I was only briefly part of it for a couple summers in high school. I worked for a temp agency, working short-term jobs (from a few hours to a few weeks) at small businesses and factories in my town. One stint in particular was where I learned two important life lessons. They may seem trivial on the face of it, but to me the were profound.

It was a bottle-filling factory, to put it simply. We tended machines that filled bottles and tubes with various glues, oils and liquids, then packaged them for sale and shipment.

Lesson #1: Stay Busy.
In my bottle-filling job, the machines were temperamental. They would frequently malfunction. The first time the machine I was on shut down, I simply sat and waited. Mistake. Within minutes, the boss came by with a putty knife and explained how to get glue off the floor. I felt insulted, until I looked around and noticed how everyone else on the line looked busy, even with the machine down. They cleaned, they stacked, they sorted until the machine came back up. Moreover, they were doing essential activities that were hard to keep up with when the machine was running. They remained useful. And employed.

That putty knife was my friend the rest of that gig. Anytime my machine went down, I was the glue master. I stayed employed at the bottle-filling factory while several other temps came and went. I only moved on when the entire temp force was released when the work dried up. At every temp gig after that, I made sure I kept busy when the machine went down.

In the temp world, staying busy is a survival essential. You are only employed for exactly as long as you are useful. The moment you are seen as no longer needed, back in the queue you go. And in today’s employment environment, every job is a temp job it seems, no?

Lesson #2 Use your freaking head.
Back in the bottle-filling factory, a group of us worked this one particular line for several weeks. I was the young kid, a fresh 18, waiting for college to start. The others on the line were older, in their 30s give or take, working temp jobs while awaiting a better gig. It was a fairly slow-paced and quiet machine, so we chatted while we worked.

I made a rookie mistake. Once again, the machine went down. Not wanting to look un-busy (see #1 above), I took to cleaning some of the tubes of product that had gotten dirty in the machinery. I found myself with a big box full of ones ready to go to the packer at the end of the line. The guy running the packer was kind of a mysterious guy. He looked like he probably led a pretty hard life outside the factory. We did not say much to each other, but we had mutual respect going after this long time on one machine.

I took the big box of cleaned product and dumped it on the conveyor belt. The big slug hit the packer and snarled up the system. The guy at the packer growled at me “Use your [freaking] head!!” All I could do was smile sheepishly and go back to cleaning.

The “freaking” part is very important here. He used a more…choice…term, but the expletive is what makes this phrase work. It conveys the exasperation at the sheer foolishness that not using your head yields.

Those four words stuck with me. I should have known dumping a slug of product would screw things up, if I’d only taken a moment to think about it. Life in general is like that. Think ahead about how your actions will affect a others, particularly those down the line. Miss a deadline, dump a project on an underling, finish something in haste that really needed more care, and you can bring down the whole line. In life, yack on a cell phone in traffic, hit your little brother with a toy, make an insensitive comment to a friend…all these things lead to trouble that could be avoided if you “Use your [freaking] head!!”

To many adults, these lessons seem trivial. But we are not born with the knowledge. I’ll bet you know an adult or two who never learned these lessons.

It may have been minimum wage, but my experience was gold.

Observe the graph, and you will see that the price of a first class stamp has remained somewhere between 40 and 55 cents in constant, 2007 dollars since 1971. (We are using 2007 dollars because that’s what the inflation calculator tool I used uses…and it’s a good frame of reference because we all have a sense of what 2007 was like financially, 2008 is still too new!) Once we get past the inflation spikes of the late 70’s, there’s one recent outlier in 1999 where it came in at 52 cents. Not sure what happened there. But aside from 1999, since 1985 it has been a very steady 41 to 45 cent range, and a very steady 41 to 43 cents since 2001.

I think the USPS is doing a pretty good job keeping costs reasonable.

Props to Five Cent Nickel’s post on the subject for the idea for this post.

This graph uses this Inflation Calculator . Postage data is from a graph linked in this news report

Another common argument against them is that if the CFLs happen not to last their advertised time, 6000 hours to 10,000 hours, then that additional expense has more than wiped out the gain.

Well, good news. CFLs have come down in price to the point where even if they fail well before their expected time, they are still cheaper to operate. Let’s run the numbers.  (more…)

So let us list the things that we have done that we really did not have to if we had any sense. Or money. (more…)

Well, he is right. (more…)

Anyhoo, I puzzled over this for some time. I use my shuffle very little. It was working fine on a recent vacation. I laid it aside for a few weeks on my dresser. When I picked it up again, all I got was lights of death.

Here’s my theory. (more…)

Ironically, if I blather on much longer, I will violate my charter before I begin.

So I’ll shut up now.