In most parts of the United States this weekend is the start of Daylight Saving Time – at 2:00AM this Sunday morning clocks are set to 3:00AM, until late next Fall.
Unfortunately, if you have created a Facebook event that is happening this Sunday and you are in a DST-using location, Facebook’s coding is going to mess mightily with the displayed event time, as it gets confused between you creating the event in Standard Time yet the event is in DST.
What happens is:
A friend just called me in a panic. We had scheduled (some time ago) a performance event at her house to happen one evening next week. But she came into her newish job this morning to find that they expected her to attend an evening board meeting at that time! She was both irritated by the work requirement – though she knew the job would not always be 9-5 she felt like she had no control over her personal time due to this conflict – and guilty/concerned about messing up the performance. What should she do about it all?
Long ago, before laser, inkjet, or even dot matrix printers, before Word or standalone word processors, there was the typewriter. No “delete” key, just “oops!” or more salty language when you typed something incorrectly.
Various remedies were available for analog correction: Wite-Out was a small bottle of white paint for covering over the incorrect typing so you could re-type over it. Correction film was a small sheet of plastic coated on one side with a white substance: you held this between the paper in the typewriter and its keys, then typed the same WRONG letter in the same place, so that the film’s coating would exactly transfer to the paper, covering the letter. Fancy IBM electric typewriters had a spool of correction film built in for instant use.
Why am I telling you this? Because today you would be hard-pressed to find either of these correction tools in your home or office, yet there may still be an occasion when you need to block out a mistake on a document.
For instance, I had a paper form I needed to fill out by hand (since I did not have a PDF to edit online) and fax to a company. Just before I sent it I realized I had checked a wrong box on it, but trying to change it would be messy (and as it was a legal document probably render it unacceptable). Any bottle of correction fluid I’d had was long ago dried up. My only typewriter tool was an old typing ball I’d saved for nostalgia.
BUT – what my office DID have was an electronic label-maker, which prints black letters on *white sticky tape*! I clipped off a small piece of unprinted tape, places it over the incorrect mark, added the correct mark, photocopied the document (to make the added tape piece less noticeable), and faxed the document with no complaints from the recipient.
In addition to collecting interesting information that later is useful to people I meet, I’m also known for my ability to discover information I don’t already know. Both of these abilities are based on a skill you can hone yourself to better access information you need – it all comes down to paying attention to details.
It’s not always easy for me to demonstrate how I do this in a straightforward way, but I just did a quick information discovery exercise that serves as a clear example: