Every business needs to send packages. It’s just the natural order of business. But with such a dizzying array of options: Fedex, UPS, Purolator, DHL, who do you choose?

Well, I do not know if they are better suited to your needs or not, but after this advertisement (I apologize for the low quality, but I do not have access to a color scanner at the moment), Purolator had my vote [in 2006]!

For the curious, the missing text is the following:

From anywhere in Canada to every zip code in the U.S., trust the experience of Canada’s largest courier. Just visit purolator.com to ship all your documents in one easy step. Our enhanced technology ensures better U.S. tracking. And one courier means one invoice. For more information, visit purolator.com or call 1 888 529 9777 to order your U.S. shipping kit.

Well, based on this add, and the fact they ship to Moose Jaw express (1 888 JAW XPRS), I had to give them my vote [in 2006], eh?

It’s my day off (from sourcing), and this week I’m going to attack all those stupid How To Do Nothing at Work and Get Away With it lists. The latest one that was brought to my attention was one at FullDuplex.org

Their top 10 list goes as follows:

1. Look Busy
2. Look Stressed
3. Speak Quickly
4. Hide
5. Break a Limb
6. Make Excuses
7. Never Leave Your Office/Room
8. What they can’t see
9. Fool their eyes
10. Choose a profession people don’t understand

As far as I’m concerned, this is more work than just doing my job. After all, the only way you can truly get away with not working for any reasonable amount of time is to convince people you actually are working around the clock. This requires keeping up appearances, and most of the above suggestions require an awful lot of work. Let’s examine them one by one.

1. Look Busy
   This requires always having potentially relevant materials in hand, a lot of flustery movement, and good acting. You’ll have to spend time collecting relevant materials, keeping in shape, and taking acting classes.
2. Look Stressed
   Either you take acting classes, or you get stressed out trying to look stressed all the time – the first is work, and the second requires a good workout to get out.
3. Speak Quickly
   Auctioneer classes.
4. Hide
   Lots of time exploring the work area and observing your coworkers habits to determine where you can hide and when the best time to hide there is.
5. Break a Limb
   Either you put yourself through pain and agony, or get a fake cast and put yourself through pain and agony. Work however you look at it.
6. Make Excuses
   You’ll have to track which excuses you use when, as you only have so many relatives who can get sick/die so many times, and after a while, you’ll have to do some serious research to come up with new, plausible excuses.
7. Never Leave Your Office/Room
   Well, I lied – this one isn’t work, unless you count the therapy you are going to have to undergo to combat the anti-social phobias you’re going to develop as a result of this one.
8. What they can’t see
   Well, I guess this isn’t too much work after you rearrange your office, but you’re going to have to practice those very concerned looks to make sure people hurriedly walk away and don’t try to sneak a peak. But then you’ll be shunned, become an anti-social recluse, never leave your office/room, and we are back to our previous problem.
9. Fool their eyes
   Now you have to setup quick-switch programs and shortcuts to switch to real work in a flash and either constantly listen / watch for visitors or install monitoring software and hardware to let you know when someone is close. Plus, you’re going to have to work on your multi-tasking skills to remember where you switch from and what you switched to.
10. Choose a profession people don’t understand
    Problem here is that you have to understand it, or you’ll get found out – and if very few people understand it, it’s probably very hard and a lot of work, which is what you were trying to avoid in the first place.

Well, I hope I’ve convinced you that these lists are a waste of time and that it’s probably just easier to do your job and, more importantly, given you the confidence to tell the next person who sends you one of these lists to stop wasting time and do their damn job!

Have a great weekend!

Sometimes even bloggers are cursed by writer’s block, and sometimes even the witty rhetoric of other bloggers is not sufficient to get the creative gears moving again. So what’s a blogger to do? Where can a poor blogger turn for inspiration for that critical first line?

No longer will I need to ask that question when a plethora of delightful options await to stimulate the neurons at the San Jose State University Department of English & Comparative Literature, courtesy of generous submissions to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest!

If you ever feel a bout of writer’s block coming on, start with the 2006 winners, after all, how can you not be inspired by a sentence that so flawlessly integrates a burrito, an angel, and a shovel into one awe-inspiring lucid thought?

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA, USA

I was right, wasn’t I?

It has nothing to do with sourcing, but The Dilbert Blog is worth the read.  I found the last paragraph of yesterday’s post, Sleepless in California, quite enlightening.  Have a good weekend.