Usually this works pretty well. The employee or cashier puts the badge up against a reader. Today I was behind someone who’d forgotten his badge, and had a temporary badge. He gave the cashier a piece of paper with a long string of numbers or some such, and she keyed it into the POS terminal, and it didn’t take. She asked him his name, and it was some long hard-to-spell name. She tried to enter it using an on-screen keyboard on the touchscreen display several times, then let him try it, and he had trouble with it too.

As I was waiting there, several people abandoned the line to find another one. Eventually I gave up too.

I think if I’d forgotten my badge I’d either pay cash (there’s an ATM in the cafeteria), or go home and get the badge.

The bigger mystery, though, is why they were designed such that the lights indicating whether the elevator is going  up or down do not light up until a few seconds after the doors open.  Why shouldn’t they either be on continuously, or turn on when the doors start to open?

Flashback to about five years ago: I was working for a different startup company, and very late one evening I smelled smoke and discovered that there was a fire in the next room. It was a very large room, and filled with dense smoke, but the fire alarm had not yet tripped. I called 911, did a quick runthrough of the building yelling “fire” in case anyone else was still there, found a fire extinguisher (with some difficulty), found the fire and sprayed it a big, then exited the building before having trouble with smoke inhalation. Turned out that a 500W metal halide ceiling lamp had exploded, and the plastic diffuser under it caught fire then dropped on the cubicle below.

Some time later, at the same company, I was at work late in the evening, and again smelled smoke. Someone else was there that evening, and we tracked the smell down to a lab, but couldn’t identify the source. By the time the fire department arrived, the smell was gone. Later it was determined that the bearings in an air conditioning unit had seized.

Back to the present…

When I noticed the smell, several other people were around and also noticed it. I grabbed a fire extinguisher, and we walked around to find the source. It turned out to be a “wall-wart” in a cube across from me. The resident of that cube unplugged it. The wall-wart was hot, though not outrageously so, but it definitely smelled of smoke. Fortunately the fire extinguisher proved unnecessary.

We’re not sure whether it was the wrong wall-wart for the equipment it was connected to, but even so that should not have caused it to smoke. Wall-warts are supposed to have internal thermal fuses that should blow before they heat up enough to start smoking. Perhaps this wall-wart was defective.

Ever since that first experience with fire at work, smelling smoke really causes me a lot of anxiety, though not enough to keep me from reacting sensibly. I’m just glad that it turned out to be only a minor problem, and that it happened while people were in the building to take care of it.

[The secret to enjoying your job] is to work in a field that you’re personally interested in, for a company that is small enough that they do care about the employees. You’ll rarely, if ever, find that in a large company; HP was once that way but Carly “fixed” that.

Most large companies consider employees to be completely interchangeable and replaceable like light bulbs.

That’s not to say that all small companies are good, though. Many tech startups have a business plan that requires making their employees work long hours and weekends until they burn out. Avoid those like the plague. They always tell prospective employees that they will reap big rewards on stock options, and in fact often insist that the employee should accept lower salary and worse benefits in exchange for the options. Don’t buy it. Options *might* pay off, but it’s a long shot. If they try to sucker you into such a plan, ask them to give you the salary and benefits you want and forget the options. They’ll almost never do that, which tells you that their real opinion on the value of their own options is that they are worthless; obviously you shouldn’t value them any more highly.

I’ve had the good fortune to have several enjoyable jobs at small companies, including my current job. At a few of them I did eventually make modest gains on stock options, but not enough for a down payment on a house. Well, maybe a down payment on a house somewhere other than in Silicon Valley.