the social outcast character could just hide away all morning – and night – to do their own work. Teamwork usually meant different teams for projects at the end of which, the social outcast could say, “I’m sick of seeing this project and everything that reminds me of this project, including you, so don’t call again.”

However at work, you’ll be working in the same team, and you’ll be seeing the same people over and over again. From the computer screen backgrounds, you can tell who’s married (*hint*hint*: children’s picture), who’s still single (*hint*hint*:their own picture as a child), who’s getting married soon (*hint*hint*:A spreadsheet with TOTAL EXPENSES= ∞), who’s getting divorced soon, (*hint*hint*:

Courtesy of Google Images

With time, you also start to know the details of people’s lives, the number of children/wives, the names of these children/wives, in what schools these children study, not because you’re interested so much, but because there are a lot of mundane conversations taking place.

“Good morning.” Smile. “How are you?”

Inner voice: “Not that I care so much”

“I’m fine. I had to drop my kids at school, but you know there was traffic today on…”

*Tune out*

Mental note: Next time, don’t ask ‘how are you?’ when you’re not interested.

And this happens assuming you even understand the language of the people you work with. Some of our professors already spoke to us about the importance of adding new languages to our CV. At first, we used to think languages like Spanish and French were what made a CV stand out, until with time we discovered they were very impractical in the UAE, so the Spanish coursebooks had to be replaced by…

P.S. No offense intended to any racial/ethnic group

The Office Chair

This chair is one of the most amusing furniture pieces you’ll see in the workplace. The yawns this chair induce are enough to form a yawning orchestra.

*Imagination break*

*yawn*yawn*yawn*YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWNNNNNNNNNNN*

*Glass breaks because the yawning sound is close to the glass’s natural frequency, which causes resonance*

It makes you think that there’s a “sleepy” cloud over this chair and this chair only, because some employees concede that they may be so sleepy while seated in this chair, but the moment they leave it they’re so fresh and active that they are ready to go pump iron. This chair might explain the increasing number of gym enthusiasts among the employed.
*Imagination break*

Employee’s phone rings, “Hello?”
“Hello? Why do you sound this way? Are you asleep?”
“No, no, I’m at work.”
“Ya3ni just tell me, you’re asleep.”

People with sleeping-in-class experience won’t find this chair different from the uni chair, except that there’s no monologue to put you to sleep. The office noise is different, and consists of clicks, printing noises, people talking in different languages. So basically, the suffering is caused by two things,

a) You have to stay in this sleep-inducing chair for 8 hours because of the attendance policy as mentioned before.

b) There’s no monologue there to put you to sleep.

Working in this chair is not even efficient for some people, especially those who are used to working on a bed, and sleeping in a chair.

Someone once proposed to take the office chair home because her baby nephew kept on waking up in the middle of the night crying, so maybe replacing the baby’s crib with this chair might be the solution, what do you think?

But then again, if you’re working, do you still think?

Shown below is what I call a truly multi-functional chair, designed by Dutch designer Roel Verhagen Kaptein; a chair that transforms into a chaise, then a sofa, and then back again. Now if I started a company I might replace the office chair by this one. Of course, the sofa appears in the morning, and the chair at night.

Communication and Engineers

Some working engineers seem to think that the knowledge that is in their head can be transferred to other minds telepathically, for when you ask them a question like, “How come the answer I got is this?” in search for an engineeringly correct statement that explains the logical sequence of the equations that lead to that answer, you may get a one word answer, and you may not even have the educational background to check for yourself if this one word answer is correct or not.

Add to that the wordy-less emails that you scroll through everyday at work with the following,

“FYI.”

“FYA.”

“Done.”

Coming from an academic environment where, “How are you?” could start a one-hour conversation of researches and hard-core scientific lingo, this can be quite disappointing. Because in an academic environment it is okay to turn clothes drying into a function of the weather, where variables such as sunshine, humidity, and rain could be recorded to come up with an empiric formula that can be put into matlab with the objective of optimizing clothes drying. Can someone talk about such an idea in a rigid work environment without sounding crazy?

Lunatic out-of-the-box thinkers should really stick to the academic path and not even try working in industry. If someone I trusted had told me that before, I might have listened. But then again, knowing myself, I would have still wanted to tried.

*Oh my God, there goes my spelling…um…I mean, grammar *

But if there’s anything I learnt from my work experience, it’s to cut conversations short…and the notes, too. So that’s it for today.

Done

Attendance Policy

Could someone have made one thing explicitly clear before we graduated as engineers: Your paycheck is a strong function of attendance, not work?

Remember when we were students, we used to complain about 8 am classes and 2 pm labs? At least, those 8 am classes used to end at 8.50 a.m. or 9.15 a.m. after which we could hit the bed and slide under the blanket if we had pulled an all-nighter. And at least those labs used to be fun because we spent half the time chatting and laughing anyway, so time would pass.

At work, it’s like having a morning class and afternoon lab each and every single day of the workweek, and it’s not like you’ll have work every day.  Across the year, real work comes in intermittent spurts depending on your position, but attendance is mandatory throughout the year except for weekends and when you go on leave.

(And seriously speaking, don’t you just love signing the leave form?)

The typical-AUS-student way of understanding the attendance policy is that if you have an 8 o’ clock class, you can tell your friends to wake you up at 8.25 a.m. because slipping in late with a cute “Am I late?” can get you at least a half-attendance with some professors. With other professors, your final grade is a strong function of the exam results, so the you-must-attend-each-and-every-class doesn’t really matter but you need to at least attend the exam.

*Imagination break*

Professor to Student: “I know you don’t like attending classes and all, but please please please attend the exam.”

Student (rolling eyes upwards and blowing air out of cheeks): “Okay, if you insist.”

As a final note, just because you are there doesn’t mean you are really there. In other words, there is always a distinct difference between physical attendance and mental attendance.

Engineering; a comedy show?

Once upon a time, I used to write about how engineering classes are supposed to be boring, since “it’s Engineering not stand-up comedy”. But in retrospect, I need to do a little rephrasing, because having studied, lived and worked among engineers for the past [...Oh-my-God-I-am-getting-old...] years, I have to admit that hanging out with engineers can be so funny, that if you ever feel like directing a sitcom, you might want to contact me.

Take these quirky things that engineers are prone to do.

Scene 1:

Engineer A peering closely at the screen: “Why is the cursor not moving?”

Engineer B: “Um…that’s my mobile, not the mouse.”

Scene 2:

During lunch time, Engineer A and B go all the way to where Engineer A has parked their car (across the street) just to remember (too late) that Engineer A has forgotten their key in the office, so they retrace their steps to Engineer B’s car (in the parking), just for Engineer B to remember that they haven’t parked their car in the usual spot, and that their car is actually parked across the street…in the same line as Engineer A’s car….and there’s more time and effort wasted. Can someone reteach us the basics of optimizing systems?

Scene 3:

Engineer A: “Hurry up with the calculator,I need to borrow it.”

Engineer B: “Wait, wait, let me finish.”

Engineer A: “Yalla 3ad, 3ajli…”

Engineer B hands calculator to Engineer A, “Here, take.”

Three seconds later, Engineer A gives the calculator back to Engineer B only for Engineer B to see the numbers, “5 x 1=” on the calculator’s screen.

*You wanna guess what the answer was ?*

*Aywa….3aleikum lamba mush leit wala bulb*

Scene 4:

So imagine one day you strut into the office all happy and bouncy, and you ask the EE (terminology introduced in New Kid On The Block Sydrome (Part 1)) you’re supposed to be working with (not working for, by the way) if you have any tasks for the day, and he says, “No” in a tone that might as well have said, “Get lost, why are you here a9lan?”

And you can easily see him working on some mysterious excel sheet (copy-paste-run, copy-paste-run, copy-paste-run, copy-paste-run, and all you can think is, “Can this person just stop clicking? ” And you keep on listening to “click-click-click-click”.

So you go to your reading material – since, yeah, remember the trusted sources we were talking about in EnginEeeeeer’s Life that nobody else bothers to pick up except the nerdy one since unlike others you seek to understand before you click-click-click.

Then when the time comes for you to leave the office, this EE appears at your workstation like a nervous wreck, all stressed out and throws work over your desk. “Finish this quickly, it’s urgent.”

6ab3an you’re annoyed at this, since you were about to leave the office, but since he had said it’s urgent (urgent according to AUS standards literally means urgent = you-won’t-sleep-because-it-will-keep-on-haunting-you urgent), and maybe you think, “Oh well, it won’t take that much time anyway, since the task in hand is easy if you just plug things into a spreadsheet, formulate an equation and draaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggg.”

(*oh guess who‘s doing the clicking now here?*).

Finally, over an hour later, this EE is sitting happily in his office, chatting on the phone in a language you don’t understand and are trying to tune out anyway, and you try to explain what you found out, and he says, “We’ll discuss it tomorrow.” (i.e. “GO AWAY, I’M ON THE PHONE”)

6ab su2al, what’s up with all the “it’s-urgent” drama or was it just an act?

Newsflash, “URGENT” needs to be defined at work. I mean, at AUS, “urgent” was defined by “exact date & exact time,” and remember how our professors used to say, “In industry, you can’t ask for a delay”? Then at some point in your career, you may see engineers who are asked on Wednesday, “When’s the deadline for this?” and they say, “(Last) Sunday.”

Seriously, after listening to all these stories, and going all through this…..can someone blame a writer for shaking their head in laughter all day long?

The New Kid In The Block Syndrome (Part 2)

Why are you given not-so-important work at first?

Just like in university you had to do your homework and study to get grades, at work, expect to get the not-so-important work at first (like printing, emailing and calling people), because the EE won’t trust you with the real work, since you’re still a trainee and are prone to mess it up. Because if you were given something too easy to do, and you didn’t do it (maybe because you think the work is too dumb for you), they might say, “I gave him something so simple to do and yet he didn’t do it. How does he expect me to give him the real work when I’ll be held responsible?”

Additionally, since the EE is responsible for you, it means your work will be signed by him, and as mentioned in EnginEeeeer’s Life, signature = responsibility, so guess who gets the hit in the head for your mess?

No, not you, so you can *snigger* away as much as you want.

Basically, that puts EE in the situation especially if he was really, really busy, and doesn’t have the time to check after your work, because he’s too stressed out by Big H. or the continuous deadlines.

So basically, what you need to do is:

a) Prove that you can shoulder the responsibility by submitting all the work accurately and on time (long before the deadline is actually better because that will give EE time to check your work, not that they will check your work until after the deadline set by planning engineers – expect that 3ala fikra).

b) Ask EE if there are any comments on your work

c) Make sure Big H. is aware of the work you are doing

Step (b) might sound strange, because you might expect the EE to tell you if there are any comments on your work, but remember they were employed to work not train, and work-oriented EE’s really don’t care so much about what you are learning in the process.After all, how are you supposed to learn if you don’t make mistakes and have someone show you that you are mistaken?

Because if there are no comments on your work, then your typical fresh-from-uni mind translates no-comments to 100/100 on your work, which is not always the case. Sometimes you may be making mistakes, but the EE’s correct it and submit it without letting you know.

Again step (c) is strangely important, since there’s always the danger of Big H. not being aware of how much work you are really doing because EE is conveniently forgetting to bring your name up since he’s too busy telling Big H. about his busy schedule, and all the work he is doing, since remember, his promotion is at stake here.

So you, the trainee, may need to deal directly with Big H. because as mentioned in The New Kid (Part 1), he is the source of the work, and most EE’s are more prone to make a move – training you or giving you proper engineering work – if they got the order from above, since you are like the little annoying office mouse whose voice doesn’t matter.

And since your “office-mouse” voice might not matter to the EE’s anyway, and Big H. has all the work anyway, make it explicitly clear to Big H. when you want to know how you’re progressing, how many more responsibilities you would like to take, or if you’re not being challenged enough by those EE’s.

In other words, feel free to bypass this mid-sectional level if you have to, just don’t be overhostile about it, since it’s a dog-eat-dog business at work.If the EE already don’t like you from day one(because of your nationality or if you entered through your father’s was6a), they might do whatever to make you look bad to Big H. If you come in late once, they might exaggerate it that you’re always late. So be careful around the EE‘s because you can never know who to trust. Again, coming from a university environment, it’s easy to trust your fellow classmates, because at the end of the day,your grade was your grade. It reflected your studying. Nobody could affect your grade unless there was team work involved. But at work, most of the work is teamwork so how you cooperate and co-ordinate with others really matters. Additionally, Big H. might be more likely to listen and believe EE since they’ve been there longer than you, Mr. New-Kid-In-The-Block.

The thing is, don’t be afraid of approaching Big H.’s since they’re normally friendly people who are also understanding though they have to make tough decisions sometimes (i.e. terminate people) just so the work will continue as per standards. This fear-of-the-boss is just like the fear-of-professors in university, because students were afraid of being honest with professors, and dealing with them “lest they fail me”. But this fear of facing figures of authority is not always justified. If you’re Muslim, and you believe that your risq is maktoob by Allah subhaanahu wa ta3ala, then you will get your risq if not from your current employer but from somewhere else. And overall, you can only ta2khuth bi asbab al naja7, and tawfeeq comes from Allah subhaanahu wa ta3ala.