Last month we talked about bosses and offices with weirdly outdated expectations from a far-off era. Here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The host

A former boss had very strong ideas about technology.

Pre-pandemic, some employees had access to Zoom and used it occasionally for in-house meetings.

Obviously, in 2020 we had to pivot to using Zoom for every meeting. My boss insisted that he be the “host” and the only “host” of Zoom meetings. He said it was important for people to know that he was host, in the sense that he was convening the meeting and responsible for the meeting outcomes. He could not be convinced that in a Zoom context, most of the hosting role involves managing the delivery of the meeting. Because he would not allow any co-hosts, so much time in meetings was spent on things like him asking someone to share their screen, when the person not have share screen permissions, and then we’d have to coach the boss, in real time, through the process of giving a meeting participant the ability to share their screen. Every time. There was no learning curve.

Relatively quickly, I started scheduling meetings and when he would ask to be “the host,” I’d say it was so weird, but Zoom wasn’t letting me make him the host, wow, technology, who knows, right? Then he would start every meeting by declaring that regardless of what the screen said, he was THE HOST of the meeting (akin to when Michael Scott on The Office “declared bankruptcy”).

2. The FedExes

My former boss, who just turned 90, had me FedEx a printed letter to Africa every time he sent an email to anyone there. This was literally in the last 10 years, so not decades ago. We’d often have a response from that person via email before FedEx even departed with the letter. These were $130ish PER LETTER to send, on our small nonprofit’s budget. Eventually I just started telling him I FedExed them even though I didn’t and he never knew the difference, but we saved so much money.

3. The “girl”

My boss shares an office with a separate business, and the other business owner insists on calling me “the girl” or “your girl” in conversations with my boss or others. It should be noted I am in my late thirties with a professional degree, not a high school student, not that that should matter. I finally started addressing him as “old man” with my boss’ approval and he has stopped talking to me all together.

4. The cost of an email

I once had a boss (~10 years ago) frantically pull me aside to ask how much money it cost to send an email. He was elated to learn it was a free action!

Same man wouldn’t allow us to have any books/newspapers, but don’t care what we were doing on the computers (this was a back-of-house retail job, so not in view of customers, but with some of the weird controlling behavior of your classic retail work). I think he was so computer illiterate that he genuinely couldn’t conceive of anything we could be doing on a computer that wasn’t work. You could fully see the screens while walking by, and people would blatantly be on Reddit/imgur with giant images and had no issue. But pull out anything on paper and we’d get in trouble. I was a college student and couldn’t do homework out of a physical textbook, but could off of a PDF of a textbook.

5. The mail merge

She was beyond computer illiterate to the point that she didn’t “trust” mail merging information, like mail merging name and address into a letter or invoice, and instead expected her people to type it out. I got dragged into the mess to show her how mail merge worked, try to teach it to her, show the high rate of errors when people are forced to type and Nope. Flat out not having it, doesn’t trust it, etc. Her staff ended up literally lying to her on how receipts and tax letters and invoices were being produced and basically blowing off work every Friday when they would work from home to … type for hours (and instead, of course took 10 minutes to mail merge).

6. The print-outs

We had an executive, just 10 years ago, whose admin would come in half an hour early so she could print out his schedule for the day, print out his emails, highlight the important bits, and assemble it all together in his leather folio for him. Then stick it under his iPad on his desk. She’d then stay late to type his email replies for him, from what he wrote on the paper.

This was the CIO. The head of IT.

7. The husband’s name

I worked at a very old-school membership library that wanted to grow their younger membership base. As the newest and youngest staff member, I was asked to contribute ideas. I pointed out that I made the initial membership contribution (before I got the job) and now worked for the org but the second I added my husband to my library account, every single piece of communication was addressed to Mrs. Husband’s First and Last Name. Including work mail. And that was something that was going to actively turn a lot of people away from joining or working with the org. Especially from the multiple universities around us.

The new director agreed but the rest of the staff, uh, did not and were very much in the “it is tradition! This is how we have always done it!” camp.

This was 2016.

8. The rules

At one place I worked, the owner hated the smell of coffee, so there were no coffee makers on site. People had to bring in their own coffee from home or a coffee shop. There were lots of other weird rules –

1. No popping popcorn in microwaves (one person put 30 minutes instead of 3, so no one was trusted with popcorn ever again).
2. Everyone must wear a name tag at all times.
3. No coats on the back of chairs (could get caught under wheels and cause an accident).
4. No temporarily keeping shared food on an empty desk (think donuts for a couple of hours). Eating at your desk was soon banned after a specific incident, even though it had previously been allowed. No clue why that day set the owner off. The owner was going to write up the employee until it was explained that the employee was on vacation and not responsible for someone else putting food on their desk.
5. All employees, including salaried employees, must use the time clock for entry, exit, and lunch breaks. The penalty for being one minute late was worse than calling off, so there would be people who literally called out from the parking lot and went back home. My team had a spreadsheet for time clock games to help us beat the system. Due to rounding, you could be gone for 14 minutes but clock a zero-minute lunch by clocking out at 12:08 and back in at 12:22, as an example. Both were rounded to 12:15, so it was a zero-minute lunch break. We used the same logic to have longer lunch breaks, since we only got 30 minutes.

9. The telex

I was brought in to do annual updates on a practice guide (big legal book designed to actually be helpful to practicing lawyers with real clients) in 2019 because the former editor was retiring. One of my recommended changes the first year was to change an example from “telex” to “facsimile.” The change wasn’t approved until the following year.

I will be doing updates this summer and might get bold and try to change it to “email.”

I only knew what a telex was because early in my career I worked on a case where the evidence went back to the 1940s, including telexes.

10. The last names

At my previous job, my boss was in her seventies – lovely woman, I really enjoyed working with her – but she insisted it was *just not done* to call anyone you worked with by their first name. The whole department was Miss, Mrs., Mr., or Dr. except for the custodian, and I’m like 90% sure that was just because he wouldn’t tell anyone his last name. Scratched it off his nametag and everything. My boss still called him Mr.

11. The sperm bank

I used to work in a small specialty medical lab. One of the services we offered was a sperm bank for men who were undergoing treatment for testicular cancer. A tech would examine the donation microscopically before freezing it to make sure it actually did contain viable sperm. Our boss would not let any of the single techs do the microscopic analysis, only the married ones could do it. He said it was inappropriate for a single woman to look at sperm.

12. The wooden blocks

About ten years ago, my sister worked in one of the largest public library systems in the United States, in a major city. Instead of emailing requests for books kept in the archives, she had to write each request on a piece of paper, rubber band the paper to a small block of wood, and throw the wooden block down the stairs into the basement/archives.

Twice a day, someone down there would gather the blocks, fill the requests, and bring up the books (for distribution to patrons) and wood (for reuse).

The post the wooden blocks, the meeting “host,” and other weirdly outdated office practices appeared first on Ask a Manager.

I ran across the information that Mafia was derived from a Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which surprised me and made me curious about further etymology. The OED (entry revised 2000) wasn’t much help — it just says “< Italian mafia (1865; also †maffia), probably back-formation < mafiuso, Italian regional (Sicily) mafiusu” — but the Wikipedia article has this fairly astonishing etymology section:

Mafia (English: /ˈmɑːfiə/; Italian: [ˈmaːfja]) derives from the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, which roughly translated means “swagger” but can also be translated as “boldness” or “bravado”. According to scholar Diego Gambetta, mafiusu (mafioso in Italian) in 19th-century Sicily, in reference to a man, signified “fearless”, “enterprising”, and “proud”. In reference to a woman, the feminine-form adjective mafiusa means “beautiful” or “attractive”. Because Sicily was under Islamic rule from 827 to 1091, Mafia may have come to Sicilian through Arabic, although the word’s origins are uncertain. Mafia in the Florentine dialect means “poverty” or “misery”, while a cognate word in Piedmontese is mafium, meaning “a little or petty person”. Possible Arabic roots of the word include:

■ maʿfī (معفي), meaning “exempted”. In Islamic law, jizya is the yearly tax imposed on non-Muslims residing in Muslim lands, and people who pay it are “exempted” from prosecution.
■ màha, meaning “quarry” or “cave”; the mafie were the caves in the region of Marsala that acted as hiding places for persecuted Muslims and later served other types of refugees, in particular Giuseppe Garibaldi’s “Redshirts” after their embarkment on Sicily in 1860 in the struggle for Italian unification. According to Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo [it], cave in Arabic literary writing is Maqtaa hagiar, while in popular Arabic it is pronounced as Mahias hagiar, and then “from Maqtaa (Mahias) = Mafia, that is cave, hence the name (ma)qotai, quarrymen, stone-cutters, that is, Mafia”.
■ mahyāṣ (مهياص), meaning “aggressive boasting” or “bragging”.
■ marfūḍ (مرفوض), meaning “rejected”, considered to be the most plausible derivation; marfūḍ developed into marpiuni (“swindler”) to marpiusu and finally mafiusu.
■ muʿāfā (معافى), meaning “safety” or “protection”.
■ maʿāfir (معافر), the name of an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo. The local peasants imitated these Arabs and as a result the tribe’s name entered the popular lexicon. The word Mafia was then used to refer to the defenders of Palermo during the Sicilian Vespers against rule of the Capetian House of Anjou on 30 March 1282.
■ mafyaʾ (مفيء), meaning “place of shade”. Shade meaning refuge or derived from refuge. After the Normans destroyed the Saracen rule in Sicily in the 11th century, Sicily became feudalistic. Most Arab smallholders became serfs on new estates, with some escaping to “the Mafia”. It became a secret refuge.

Does anyone have any thoughts about that parade of possibles?

The Netherlands’ largest newspaper, De Telegraaf, recently published an interview with a woman claiming to organise her own evacuation flights from Dubai, selling seats at €1,600 (US$ 1850) each. Four days later, her photo was removed from the article, though the interview remained.

Bellingcat has found that the original image not only includes artefacts commonly associated with generative AI, but that the flights referenced in the article do not appear to exist.

The story came at a time when thousands of Dutch people were reportedly seeking urgent ways to leave the region following Iranian missile and drone strikes across the Gulf in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes.

Published on De Telegraaf’s website on March 5, the headline reads: “Dutch people in the Middle East feel abandoned by the government: We just rented a plane ourselves.”

The Dutch minister of foreign affairs was confronted with this headline during a television interview, in which he described ongoing efforts by the Dutch government to repatriate citizens to the Netherlands.

The article features interviews with several Dutch people struggling to leave Dubai and Abu Dhabi, including Tamara Harema. Under the subheading “Dutch people hire their own plane”, Harema says she was “rebooked five times by Emirates” and that the official repatriation flights organised by the Dutch government were not ‘taking off’.

As part of a group, she says, they are organising buses and have hired an Airbus A321 to fly home. Harema is quoted as saying: “The first plane is already full, so we’re organising a second flight. Stranded travellers can contact us.”

However, several discrepancies in Harema’s photo, published in the original article, suggest it was AI-generated. No trace of a person matching Harema’s face or profile could be found, and flight-tracking data suggests no such plane took off.

The Photo

In the image below, the world’s tallest structure, Burj Khalifa, can be seen through the window overlooking the Dubai skyline. Each side of the tower is unique, with platforms that protrude at different heights and in different directions. It also contains several mechanical floors, which appear as dark bands in the photo.

By cross-checking the height of the visible platforms together with the location of the mechanical floors, it’s possible to determine that Harema’s hotel room faces north-west, towards the Burj Khalifa’s south-east-facing facade.

Several discrepancies are visible when comparing Harema’s photo with other images of the building, including an upper mechanical floor appearing higher than in other images and the absence of the water feature at the base of the building.

To establish whether Harema’s photo could have been taken several years earlier, Google Street View imagery was analysed from 2013 onwards. No match could be found when comparing the arrangement of buildings at the base of the Burj Khalifa.

Several other irregularities, as shown below, including the hotel room furniture and details of Harema’s clothing and jewellery, also suggest it may have been AI-generated.

Fully Booked Airbus A321

Regarding whether the plane existed, Harema says in her interview that buses have already been arranged to collect passengers from two locations in Dubai on Saturday, March 7, after which a 232-seater Airbus A321 will depart from Muscat, Oman, for the Netherlands.

The article notes the cost is €1,600 (US$ 1850) per person, without detours. “Although we read that a Dutch repatriation flight costs €600, just try getting on such a flight,” says Harema.

According to Flightradar24, multiple A321s departed Muscat on March 7 and 8, but none bound for the Netherlands. The only aircraft that did arrive in Amsterdam from Muscat were either government-organised repatriation flights or scheduled Oman Air services, none of which were Airbus A321s.

Two Airbus A321s were recorded on the ground at Muscat Airport on March 7. One, belonging to Gulf Air, later departed for Rome via Riyadh March 8. The other, operated by SalamAir, had been flying routes between Oman and Bangladesh until March 3, but has since remained in Muscat.

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After contacting De Telegraaf, an explanation for the photo’s removal was added at the bottom of the article, stating that the photo did “likely not meet our journalistic guidelines.”

The newspaper’s deputy editor-in-chief, Joost de Haas, added:

“Regarding the quoted Tamara Harema, the editors contacted her after Mr. Chizki Loonstein—a long-standing source for one of our reporters—informed us about attempts to charter a plane. Mr Loonstein informed us that Ms Harema stayed in Dubai and could tell us more about it. This led to messages from which several quotes from Harema were extracted, as reproduced in the relevant passage of the article.”

A search for Loonstein led to a six-month-old report from another Dutch newspaper, NRC, which claimed that Loonstein, a lawyer, emigrated to Dubai after his legal company went bankrupt, leaving his clients, victims of fraud, worse off.

Contacted for comment, Loonstein confirmed that he knew Harema and had shared her contact details in “an app group” in relation to a flight from Muscat to Amsterdam. After this contact, Bellingcat sent him the photo of Harema to confirm her identity and asked him to share Harema’s contact details. In response, Loonstein refused to provide further comment. 

Merel Zoet and Claire Press contributed to this report.

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The post AI Used to Promote Non-Existent Evacuation Flights From the Middle East appeared first on bellingcat.

mondengel2:

ef-1:

My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:

And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process

And from this:

we got this:

The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.

I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.

When Formula 1 Met Medicine: The F1 Pit Stop That Saved Lives

I love this!

And it that it wasn’t a one and done.

The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.

After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it’s now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.

This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.