Snapshot of the Day » At work

A Simple Act

Luis — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 14:12:06 +0000

Today, another important milestone was reached. The final printing of 2 products that I contributed with their content was finally accomplished. This brings me a great satisfaction because these products represent an original idea I had back on December 2009.

Besides its utility and nice layout, “A Simple Act” also fulfill a personal goal which is trying to make a contribution to the community and society by providing something that inspire them and others in their daily life. The calendar and the agenda, contains inspiring actions to cheer your day or the day of others.

A Simple Act is a product developed and designed by my wife in cooperation with Toronto Star and it will be sold in Chapters-Indigo across Canada very soon. I hope you like it or buy one as a gift for someone special.

Finally saving the best part to the end; one of the illustration happens to be designed by my older son Gabriel (7 at the time of drawing) which made him and us so proud of his talent. I belief he will follow the steps of his talented mom very soon.

Passioned about your job

Luis — Thu, 20 May 2010 04:24:49 +0000

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?

Connecting with your customers

Luis — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 03:45:41 +0000

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

100 steps at the time

Luis — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:07:16 +0000

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-guess 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