Lessons

Professional Communication class has helped to get me used to a work environment. It has taught me to be critical of my work and make it more readable. It helped me to market ideas through public speaking and reports. It also helped me to market myself better for a job. Communications class has helped equip me for a professional occupation.

The extensive editing we did in PCom 132 showed me how bad my work is before it is edited. It showed me that the words I put my thoughts into don’t always read the same way I think. I need to make a habit of getting someone else to edit my work and editing critically.

Two valuable tools from Pcom 132 that help make writing more readable are the 3 C’s and PAFEO. Concision, clarity and coherence form a valuable checklist to keep writing understandable. PAFEO is a needed reminder to stay on topic, convincing, and relevant to the reader.

I definitely need practice public speaking, and the 5-minute presentations in Communications 142 have given me some much-needed practice, with useful criticism to help make my speaking better. Preparing for the large presentation has been a useful experience, and presenting it will be also.

Before technical communication class, my resume writing was terrible. I learned the format in high school, but I didn’t learn how to promote myself. My resume still needs work, but Pcom 132 showed me what’s wrong with it and gave me some tools to make it better.

Communications also familiarized me with memo write-ups, internet research, and blogs. It helped me get to know my class better, and taught me how much time you can waste on blogger.com.

Overall, Professional Communication has taught me three very important lessons:
1) Don’t get a job that requires report writing
2) Leave English grammar to the Brits
3) Leave public speaking to Mr Bean

The Tale of Three Plumbers

In my mind, professionalism is all about doing your best. It’s what separates the people who make sure that their work fully satisfies their customers from those who just get the job done (or pretend to), and run off with their paycheques.

Picture a few hypothetical characters (again): Fred, Bob and Big Tom. All of them are plumbers. All of them charge the same price per hour.

Fred is a perfectionist. He makes sure everything fits together perfectly and cleans up after his work. He has a policy of using every toilet he installs to make sure it even feels right. Whenever he is fixing something, he doesn’t just replace the damaged part, but inspects the whole system for the cause of the problem and anything else that could go wrong. He wears suspenders to avoid improper exposure.

Bob is a fast worker. He puts everything together as fast as he can, and just does a quick check to see if it works. He figures he shouldn’t waste any time since plumbers’ rates are expensive. When fixing something, he just replaces the damaged part, and avoids time-consuming troubleshooting. He does wear a belt.

Big Tom works at a snails pace, since he enjoys his hourly rate. He doesn’t care if everything fits together right. After all, if something doesn’t work, his customers can pay him for more time to fix it. When asked to fix something, he just gives the damaged part a quick patch that should last a while. He can’t bother with a belt or boxers, and enjoys excellent ventilation.

Fred is very professional. Even though he takes extra time to generate perfection, he saves time and money in the long run, since his work won’t randomly flood your house, and he solves potential disasters. Bob is also quite professional. Even though his work isn’t perfect, customers appreciate paying him for less time. Tom’s redneck relatives think he’s professional.

In mechanical engineering, we’ll have to be professional in the way Fred is, because if we’re not, we might not just be flooding someone’s house.

Why Can't We Collaborate on Stress Midterms?

Collaboration has two rather different meanings. The negative meaning of collaboration is working with an enemy in treason. An example of negative collaboration is how, during World War II, France and other countries cooperated with Germany once they were conquered.

The positive meaning of collaboration is working together toward a common goal. This kind of collaboration can be a very valuable practice.

Military tactics provide some of the best examples of positive collaboration. Maybe that's because most people who don't collaborate in war don't live to share their ingenious tactics. While military operations are insanely complex, a simplified tactic is very helpful in explaining what collaboration is all about, and how valuable it is.

Infantry alone can't accomplish much, since snipers, artillery, mines etc. easily pick them off. Long-range artillery is clumsy and useless in close combat. When artillery and infantry work together, they are very effective, since the artillery can blow away the infantry's threats from a distance, and the infantry can hide behind the artillery while protecting it from close-range threats.

The same tactic applies for those fighting for success in businesses. Some people are good at one thing, while others are good at another. If one person tackles a problem alone, he might get stumped by a problem that someone else would solve easily. When the right people work together, their strengths make up for each other’s weaknesses.

Another benefit of collaboration is that when people share their work, others who are doing something similar won’t have to reinvent the work done, but just adapt it to their project. This saves money, time, labor, and stress-induced heart attacks.

Unfortunately, collaboration can encourage a serious problem: laziness. Some people don’t take pride in their work when they work in groups. They let others do the work for them, or are sloppy since they don’t feel responsible for their work. Others might hog the work, and not let other people contribute. And then there are the personal conflicts that can erupt.

Overall though, collaboration is a very valuable technique. However, it has to be done right, so that everyone contributes to the goal and does quality work.

Mediterranean Currency and Skills

A talent is a variable unit of weight and money used in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle East. Since I don’t have any currency from these areas, I guess I’m completely untalented.

Talent is also a natural endowment or ability of superior quality, or a marked ability you are born with. Now this is bad, I’m pretty sure the only abilities I was born with were crying and diaper-dirtying. People may be considered talented because of special abilities like kazoo playing or burping the alphabet, but these are acquired skills, not talents.

Skills are much more important than talents. A lot of research has shown that talent isn’t as important as people used to think. Enron was a company that hired the smartest people available, and it was driven to bankruptcy. Meanwhile, companies that focused on teamwork, people skills, and other learned skills, have been extremely successful.

Studies have also shown that traditionally sought-after talents, such as a high I.Q., have little relation to how someone performs on the job. Tacit skill, or the ability to see the implications of choices, is much more relevant to success. This helps people to make decisions based on long-term consequences instead of immediate results.

This brings the question: why are we going to school, when implicit foresight and the other more important skills are developed by trial and error on the job? We should just do a couple of years of co-op to get our diplomas. Book knowledge won’t do us any good unless we learn how to apply it to real life.

Besides, wouldn’t we learn better if we were getting paid to learn?

Fords and Trailers

DISCLAIMER: If your name is Bob and you drive a rusty 1977 Ford, or if your name is Sam and you drive a 2007 BMW, I’m not talking about you on purpose. This article is completely fictional.

Success is having an old rusty Ford and a living in a run-down trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks.

Picture one hypothetical man named Bob. He has a rusty 1977 Ford that hasn't run on all four cylinders since 1998. He lives in a trailer with mildew stains in the ceiling (where there still is a ceiling) and one side window that isn't broken yet.

Now consider another hypothetical man, Sam. He drives a customized 2007 BMW convertible roadster, since he's got connections. He lives on a fancy acreage that includes a mini golf course and is bordered by a serene lake on three sides. His house was estimated to be worth $1.5 million last year, but that was before the renovation.

Who is more successful, Bob or Sam? Obviously Bob.

Why is Bob more successful? Consider his automotive success:

1. Bob knows how to handle roadside repairs when his car is broken down 17 miles from nowhere, and is in really good shape from walking those 17 miles to buy a gallon of oil. Sam doesn't even know what a lug nut is, hasn't walked for more than five minutes at a time in his life, and is scheduled for his third bypass surgery on Thursday.
2. Bob is a friend of mechanics everywhere he goes. Everyone hates Sam because they are so jealous of his car.
3. Bob knows how to patch a radiator with duct tape, and is an expert with JB Weld. Sam had to get Rick from BMW to open his hood for him.
4. Bob doesn't have to worry about the fact that his car doesn't lock, and starts it with a screwdriver. Sam worries constantly about his car, even though he never leaves his car unattended, and his alarm system can be clearly heard 2.375 miles away on a calm day.
5. Sam is more successful than Bob in one way though, he's better at receiving speeding tickets gracefully.

Now consider Bob’s housing success.

1. Bob can spill anything from Coke to chocolate melt on his floor and not worry about it. He never bought a vacuum, since his dog licks everything up. He finds that dog-licked spills make cool designs in the carpet. Sam can’t even spill water in his house, since it might find an unsealed crack in the hardwood floor. He can’t even think of getting a pet, since it might scratch the mahogany baseboards.
2. Bob didn’t lose any sleep over the tornado that came through town, since his windows were already boarded over, and he only had three-and-a-half shingles to lose. Sam worries every time he hears about a forest fire within 75 miles of his property, since local building codes won’t let him dig a 100 yard wide moat across the side of his property that isn’t bordered by the lake.
3. Bob doesn’t worry about security, because nobody thinks there could be anything valuable in his house. Even though Sam hires five experienced security guards, he worries that someone could break into his house if they parachuted on to it, since that crazy building code doesn’t allow roof-mounted flak guns. There was an issue about killing some endangered bird.

Overall, Bob has no worries, and is prepared for everything from spills to roadside breakdowns to tornadoes. He is rarely caught off guard, since chance favors his prepared mind. Sam isn’t prepared to face the fifty percent chance that he will die of a heart attack within five years, and worries constantly.

While this scenario was mildly exaggerated, I hope you can clearly see how people with rusty fords and boarded up trailers are more successful than those with next year’s most expensive car and a fancy mansion on the lake. So why don’t you give all your fancy cars and houses so you can learn true success? I’ll suffer through Sam’s lack of success for you.

Can't Choose what to Write About

Choices can be very deceiving. Sometimes it is obvious to everyone but the choice-maker that a choice is bad. Some people think they have to make everyone else’s choices for them. Others feel like they have to let others make their choices for them. Take the people that vote for President Bush for instance...

Choices are often not thought out very well. For instance, people buy cats. When you think about it, why would you buy a cute little fur-ball machine with a temper worse than a rabid rodeo bull, when you can buy a semi-obedient automatic face-washing machine, also known as a dog?

Many people deliberately ignore consequences when making choices. I choose to eat Mexican food, even though I know I might not be able to find a well-ventilated area later. A crazy amount of people ignore radioactive lungs, out-of-tune wheezing, and hacking that even cats with three inch diameter fur balls can’t relate to, when they choose to think that sucking on a cigarette's smelly butt makes them cool. And people even buy Fords.

Sometimes people don’t even realize the choices they make while trying to achieve certain results. For instance, in an effort to write blogs, many writers don’t realize that they are choosing to be depressive whiners. This same principle may apply to country songwriters too.

Consequences are the tools that reveal whether a choice was good or bad. Experiencing consequnces teaches us what bad decisions are. So, if you ever feel a need to get schooled in the art of terrible choice making, just let a pack of girls persuade you to join an innocent game of truth or dare.

It’s easy to pinpoint other people’s bad choices, but what about my own? Oh, they’re different.

Preschool

I've decided that the best learning environment is playschool.

Picture a nice quiet library with no books out of place, uncluttered walls, and nothing visually distracting. I don't think I've learned a thing in this kind of setting. The plainer the wall is, the more blankly I stare at it.

Now picture a busy playschool with toys heaped randomly on the colorfully stained floor and finger paintings falling off the rainbow-colored walls. How much have you learned in this kind of environment? Hitting the kid who's hogging the red push-car over the head with your Fisher Price hammer gets you in trouble. Finger paint doesn't taste good, but eating it is an easy way to get help drawing the cookie monster.

For a more recent example, think of how much you learned while sleeping off one of those Monday morning Application of Engineering Principles classes. Compare that with how much you learned in a cluttered high-school shop with random parts of alternators and starters in even more random places.

I know that any well-organized professor would disagree with this, but from my disordered perspective, I find that the more scattered the environment, the less scrambled my brain is, and the more I learn.

So, who's up for finding the brightest colors of paint that exist, filling up water balloons with them, going into some unsuspecting classroom, having a balloon fight, and totally showing up Picasso?

And who's bringing the Duplo?

Okay, seriously, here is what I think about learning:

• Mistakes are excellent teachers
• Trial and error teaches the most useful skills
• Learning by observing, then doing, works well
• The above point does not apply when in a classroom
• Interest level is closely linked to learning level

Trippin in Little Boots

Welcome to my Communications 142 blog. Dr. Jacobs likes making me trip over my words, and I'll be falling all over the place. How do you write 300 words about nothing with clarity, concision and logic if you're not a woman?

I'm stoked that we'll finally be able to make something other than redundant write-ups in shop class this semester. Making useless metal air-powered engines in fabrication class will definitely beat writing redundant reports that use 12 pages of tree to give 2 sentences worth of valuable information to a teacher that just writes "ok" on everything.

We should get together in fab class and make a boot especially for the OC security golf cart. It would be quite simple, but we could paint a picture of a yellow rubber duck on it and make it fancy to show security just how much we care for them. Then we could drive or drag the cart into the entrance to KSS and boot it up. Anyway, it would be sweet to watch security driving around later in a golf cart with mace-shaped hubs and a $500 alarm system.

I wonder if any of our teachers are cool enough to help make the boot without leaking the news to security. We should tell them about the UBC students and teachers that suspend a Volkswagen Bug in an intersection and bet them that they couldn’t do any better. Where’s a good place to suspend a booted golf cart in Kelowna?

Then our professional communication skills will really be needed. We’ll have to be able to spew garbage out of our mouths like a seasoned blogger when security asks us why their precious golf cart disappeared.

Anyway, fabrication class should be lots of fun even if we don't pull off the most pathetic hijacking in Kelowna's history.

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