The lab I did my postdoc in had one project that was funded by the Office of Naval Research. At one point someone from ONR visited the lab as part of some routine checkup process and asked if he could review our time cards. The resulting blank stares suggested a bit of a cultural gap between the Navy and academia.
The bathroom at my new office is just so much filthier than at my old office.
Clearly you just swing by your old office when you need to use the can.
Ten years after I left the private sector, not billing my time still makes me happy. I don't work in any way that can be rationally billed! There are short bursts of activity at very very long intervals! My total output seems to make people happy, but accounting for my time on an ongoing basis is embarrassing and insane.
Also, where on earth are you working? I've never been in an office that didn't have the bathrooms professionally cleaned daily? or at least regularly?
The toilets at my workplace are cleaned so frequently that more often than not they're closed for cleaning when I need to use them.
The bathroom is for the whole floor and I think maybe some of the other offices don't employ people with healthy diets.
How are the bathrooms on the other floors?
My office has had to send round all-staff emails on the following subjects:
Someone jamming magazines (paper, not firearm) and coat hangers down the pan in the women's toilet (twice)
Someone smearing human waste on the walls of the women's toilet (also twice)
Every time one goes round there is this hush in the office as we all look round and try to work out who the headcase is.
11 Women's toilets have different plumbing than ours do.
re: 11
Lucas is using British usage. The pan is the porcelain bit you shit into.
Ah, so "pan" means "toilet" and "toilet" means "restroom".
The word "panic" was derived from the fearful feeling you get as the water reaches the top of the toilet with no sign of slowing.
This thread went in an interesting direction.
I think I'll go ahead and break the 40 comment rule.
Belated realization about a completely trivial matter: Rewatching the eminently forgettable Ghost Ship this weekend (the 2002 movie with Gabriel Byrne), I realized that it's almost literally Event Horizon at sea instead of in space. I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me the first time.
I'm going to poop on your doorstep.
19: Does that count as billable time?
If I were a sane person in a sane workplace I didn't want to get fired from that had this policy, then I'd only break things down to 10-minute increments in two situations.
1. I'm both swamped and pulled in multiple directions and need to account for literally every minute I'm working on Project A and Project B because someone from Project C is also entitled to my time. (I wouldn't call this situation sane if it lasted a long time, but any job can have a busy period for a few weeks.)
2. I've opted to work outside the normal hours for one quick task either because it's urgent or because it's something I forgot or didn't know about earlier.
Other than that, half-hour increments are as detailed as I would get. I think that's reasonable. I've complained about my job a fair amount over the past few months but I'm lucky it's never been anywhere near bad enough that I need to time my bathroom breaks.
I used to work with a guy who claimed he was always constipated the entire time he was on vacation.
If you're a private sector attorney, you bill by the 6 minute increment, and are DEFRAUDING YOUR CLIENT if every 6 minute increment you bill to them isn't real work. It is so, so miserable. I'm not saying it's a sane way to work, but if I don't spend a large chunk of my day dicking around pointlessly, the productive bits don't happen, and yet the pointless dicking around doesn't seem to be honestly billable.
A big chunk of why my law firm career was so weak, was (I think) that my billable hours were always very low. My total output seemed fine, the rate at which I got things done seemed to make people happy, but I was billing much less than another lawyer would for the same task, and I didn't really have extra capacity to do more -- I could do as much in a week as a high-billing attorney could, but not more, and my working style didn't let me honestly bill the same amount for it.
(I always darkly assumed that the higher-billing lawyers worked more like I do than they were willing to admit, and were just less inhibited about the fraud thing.)
6 minute increments? Do you use a stop watch or is there some kind of special lawyers clock?
You can use stop watches, or just look at a clock and keep notes. (I didn't, very well. I'm being all boastful about not committing fraud, but while I think my overall numbers were honest in bulk, they were largely invented from memory in detail. I was consumed by guilt all the time. It was really really awful.)
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Campaign logos are an interesting topic. I suggest a thread inspired by this post.
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I know that lawyers overbilling for their time is fraud because it was an important plot point in The Firm.
The Grisham novel or the porn movie of the same title?
I have similar issues tracking time for work for clients. Since a lot of my work is non-billable, or indirectly billable,* I don't have to do it that finely. But, it's often the case that I'm working on multiple pieces of billable work at one time, and am context shifting back and forth. I'm terrible about tracking this.
Again, as with LB, I'm pretty accurate in the global sense. If I say I've done 7 hours for you this week, I've probably done at least 7 hours for you. I never consciously over record time. But if you were to expect that I'd accurately tracked precisely which exact slice of time I spent on your code, you'd be out of luck.
* I'm the overhead on your project, since, some of the time, I'm the person managing the development team, or I'm "owning the product" which means I'm answering questions from devs as and when they come up, but they are coming up in random chunks all over the place, and I'm not tracking my time at the 6 minute level of accuracy. I just bundle it up, into "I spent about an hour today on project X".
It's a very goofy system. If I'm having a stupid day, I may take an hour to find something out, that on one of my relatively smarter days, I can find out in a few minutes.
I always imagine the billing attorney will write off my charges anyway.
I kept an Excel sheet open the whole time for notes and added things up and dumped them into the company's web timesheet system at the end of the day. Or end of week, because there was a totally arbitrary target one had to fiddle to meet.
There's an app. It's not required and I don't use it.
if I don't spend a large chunk of my day dicking around pointlessly, the productive bits don't happen, and yet the pointless dicking around doesn't seem to be honestly billable.
I have the same experience (though, thankfully, do I am able to track by half-hour periods, which makes it much easier), it's also something that I've been thinking about for a long time.
I usually don't like stuff like 27 -- I find commentary on design either incomprehensible or just poorly done -- but this is a smart piece. The author is perhaps a little more charitable to Warren's logo than I would be, but like the author, I never agreed with the derision of Hillary's logo.
Can we have an official new shutdown thread? I tried to revive the old one yesterday but it stayed shut down.
further to 10, the men's loo on my floor is used entirely by grown-ass PhD scientists and yet still, on any given day, at least one or two of the four commodes is out of service because someone(s) literally doesn't know how to use a toilet and is constantly filling the goddam things up with fistfuls of hand towel. This has been the standard state of affairs for years now. If I had any idea who it was I'd choke him/them with my bare hands, which I would then wash very thoroughly. Adding to the misery, the university has recently announced plans to locate a student centre across the hall that will be served by this same loo, which will at least double the traffic. I'll never be able to shit at work again.
Years ago, I heard a story where someone billed a couple of extra pages at a time to different clients in a rotation using the office photocopier, which required entering client codes, for personal photocopying until they'd copied a whole book, which I think was a textbook for learning the language spoken where they were planning to travel after saving enough money to quit.
I believe this was one of the only people in the office with a law degree.
27: The most interesting thing about that was learning that only two states have neither an A nor an O in their name, Mississippi and New Jersey. Sorry to be all more-serious-than-thou, nothing against the discipline of graphic design in general but that article rubs me the wrong way in a whole lot of ways.
On the original topic, I've often thought that my job has me in an unusual situation. I'm a salaried employee but expected to track my hours closely because I'm a contractor in a government office. My salary is the same either way, unless I go so deep in the hole on paid leave that I need to take unpaid leave (which has never happened and I'm not sure about the details if it does), same for everyone else here, but we still get frequent reminders about tracking our hours. That's not normal, is it? I've spent the past 10 years in this industry but I have the sense that for the vast majority of Americans, either you're hourly and punch a time card, metaphorically speaking, or you're exempt and work the job not the clock.
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So here's my own ATM. My car (my beautiful 2012 Mini Cooper S) was in a bad flood in October. Like almost up to the door handles bad. And stupid me tried to drive it out. It got cleaned out at an auto body shop but I've been waiting for my mechanic to get back from an extended vacation. Now he's back and initially he said it was not worth fixing and I should sell it for parts but that was before he looked at it. Apparently the computer is completely shot. Now he says he wants to buy a new computer/electronics for the car (about 1,500 USD give or take a hundred) and see if it will start and I'd be totally game if I thought it had a good chance of working but I'm not sure about that and I'm worried about throwing good money after bad. Any advice?
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40.1: Mostly, I think you're taking it too seriously. Inasmuch as it is serious, I think the article has a point: presentation matters (far more than substance, as HRC has demonstrated, twice) and shitty presentation speaks badly of the candidate.
40.2: I was in the same situation, at an advertising agency. I think that's quite normal in b2b businesses.
Back when I was a paralegal I worked with some lawyers who would get literally months behind in their time entry, and then make it all up at once. There is no chance at all that the bills they submitted represented an honest accounting of their time.
The point in 27 about the changes wrought by the Obama 2008 logo are compelling (if not new); the rest seems to be projecting the author's expertise as a predictor of everything else under the sun. (If the Romney 2012 logo was so horrible, why did he win the primary? Who the fuck has enough of a sense of early Soviet graphic design for associations with it to hit even on a subconscious level? Etc.)
45.last Um, me, and on a conscious level but then I'm a big fan of Soviet Constructivism.
Who the fuck has enough of a sense of early Soviet graphic design for associations with it to hit even on a subconscious level?
I don't know, I thought the connection was pretty obvious. But I've always been a sucker for Soviet graphic design.
45: One doesn't need to posit memory of Soviet propaganda to say the design is effective; the design is effective on its own merits. The similarity may be deliberate (and good spot if it is) or may be convergent design.
40, 42: I've billed throughout my career; for the first 15 years or so, I was paid hourly, so it made a lot of sense. I'm now salaried, but we track by client and bill some projects hourly, so I'm tracking my time without the same sense of reward for the extra hours.
I thought the link in 27 was really interesting. It's best read as commentary on graphic design rather than election handicapping, though I do think the quality of design and other creative work is a minor but underappreciated factor in elections.
48 I don't think it's convergent design at all, Constructivist poster design is studied at art school and any graphic designer worth their salt will be very well familiar with it.
41: How much can you afford ~$1,500 that might wind up being completely wasted? How much do you care about this specific car, or this model of car? Personally my house is the only thing I own that I'd care about enough to spend that kind of money on for the chance of saving, but I could afford it if I had to, there are weirder things to be sentimental about, and maybe something about the car or model of car makes it really important.
Yes, obviously such people exist; if I need to be more precise in my words, any at all significant fraction of the population.
52 I can afford it and I only paid about 8,000 for the car in the first place. And I love it. Or at least I love the model enough I would seriously consider buying another one. I just don't want to throw 1,500 or more at it, have it come to naught, and then go and spend a lot more than 8,000 on another car. Which I'm almost sure will happen given the kind of shitty luck that tends to come my way.
51: Yes. That makes more sense. Persistent traditions in design based on efficacy. I don't know art history, but I'm guessing those Soviet designers were drawing on classical art training directly descended from Renaissance developments mentioned in 27.
Look, if you spend $1500 you will cause a divergence in the timeline. In one timeline, you have saved your car, in the other, you have wasted $1500. Plus there is the other timeline in which you both saved $1500 and did not save your car. So, between the three timelines, you've got a total cost of $1500 * 2 timelines offset by the $8000 value for the car in the case where the car is saved. That works out to a $5000 profit across all three timelines.
That's a good value, but the problem is that its unevenly distributed, with the overall benefit going to the Barry in the timeline in which the car has been saved. The other two Barries get screwed. What I would suggest is that you figure out a way to have Barry from the timeline with the working car share his fortune with the other two quantum Barries, so that it all evens out.
Or jump to the fixed car timeline, kill that Barry, and assume his life.
41: A friend flooded his car and got it running again -- by having the guy who towed it out of the river act immediately to dry it out. But the floor rusted out before too long.
(Pro tip: If you're driving near a river in a major rainstorm and hit a puddle, don't hit the accelerator to get through it, even if that worked the first two times you tried it.)
Speaking of timelines, has anyone else noticed that if you tune in to a rerun of the original Star Trek, Spock has facial hair in every episode except one?
Or jump to the fixed car timeline, kill that Barry, and assume his life.
You know, I tried doing that once to my double in the Bernie Sanders is President timeline, but other me was so buff from all the free healthcare that he kicked my ass.
Speaking of timelines, has anyone else noticed that if you tune in to a rerun of the original Star Trek, Spock has facial hair in every episode except one?
Yeah, I was suspicious a few years back when suddenly there were a bunch of TNG episodes where Commander Riker has a beard. That's not the way it was before the dark times.
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(I might have asked this before and forgotten, but it seems like it's vaguely on-topic)
If I contract with a lawyer/small firm to do something for me, and they say it should cost about $X (equivalently, telling me how many hours of their time it should take, they've told me their billing rate) and take a retainer for $X/2, how surprised should I be when the next thing I hear from them is a bill for $3X? It's water under the bridge, I've paid it and the work is done, but I feel like I should have gotten some notice either when they consumed the retainer or when they blew past $X amount of work.
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65: I have no idea what the industry standard is, but I'd hope that what you've described falls outside it, and I'd try to avoid doing business with them in the future.
only two states have neither an A nor an O in their name, Mississippi and New Jersey
Kentucky?
65: I've never done it, but I think you should have complained before you paid. Maybe asked for something knocked off the bill.
38: do you have the people who stuff paper into the sink? incredibly common pathology that's utterly pointless and stupid and not obviously enjoyable.
Not the sink. They tend to try to flush vast quantities of unused paper, and/or leave it scattered around the floor.
57: Spike is Abed Nadir.
Maybe they're using the paper as an improvised plug?
A mostly flat disk with a slightly rounded bottom would also work.
They tend to try to flush vast quantities of unused paper, and/or leave it scattered around the floor.
That would be the vast quantities of paper they use to avoid making contact with the toilet seat.
That works better with three whole rolls to form a tripod. Probably best to throw them in the trash instead of flushing.
5:00 AM: Start work--revising lecture notes from yesterday's class
5:15 AM: Switch to writing about differences between researchers' various estimates of income inequality levels and trends
6:00 AM: Send 500 words on income inequality off for review
6:02 AM: Put 500 more words on income inequality in the tickler file to review next week
6:04 AM: Stare at wall because it becomes clear I am not going to make tomorrow's deadline finishing piece on my views of the future of employment in developing countries
6:15 AM: Stop staring at wall and start reading Martin Wolf's rant about Brexit.
6:20 AM: Rant about Brexit
6:25 AM: Commit short rant about Brexit to Twitter and weblog
6:27 AM: Unload dishwasher
6:28 AM: Query possible breakfast partner whether we are in fact meeting at Saul's at 8:30 AM
6:30 AM: Archive every unread inbox email
6:32 AM: Start making tea...
6:34 AM: **********
6:39 AM: Start drinking tea
6:40 AM: Begin laughing at Unfogged comment threads
6:59 AM: Post to Unfogged comment thread
7:00 AM: Start reading "On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough", by Alberto F. Alesina, Paola Giuliano, Nathan Nunn...
You can't unload a dishwasher that fast without risking the dishes.
Who says I care about not breaking dishes?
67, 81: Don't you remember those states seceded after Obama was elected? Or are you people in an alternate time-line????
79: Darb gets more done from 5 am to 7 am than I do in a whole week. It's not nice to brag!
84 Same here but I get more Unfogged commenting done between 6:40 AM and 6:59 AM than he does.
View from my office window, and weather forecast for today:
https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad390e553200c-pi
billable hours are the single worst invention in the history of the universe. It's a system designed to punish efficient workers, which is pretty much the worst thing you want to do from a business perspective. As someone who was very efficient at various technical things (and MUCH more efficient than any of my law firm colleagues), I would end up doing (a) either the same amount of work, but in less time, resulting in clocking less billable hours (and possibly not enough for the year-end bonus, which was entirely hours based) or (b) twice as much work, which doesn't quite seem fair either.
Sure, it was great to have a reputation for efficiency during those moments that were truly "crunch time" - when a deal needed to be put together in mere days - but the rest of the time it was just a system of distorted incentives.
I second all of LB's comments above. Twelve years plus since I got away from billing by the hour and it still makes my stomach drop to think about it.