The Office Curmudgeon

Steal-proof Cable

Ok, I have to brag on my co-worker a bit, because I can’t get him to blog on this himself. This morning I came in to find one of extra long networking cables outside our office door. How did you get that returned, you may ask? Why did it not walk away, but get returned outside your office door? Pictures are worth a thousand words.

Let’s break down how Jeremy steal-proofed this girly bad boy. 1. He used a displeasing color. Few people look at a nearly flourescent pink cable and think, “Oh I gotta have that.” 2. He terminated the ends with jacks, not plugs. Looking at it, the novice would surmise that won’t work for them. 3. He finished the cable with ridiculously short jumpers, which no one in their right mind really needs. “Ooo, that would work perfect for my … nothing?”

Evil Genius at Work

I sometimes listen to Marketplace on NPR on the way home because it is typically on during the time I leave for home. Tonight I heard a great quote that made me think of a conversation I had with a co-worker within the last month. We were discussing the major factors of US economic fallout and how to view it in positive light. We both agreed that these times will be our cross to bear as a nation, state, city, or family. Things will right themselves, and this is a time for growth.

The quote was by Charles Handy, the “London Business School founder and Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Business Professor.”

[Referring to the US econmic situation] But there may be some good news in all of that and we may get back to a saner kind of world — what Adam Smith [author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations] called “cultivation” or “civilization” — where we don’t all sort of spend our life trying to make money, to buy things we don’t really need to impress the neighbors, and so on. But we actually do work not 60 hours a week, but 40 hours a week. Where we actually do take holidays. Where we actually get to know our kids again. ….

How tragic does that sound?

I just learned of the new NASDAQ index QGRI, which

allows taxpayers and other investors to measure the performance of U.S. companies that are participating in the government’s financial relief plan,

The index started at $1000 on Jan 5. As of today it is measured at $941.42

Although it is not the greatest of tools to measure how these companies are doing, it is the first thing toward accountablity that I’ve seen. :-/