Tricks de la Trade

I love stuff like this. A fellow over at Defective Yeti has compiled a list of crafty, shrewd little workarounds from people in various professions. The kind of knowledge you acquire after a long time doing something that is known mostly only to the people in that trade. The best 30 of them were compiled into an article here, and it has been so popular that Mr. Yeti has decided to give the idea its own website: TradeTricks.org.

My favorites:

Nurse
"Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they're most likely unconscious; if not, they're faking."

Professor
"If you have to give a poor grade to a student you know is going to object, put a lesser grade beside it on the paper and then scribble it out (but not so much that the student can't make it out). It will make them think that you originally gave them the lesser grade but then raised it after some thought. 99.9% percent of the time this will prevent them harassing you."

I once had a guy tell me that he worked on a road crew for a city. He said that the bulk of his day consisted of driving around and eating, then eventually showing up at the worksite, only to spend most of that time standing around leaning on a shovel. He said that it was a well-known trick that if you saw the supervisor's truck pull up, you should just point at something &emdash;didn't matter what&emdash; and the supervisor would assume you were doing something important. Otherwise he would stop and get out of his truck and try and figure out what you were up to. I always thought that was so cool; they had their supervisors so dialed in that all they had to do was stand there and point! Goodness.

As to my own tricks of the trade: I haven't really been a software engineer long enough to have acquired any great tricks, but I do have a couple good survival tactics. One is as follows: In meetings there is invariably one attendee who loves to hear herself talk, a total energy vampire who feels like time is being wasted if she isn't the one speaking. I'm the complete opposite: in group settings, I'm painfully shy and participate as little as humanly possible. So if I am called upon to speak, I make a point to leave really long pauses between phrases and act like I'm really deep in thought. Without fail, the Type A gasbag will find herself unable to take it any longer and interject and take over. This tactic has a 100% success rate, and I ascribe this to the fact that in any office setting, easily 20% of the people there suffer from that pathology I described above, where they can't stand not being the one talking. The idea is to harness that energy and make it work for you ("you" meaning me).

As a person who worked in the restaurant industry for about 15 years, I managed to pile up a few little tricks of the trade, and here are a couple:

Dishwasher

In most restaurants, when it gets busy, keeping up with the silverware is a big pain in the ass. You always have waiters and bussers yelling back, "We need more forks!" When I washed dishes, I quickly noticed that probably 85% of the silverware wasn't really dirty enough to warrant a full-on washing in the dish machine (which takes quite a bit longer). Indeed, most of the utensils didn't get used or even touched; the bussers just cleared them from the tables as a matter of course.

So when it got really busy, I found it quicker to take a few seconds and pull out the ten or twenty utensils that needed to be washed and send them through the dish machine, and just give the rest a quick rinse (in real hot water so they dry quickly). That way you're always on top of the silverware, and if a dirty fork or two gets past you, the waiters will usually catch it before they set it on a table.

Pizza Delivery Dispatcher

When the pizza table is really busy, sometimes the dispatcher needs to pull the reins in a little bit so everyone can catch up and nobody gets pissed off. A technique I used when the phone was ringing off the hook was to answer with "Hello [name of restaurant]. Just so you know, we're very busy and we're looking at about an hour and a half for deliveries right now." In sooth, the people would probably get their pie within 45 minutes or so, but they don't need to know that. Most people will just say, "Oh, okay. I'll try somewhere else. Thanks."

I'd love to hear the tricks of your particular trade.

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One of the radio stations here recently became and AirAmerica affiliate, bankrolled in part, ironically enough, by ClearChannel.

Although I paid fairly close attention to the hype surrounding its formation, I can't say that I was dying to hear AirAmerica myself. I can take a little bit of political talk radio, but for the most part, commercial radio here is just too fucking irritating for words. All the same, when I heard of the new station here, I decided to check it out.

After about three days worth of commutes listening to AirAmerica, I am reminded that the fundamental problem with talk radio is not that it has historically been preponderantly right-wing. It is one of the problems, sure, but the array of things that make talk radio so insufferable have less to do with which party line is being propagated, and much more to do with the relentlessly shrill and pedantic nature of the format. In other words, a liberal version of Rush Limbaugh is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, I often find myself wondering what talk radio was like pre-Limbaugh, because it seems to me that he has almost single-handedly turned into an exercise to see who can be the most obnoxious, bloviating, outrageous blowhard on the air. You've probably noticed that among right-wing radio talk show hosts, the ones that get the attention and the ratings that follow are the Michael Savages, the fuckers that can out-Limbaugh Rush Limbaugh.

The AirAmerica hosts I've heard aren't really all that outrageous, but they do indulge themselves in that thing where everything that the Republicans do is risible, ridiculous, worthy of a derisive "pffffft." The idea being that anything that comes out of the mouths of the enemies must be innately mendacious and evil, so no need to even bother dignifying it with a reasoned response. "Privatize Social Security? Pffffft!" Make no mistake: right-wing radio has been embracing the "pffffft"-style dialectic for years now; it just disappoints me that AirAmerica sees that as its shrewdest tactic. My stance is that "pffffft" is a poor substitute for dialogue, even internal dialogue, and that since our brains are capable of so much more, and indeed so much more is at stake, taking the "pffffft" approach to political discourse sets our asses back about ten years.

(As an aside: whenever I hear talk radio where they take phone calls, I always find myself surprised at how many people call in expecting &emdash;and feeling fully entitled to&emdash; a constructive political debate or discussion, as if that is ever ever ever going to happen on a commercial radio station, on a show run by one dogmatic, egomaniacal gabber whose ass is constantly on the line to keep the numbers high by &emdash;guess what?&emdash; keeping things exciting by hanging up on callers, getting people so mad that they say stupid shit, talking over them and humiliating them. ["Talk of the Nation" on NPR is a notable exception] I've never figured out what kind of personality you gotta have to compel you to waste your time calling in to these shows. )

So AirAmerica, despite the fact that I happen to agree with much of the opinion being propagated, is still a commercial operation, with all the attendant horseshit that that sort of thing entails: the 18 minutes of commercials every hour; the chirping, gurgling, shrieking self-promo interludes; and oh! the relentless and abject partisanism! Anyway, pandering to zealous dullards and resentful simpletons is not necessarily unique to the right wing, but you'd have a hard time arguing that they don't do it best. Which is why I give AirAmerica two years, tops. Maybe four if Bush stays in office.

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Leftovers:

Bill Stevenson of ALL, Descendents, and Black Flag (and Minuteflag!) fame has a new band called Only Crime. Fuck that website though! Quite possibly the most annoying and frustrating site EVER, and in fact looks like it might be somebody's senior project at the DeVry Institute. I looked at about four photos from Only Crime's recent tour before I found myself wanting to cold-cock whoever did that site.

Ever found yourself wondering whether this selfsame Bill Stevenson of ALL, Descendents, and Black Flag (and Minuteflag!) fame uses 13" or 14" hi-hat cymbals, or about the placement of his kick-drum beater? Well, now he has a website oriented toward the drumming part of his life called DrumOgre. Check out the "Recordings" page; fuck, the guy's had his paws on something like 200 albums! Then check out the "About" page: you'd think that a person born and raised in Torrance, California would be able to spell it... Anyway, good stuff for drum geeks.

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Kent 3- Spells
(Burn Burn Burn Records, 2000)

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