Snapshot of the Day

Last weekend the person who was changing my balcony’s railing was telling me how he started in the business of working with metal and stone for the interiors and exteriors. Back home he was a mechanical engineer who due to the circumstances of that time he had to start doing this kind of part time job at the beginning but later on it became a very well paid full time work.

At that time very few people could afford the kind of custom made decorations made by him but the few who had access to paid very good for this kind of artistic metal work.
While I was looking his work and the level of detail he was putting into his work, I was thinking to myself how people can adapt to situations life put us on front and somehow come out with an original alternative.

Well there is the transferable skills, the actitude to take action but also the pasion for what you do. I could easily see in his face the pleasure to do something very good, no leaving anything randomly. When he was doing the final touches of paiting with his paint gun, I notice him adjusting his sights by closing a little bit his eyes like he was adjusting the focus of a camera lense. Also by changing different position to have different angles of the piece of metal he was painting even though the baranda color was white.

You can call it being professional with his job and responsible in the quality he delivers. However, I am pretty sure it was more than that. Did I tell you that this was not a regular paid work but a service exchange?

Customer Service is something I really value regardless of cost. Today something unusually occurred when I went to buy my daily coffe at the local coffee store. I got one of those free coffee prize you get from a promotion and decided to use it and redeem my prize. I was waiting on line and when it was my turn, before ordering anything I showed the piece of paper that reads won a coffee and asked for a large size coffee.
To my surprise, the cash register smiled and showing cheerfulness responded with a: “…whoao congratulations! How would you like your coffee?”
I mean it wasn’t a big prize, but it sounds sincere and with good intentions. I thought to myself in my way out. It isn’t amazing, how taking your time to actually connect with your clients and share joyfullness can actually make the customer service a totally different experience.

[click] Mar. 24, 2010(Wed) 08:38 am

I work in a office located on the fifth floor of a building and even though 3 elevators are available, I decided to take quite often the stairs for 2 main reasons: The first one, because usually it takes a while to get the elevator and the second reason is because I think it is a good opportunity to do some physical activity at work.
Some times, I even take the challenge to go up faster than colleagues who use the elevators because at rush hour there are more people that stop in every single floor even to the second floor. I do the same challenge when I want to go down and to my surprise I won quite a lot of these personal ego-guest who is faster- kind of races myself. Usually I do this 3 times a day when I arrive at the office early
morning then after my daily walk in the parking lot when I had finished my lunch and the last one during a break time in the afternoon.

Yesterday I was counting the steps from one floor to the next and found out there was 20 in total, that multiplied by 5 floors makes it 100 steps. Later on I tried to figured out how many calories this activity can help me burn and found on that per every step up you burn 0.11 calories and 0.05 for every step down according to a research.
By doing the math 100 steps times 0.11 calories totals 11 calories and 100 steps times 0.05 when I go down totals another 5 calories. They all together adds 16 calories if you do it twice a day is 32, three times is 48 and so on.
In terms of total calories burned it is actually no much, but the activity itself brings me other extra benefits like increasing my capacity to oxygenation, raising my heart rate, off course working out your muscles and even a few minutes of meditation that I am really happy to have.
Taking the steps might seems irrational, but I started to find a increasingly popular choice these days where most of our times we spend seating in front of the computer for long hours.

[click] Mar. 20, 2010(Sat) 06:24 am

Photo by Jared Tabel