I'm working at a coffee shop for the first time in almost a year after a stint freelancing and working out of coffee shops on a regular basis.

I'm at a cool discussion lounge with hip students, eclectic drinks, a hipster vibe and an interesting play list ranging from America, to Tears for Fears, Hall and Oats, Black Flag, and Joe Jackson - and everyone's wearing big ol' can
headphones and listening to their personal playlists.

Well, all the kids, that is - there's another gray hair'd guy working across the coffee shop from me that I spied tapping his foot along to The Who.

Man, I used to work out of coffee shops to get out of my own space - not to bring it somewhere else!

Oh, and another thing - millenials are generally quite slouchy and will have back problems by the time they're my age.
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I'm at a cool discussion lounge with hip students, eclectic drinks, a hipster vibe and an interesting play list ranging from America, to Tears for Fears, Hall and Oats, Black Flag, and Joe Jackson - and everyone's wearing big ol' can
headphones and listening to their personal playlists.

I must be out of it, but do you mean working from a coffee shop? No one goes to the office?

The only people that work out of coffee shops over here are sales people stopping in between site visits. I do see more people working from home in some organizations.. I feel like one of the last old school guys that goes into
the office each day.

- Mark
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Quoting poindexter FORTRAN to All <=-

Man, I used to work out of coffee shops to get out of my own space -
not to bring it somewhere else!

A dozen years ago when I was in the mortgage business I worked out of
coffee shops quite often as you said just to get out of my own space.
I enjoyed it but if the phone rang it was run outside....

Shawn

... He's all crown - no filling.

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Weatherman wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

I must be out of it, but do you mean working from a coffee shop? No
one goes to the office?

Coffee shops around Silicon Valley have been overcome by freelancers with sticker-covered MacBook Pros, buying a single latte and camping out on the coffeeshop wifi for hours. It's become a thing - so much that it started the idea of co-working spaces.

I feel like one of the last old school guys that goes into
the office each day.

I go into the office every day, then get messages via Slack from people in
the office. While collaboration tools have definite benefits, I get so much more from walking over and talking to someone when possible.




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I go into the office every day, then get messages via Slack from people
in the office. While collaboration tools have definite benefits, I get so much more from walking over and talking to someone when possible.

Same here. Collaboration is great, but it is easier to walk over and talk to the person when they are close. Just getting everyone to use the tools we have
is a challenge.

Many businesses suffer not from lack of tools, but lack of decent work-flows. Still doing things in very manual and old ways when there are much more automated and better ways to do things. The trick is getting people to move forward.

- Mark
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On 12-08-19 11:34, Weatherman wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

Same here. Collaboration is great, but it is easier to walk over and
talk to the person when they are close. Just getting everyone to use
the tools we have
is a challenge.

Despite my affinity for technology, I get a bit old fashioned in an office environment and prefer to walk over and talk to people, rather than use the phone or email/chat. But I will forward any pertinent details discussed via email as a followup.

Many businesses suffer not from lack of tools, but lack of decent work-flows. Still doing things in very manual and old ways when there
are much more automated and better ways to do things. The trick is getting people to move forward.

That's true. I ran a (near) paperless office at home in 2004. It was simply easier for me. I did have to print out the occasional document for the accountant or for sending by post. Today, going paperless is even easier.


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That's true. I ran a (near) paperless office at home in 2004. It was
simply easier for me. I did have to print out the occasional document for the accountant or for sending by post. Today, going paperless is even easier.

I went paperless at home about 6 years ago. The boxes of paper were getting out of control and being a tech person, made no sense.

Purchased a feeding style scanner and scanned everything in to PDF. Been keeping up with it each week and have a nice organized directory filing system.

The only documents I keep on paper are legal ones.

- Mark
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Re: Re: Cafe Working...
By: Weatherman to Vk3jed on Sun Dec 08 2019 06:55 pm

I went paperless at home about 6 years ago. The boxes of paper were getting out of control and being a tech person, made no sense.

I did too!

I started off with the printer that could scan - but it didnt scan duplex, and the scan time was sloooow, and I had 20+ years worth of stuff - it was taking a
long time. (I'm a document horder.)

So I invested in a Fujitsu SnapScan - best investment I made. It was expensive (around $500 if I recall) - but it scanned a year's worth of stuff in a few hours, compared to several days with the printer/scanner. And its still working
well 5+ years on (dont recall when I bought it) - and it tells me its scanned 8976 pages so far...

Then I invested in a paper scredder - and its 99% gone.
...����

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Re: Re: Cafe Working...
By: Weatherman to Poindexter Fortran on Sun Dec 08 2019 11:34 am

Many businesses suffer not from lack of tools, but lack of decent work-flows. Still doing things in very manual and old ways when there are much more automated and better ways to do things. The trick is getting people to move forward.

My first taste of workflow automation came while working at a e-commerce company with a corporate office, call center and logistics center/warehouse in different cities. When I came in, everything was handled with email.

I brought in a helpdesk package I found, sat down with the departments, figured
out what had to get done as part of the day to day responsibilities, which teams did them, who were the customers, how long it'd take, and who needed to know if it took longer than that.

Built all that into workflows, and it rocked. Managers could pull a report of work closed per day, how many tickets were coming in, and when they escalated to other teams, what hadn't gotten done. It got everyone on the same page and gave them metrics to measure how the company's processes were doing.

And, give an exec a "dashboard" and your phone will stop ringing. Until they want more information added to their dashboards... :)
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Re: Re: Cafe Working...
By: Vk3jed to Weatherman on Mon Dec 09 2019 08:39 am

That's true. I ran a (near) paperless office at home in 2004. It was simply easier for me. I did have to print out the occasional document for the accountant or for sending by post. Today, going paperless is even easier.

When I got my first work MFP, I scanned that file cabinet of crap that the last
guy left, and got hooked on keeping electronic copies over paper.
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And, give an exec a "dashboard" and your phone will stop ringing. Until they want more information added to their dashboards... :)

Give an exec a dashboard, he'll be looking for the accelsiorator.... :P

Spec


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On 12-09-19 07:13, poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Vk3jed <=-

When I got my first work MFP, I scanned that file cabinet of crap that
the last
guy left, and got hooked on keeping electronic copies over paper.

I just can't prganise paper, so going paperless was a no brainer for me. :)


... Hey! Don't pick up that pho|>>+AEssee+|-? NO CARRIER
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My first taste of workflow automation came while working at a e-commerce company with a corporate office, call center and logistics
center/warehouse in different cities. When I came in, everything was handled with email.

We need workflow automation at so many levels, it could be a team's full time job forever. The issue is most departments are not technical and have no idea how to make things better or more automated. So they keep doing the same old crap forever.

IT isn't responsible for work-flows - that is a typically a department's responsibility. There is no "middle-man" right now, which it is greatly needed. The work-flows in many departments is nothing short of horrible, very manual, slow, and outdated.

We could pay the work-flow automation department out of the late fees alone that we get all the time because we can't pay our bills on time at work due to these horrible processes.

- Mark
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On 12-10-19 10:32, Weatherman wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

We need workflow automation at so many levels, it could be a team's
full time job forever. The issue is most departments are not technical and have no idea how to make things better or more automated. So they keep doing the same old crap forever.

I love automation. I'm crap at doing regular routine jobs, so automating as many of these as possible is good for me. On computers, I depend on clever scripts run by cron jobs so much around here, and these scripts do as much as I can add in.

On the BBSs, the nodelist generation is fully automatic. The BBS machine connects to the Windows machine, runs MakeNL on the nodelists that I manage, generates infopacks and hatches the result to the relevant file echos. There's safeguards in case the network drive isn't mounted for whatever reason.

Due to auditory sensitivities, I use a noise generator that runs on the same Banana Pi that the BBS runs on. Traditionally, I had it start and stop at specific times of day. However, that isn't perfect. Firstly, in the peak of summer, the CPU overheats. In the past, I'd manually disable it for a few weeks, but sometimes I'd have to start it manually on a cooler night, when I wasn't using a fan (which is a good substitute on hot nights). Secondly, I've added a different sound system, which has an inbuilt USB audio device. But to use that requires a different device change.

So the updated script that the cron job starts now does the following:

Read the PMU temperature. If that temperature exceeds a certain threshold (currently set at 55C by trial and error), the rest of the script is aborted.

Check for the presence of an additional audio device. If it's present, use that, otherwise use the normal (on board) audio device.

IT isn't responsible for work-flows - that is a typically a
department's responsibility. There is no "middle-man" right now, which
it is greatly needed. The work-flows in many departments is nothing
short of horrible, very manual, slow, and outdated.

True. When I was in IT, I'd automate as much of my own work as possible, and try to encourage automation where it affected me.


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On 09 Dec 2019, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...

Re: Re: Cafe Working...
By: Vk3jed to Weatherman on Mon Dec 09 2019 08:39 am

That's true. I ran a (near) paperless office at home in 2004. It was s easier for me. I did have to print out the occasional document for the accountant or for sending by post. Today, going paperless is even easi

When I got my first work MFP, I scanned that file cabinet of crap that
the last guy left, and got hooked on keeping electronic copies over
paper.

For many, many years, I would continually get these guilty feelings, after it being hammered into me during the early Reagan years, "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse", and mandates to reduce consumption of paper and a few other things - more paper was consumed, and everyone using a PC of any sort would gleefully print reams of pin-feed paper...

Then Laser Printers, followed by disposable ink jets.

I finally make a clean break from paper a little more than a decade ago, and for some time prior to that embraced a philosopy of, "Anything that *might*
get printed, becomes a pdf.

I originally started getting into the habit when someone would send me a fax, and I only had access to an online fax service. So I would convert the image put my graphic signature where appropriate to sign and date, then convert to pdf and fax it off as an email attachment through the fax service.

Very rarely was it absolutely neccessary to convert to hard copy, even if it was convenient.

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Weatherman wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

IT isn't responsible for work-flows - that is a typically a
department's responsibility. There is no "middle-man" right now, which
it is greatly needed. The work-flows in many departments is nothing
short of horrible, very manual, slow, and outdated.

I was fortunate that I got to sit with each of the departments and
understand their workflows. I've seen too many systems built without
knowledge of the business' processes, and seen too many "ticket cultures" where departments are more focused on closing tickets than resolving the
real customer issue. The best thing we ever did in IT was open up walk-in shops where people could pick up a new mouse, power supply or bag, sit down with a tech, and we could understand (and solve) the problem at hand, rather than trying to find a ticket category that best met the need and closing it.


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real customer issue. The best thing we ever did in IT was open up walk-in shops where people could pick up a new mouse, power supply or bag, sit
down with a tech, and we could understand (and solve) the problem at
hand, rather than trying to find a ticket category that best met the need and closing it.

Agreed, that is a much better approach. Sadly that is not what we do at my work. We just deal with the issue at hand and move on. Very few people have the skills to link the business process with tech. Normally a specialize skill-set is needed.

- Mark
���
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Weatherman wrote to Poindexter Fortran <=-

Agreed, that is a much better approach. Sadly that is not what we do
at my work. We just deal with the issue at hand and move on. Very few people have the skills to link the business process with tech.
Normally a specialize skill-set is needed.

If you can make your people fixing computers feel like they're contributing
to the success of the company by enabling others to do their jobs, it's
easy.

When they're outsourced "resources" who ultimately answer to a company
that's concerned about closing tickets within a contracted SLA, it's a challenge. The outsourcer's response is to lower costs by letting tickets
burn up to the SLA, then rush around and slap together a solution just
before the ticket passes SLA.


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