Four Neat Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Until yesterday, I had no idea that lots of hobbyists keep pet isopods -- the kind of animal that includes the roly-polies I used to play with as a child.

The photography at the site was so uniform and high-quality that it sparked some discussion that it might be AI, but this suggestion was shot down quickly.

While I have no intention of adopting the hobby, I agree with the guy who said that this is, "the kind of site that makes one happy the Internet exists."

2. It's time for another list of funny workplace stories from Ask a Manager. This one is good for a few quick laughs, and is less likely than other lists in the genre to provoke a visit down a comment rabbit hole.

My favorite of the bunch is Item 8:

The coffee

This wasn't so much an unreasonable request, but I was so proud of my sneakiness at the time -- I occasionally had to assist a woman who was notoriously mean to everyone. She always wanted Starbucks coffee, but the trouble was that the closest Starbucks was 4 blocks away and always had a huge line (this was before online ordering was a thing), so getting it would take forever. She DID. NOT. UNDERSTAND why her coffee wasn't magically appearing two minutes after she asked for it.

Finally, after being berated one too many times, I asked the Starbucks barista for a bunch of cups and lids, and from then on, any time this woman demanded her Starbucks coffee, I simply dipped into our kitchen, poured whatever Folgers coffee was let in the shared pot into the Starbucks cup, popped a lid on, and brought it back to her. She never knew the difference.

That last line hardly surprises me, given how burnt Starbucks coffee tastes to me.

3. You may have heard of people adopting dumb phones out of frustration with electronic distractions.

Enter the dumb tractor. There is now a startup in Alberta selling completely mechanical tractors to farmers wary about machines they can't repair and weary of short-sighted companies that seem intent on using software to get in the way of same.

[John] Deere eventually made concessions, but the damage was done. A generation of farmers learned exactly how much control they'd surrendered by buying machines loaded with proprietary code.

[Owner Doug] Wilson saw the gap and drove a tractor through it. The 12-valve Cummins is arguably the most widely understood diesel engine in North America. Every independent shop, every shade-tree mechanic with a set of wrenches, every farmer who grew up turning bolts has encountered one.

Parts sit on shelves in thousands of stores. Downtime -- the thing that actually costs a farmer money during planting or harvest -- shrinks dramatically when you don't need a factory technician with a laptop to diagnose a fuel delivery problem.

Business is booming, and I am sure this will continue, given the large number of farmers who buy decades-old equipment to escape that last limitation.

4. And speaking of retro, there is now a searchable, electronic version of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica online.

-- CAV