Defining (or Finding?) the Ideal Workplace

The workplace is the greatest of all social institutions today. We spend more time at the workplace (over one-third of a day---roughly eight hours productivity, one hour lunch and one to two hours commuting), than anywhere else. Most of us see our co-workers more than our family and friends. We see and learn a side of each other that most of our family and friends really don’t see. It is, therefore, important that one finds a positive and healthy place to work. I think about this daily while at work and what we can do to improve it. So, I decided to breakdown into a list of components the ideal workplace to better study each part of what and where we spend our lives full time.

1. Intellectual Stimulation or Challenge  A work environment must challenge us. Our higher intellectual capacity should be sparked occasionally by tasks which makes us think deeper or further about what we are doing and how it benefits the organization and the people in it. This involves the ethical side of work. I found it common in the private industry that the primary focus be profit, and in some places it would seem that there would be little secondary focus whatever. We have to make money, yes; but the workplace is where we spend most of our time and in the best years of our life---why not make it great? Why not make it a place to learn as we work and enjoyable for all?
2. Integrity  If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If an employee finds extra time, do they work? I’ve found that after a few months on the job many employees find the time to do things more enjoyable to them than work, such as surfing the internet, walking around the office talking and taking extra smoke breaks. I’ve also found that when and if this behavior is corrected by management, employees usually revert to their old ways and repeat old habits within a few weeks. And this behavior is infectious. It is critical that we stay focused and do the right thing when no one is looking.
3. Discipline  Along with the woman next to you wearing a blouse cut so low that you see more cleavage at work than a Geology lab and with each smoke break the dude opposite you takes, you watch the conduct section of your company’s employee manual grow. Lack of discipline creates a less than fun work environment: Everyone is forced to work because no one wants to work. I say take initiative, less you see more common sense rules and micromanagement. Lack of Discipline is perhaps the most wide-spread problem of all the workplace components listed here.
4. Work Ethic  Proactively engaging in our work is beneficial and efficient. Taking initiative to do something makes an organized and coherent workplace. Waiting at desk for something to happen usually means that the task is overdue, and it usually causes confusion and hence errors. Lack of Work Ethic is something that I’ve found overwhelmingly common in the workplace, and I strive to make it better by example of motivation or to find a workplace that is.
5. Cordiality  “Good morning! Nice to see you---again!” Treating each other with respect and addressing one another at the same level is another important part of the ideal workplace. A hierarchy is necessary for most workplaces to operate but it is also important to keep in mind that all are equal in dignity despite any accomplishments inside the office. We may never know the experiences of a co-worker, personally or professionally, that have led them to interacting with us on a daily basis. Plus, being warm and friendly removes most awkwardness from interactions. Be happy and kind.
6. Sense of Humor  “Hey! How’s it goin’?” “Livin’ a dream, workin’ a nightmare.” A little of joking goes a long way. It is important that we take our work seriously and approach tasks with the best of our abilities. And most everybody does. This creates stress, and we all have our methods of releasing it---mostly after work. But having someone or something to disrupt a long-engaged thought or an overworked mind, even for just a moment, can be very relieving. Stress can be exerted quickly and positively through the laugh---it can be healing.

Defining the ideal workplace is something that I felt compelled to do. After a dozen years of full time employment in the lower ranks of the public and private sector, searching for the perfect job, company and co-workers, I feel that most workplaces are substandard in what they have to offer the current working class. I think that these six components are just a start to defining the ideal workplace; there are several other components, but all are relevant towards one another. If we could focus on these primary six, then most secondary components, I believe, would improve. Things could be and should be better for the workplace. It is, after all, where we spend the most of our time. So, why not make it better, why not make it great?

T.S.

Making a Truss Rod Cover

I bought a vintage Woolworth hollow body electric guitar from Craig’s List that needed a few parts. It had four of six strings and hadn’t been touched in years and was missing a tremolo lever, bridge cover and a truss rod cover. I ordered a replacement tremolo lever off eBay; a replacement bridge cover wasn’t to be found; I had two choices for the truss rod cover: buy one off eBay, being unsure if it would fit, or, as the guitar tech at a local music store suggested: make one from a spare pickguard.

I was on a budget and had an extra black pickguard, so I chose to make one. I started by making measurements, drawing up a template in AutoCAD, and then cutting out a paper template. Then I scored an outline into a wide spot on the pickguard and jigsawed it out. Next, I bevelled the sides with a file. Then I drilled holes using a counter-sunk specialty bit and attached the truss rod cover with some new stainless steel screws to the guitar.

It fit nice.

I chose a triangular shape with filleted corners at the top and sharp corners at the bottom to be consistent with the guitar’s vintage design.

If interested, here is a video showing how the guitar sounds:  https://plus.google.com/photos/114917883710990731487/albums/5862401681918512913/5862401682740781106?authkey=CMXV48GP-pq0Mw

T.S.

Barrancas National Cemetary

Perfectly straight rows of arch-top white granite stones chiseled to conformity to one common denominator: NAVY. Walking through trimmed green Florida grass the stones array in their rows like the sun throwing down gold rods. The interred lay their mark here as a stepping stone from here to there. Flowers and hammered out names and numbers are the only anticonformity; red, white, blue, yellow and green pedals and black letter-shadows catch the peripheral. 

The maticulous up-keep demand deference. Never have I seen such respect for the dead.

Grandpa's Airline Guitar

My freshman year at college I lived with Dad and taught myself to play guitar. Weeknights I unloaded trucks at Target where they cashed weekly paychecks. I bought the first thing my 19-year-old brain thought of: a red Squire Stratocaster electric guitar. Then I bought a 10 watt Marshall amplifier and a cord from a nice Mexican running a small music shop somewhere in Holland, MI. I ran home, fired up the Marshall, strapped on the Stratocaster and plugged in, excited. Now what do I do? I stood there a second and then plucked out a few inaudible, un-harmonic chords and cringed. It sounded like a creaking garage door. Nevertheless, my music career was underway.

I started downloading guitar tabs and playing them in the basement next to Dad’s office (much to his chagrin, I'm sure). One day he brought over from the utility room Grandpa’s Airline acoustic guitar, which was sitting next to a box of his childhood nostalgia, thinking that I’d appreciate it more now that I was a strummer myself. At 19, acoustic guitars weren't cool; but it was an old and interesting noise-maker, something I've been attracted to my whole life.

I looked it over.

Grandpa’s Airline guitar needed some attention but was overall in good shape. Corroded brass strings were strung over a rosewood fretboard and a blonde maple jumbo body and were plugged by ivory-white pegs into a rosewood saddle piece. Little vintage silver nuts tuned the strings on the black headstock adorned by an oval black and gold AIRLINE logo. In the guitar’s sound hole was the manufacturer’s label, reading, “AIRLINE, JAPAN,” with the name Ben Lafayette written across it in black permanent marker. I later guessed that Grandpa bought the Airline guitar used after he moved to Milton, Fl, because of the Cajun root of Ben’s last name. Nevertheless, it added character. I tuned up the old strings and strummed out G, D, and C chords I learned. An acoustic guitar was kind of cool.

But soon Grandpa’s Airline guitar broke. Unfinished wood dries then rots from the outside in. Wood is petrophilic and hydrophobic; water and dry air rots wood while oil and humidity preserves it. Tuning the guitar’s strings brought some long-forgotten tension on the saddle bride (the rosewood tailpiece that holds the strings to the guitar’s body), which on most tuned guitars range from 500-700 pounds of pressure. Within a year after receiving the guitar, the strings pulled up the saddle bridge from the guitar’s body, splintering through a couple layers (but not all) a hole in a perfect shape of the saddle bridge itself. I took it to two different renown luthiers and both basically said the same thing: The cost of the repair would exceed the guitar’s value and that considering its vintage, it would make a great wall guitar. Come to find, Airline was a mass-produced, popular novice guitar brand sold by Sears & Roebuck from the 50s to the 80s. They were generic; Kay, Harmony, and Silvertone all branded models built by the same manufacturer. However, time, solid wood and Japan manufacture would make the Airline guitar collectable and, to me, worthy of repair.

I was a bit saddened by the breakage and swore to fix it, one day, when I had the money. That day wouldn’t come soon, so I bought a chipboard case and stuffed Grandpa’s Airline guitar under my bed.

Bored one day, years later, I pulled the guitar out and admired its old beauty. The hell with it; let's try to fix it. Grandpa would probably want the guitar to be fixed or junked, and it was just an old worthless guitar being broke, and I would at least learn exactly what was wrong with it, and maybe how to fix it if I just tried. None ventured none gained. Curiosity compelled me on, encouraged me naturally, as it always had, to find out how and why something did or didn't work, like my urge to study Literature in college. What was the big deal about books hundreds of years old that people kept reading, didn't throw out, picked up again, and passed down? I pried at Grandpa’s old guitar like I did The Brothers Karamazov, like Ivan Karamazov did at thinking, Alexey Karamazov at love, Dimitri Karamazov at passion. God knows why I did.

I went to work. I took the strings off and ripped up as gently as I could the saddle, which took a few splinters with it by aged wood glue, slightly damaging some of the body’s surrounding finish. Underneath the saddle, the body’s wood was pretty dry and thin and rotted. I cut a piece of solid maple to a fit 45 degree joint beneath the saddle’s joint surface on the body from the inside of the guitar. I glued and clamped the piece underneath the damaged area through the sound hole. This re-enforced well the dry-weakened body wood, giving the guitar enough strength to hold tuned strings under heavy pressure once again, hopefully. Next, I sanded the underside of the rosewood saddle and glued it back into place using a high-bonded epoxy. Then I sealed the edges of the saddle to the body with the left-over epoxy. I clamped and cured it for 24 hours. The next day I re-drilled the six string holes, and, excited, I restrung Grandpa’s Airline guitar with new strings.

I tuned her up and strummed out a G chord: BUZZZZ! The action was way too low and the tuned strings rested across the metal frets along the neck of the guitar! With no way to adjust the bridge height, I was stumped. Oh well, I thought, always was worth a try.

I put the guitar down and cracked a beer. But I kept looking at it from the corner of my eye. For some reason it bothered me, it irritated me to find a way to fix the string height, to make the guitar playable. I couldn't stand its idleness, its triumphant idleness, getting the better of me then laying worthless in my apartment for another couple of years. I don't know if it was man's arrogance to power over nature or what, but I kept at it.

I picked it back up by the neck and inspected the bridge once again. The bridge is an elongated, U-shaped metal strip on the guitar’s body that the strings lay over; the nut is a strip of plastic that sits in the U-shape and under the string, acting as a kind of buffer between the two. If I could only raise these two up, I think that the guitar would work fine. But how? When the strings are detached from the guitar, plastic nut falls loose from the metal bridge. If I could wedge or place something between the two, the strings would raise and play better. I thought of shaping a piece of paper or cardboard?---that would probably work, but it could be lop-sided, causing the bridge and nut to be uneven or simply warp over time from being too soft. Imagination is a beautiful thing. I can see things before they happen; a dark movie theater encircles a lighted screen in my head where I see a matchstick, with its tip cut off, laid in the silver chrome of the U-shaped bridge where the plastic ivory nut would lay, acting as a spacer, raising the strings to a playable height. Then I jammed out a blues riff feeling no blues but the blues, poor times sans depression, ill, pain.

I grabbed a match, cut it and placed between the bridge and nut and then restrung and tuned the guitar. I strummed a G chord and Grandpa’s Airline guitar rung a harmonic wood-aged tone heard only from vintage guitars.

It was fixed!

No string buzzing, it kept in tune and played easy---it was like new. I couldn’t believe a matchstick was the crowning piece to making a 40-year-old guitar sound new. Laying underneath the bridge, by looking at it, no one could tell. It lived once again to boogie at one’s command, fiddle at one’s fingertips.

I ended up loving the guitar’s feel, so much so that dust piled on my new Guild guitar. It wasn’t so much that it sounded or played better than the Guild, but that it just felt better. Sometimes only what matters is what you feel.

       Thanks Grandpa, thanks Dad.