Tricks of the Trade

Tricks of the Trade has some very interesting professional secrets from those in the know.

Applicant says If you are denied employment for a job, ask the Human Resources representative if they did a third party background check on you, and if the results were involved in the negative employment decision. If so, the company is required to give you a copy of the report.

Review the report, and if you feel there are errors you can contact the company that produced it and have them investigate. If warranted, they will correct the errors and report these corrections to you and to the company. The company could then reconsider your application.

System Administrator says You deal with a lot of short computer cables in the industry - 5 foot, 10 foot, 14 foot, etc. How to tell how long a cable is without measuring it? Use the fact that your armspan is almost exactly the same as your height. This is easiest if you are exactly 6 feet tall, obviously. Measure off lengths of the cable one at a time and add them up.

This can be applied in any situation where you have to measure cable or cord or rope, but it's most effective when you just need to quickly know if the cable in your hand is 6 feet long or 7. With long cables, you are probably better off using the Stagehand's trick of counting loops.

Carpenter says When measuring a board to cut in in half lengthwise, don't place a 12" ruler perpendicular to it and divide its width by two to find the center. If you instead place the measuring edge of the ruler on the board diagonally, with its ends just touching the opposite edges of the board, and the 6" hash will indicate the exact center.

Interviewee says When asked to give a phone interview to a reporter, say you prefer to do it over e-mail. The advantages are manyfolded:

1. It is more likely that longer excerpts, or more excerpts, will be used in the story, because (a) the reporter will have to think longer about the questions he will ask and where he is trying to get, because the questions will have to be written down, and in a reasonably logical order; (b)it is easier to copy and paste whole intelligible sentences than listen to a tape and type the conversation and then turn confusing and long-winded arguments into intelligible short sentences;
2. It is less likely that your words will be distorted intentionally or unintentionally by the reporter (for the reasons mentioned in 1b). And if they are intentionally distorted you have proof of what you said and of the context in which you said it (the reporter knows this, so this will also make him/her more careful when writing the story);
3. You will sound more intelligent (unless you are a really bad writer) because you will "speak" in intelligent sentences and will have more time to think about the answers. You will also be able to understand where the reporter is trying to get, so you will waste less of your time saying things that will not make it to the story;
4. For all the above reasons (and especially for the time-saving factor), the reporter will be grateful to you and treat what you said with more sympathy and interview you more often and just maybe have time for dinner once!

Jeweler says When looking at a loose diamond, always look at it on a piece of newspaper or printed material (in addition to looking at it on a white jewelers' tray). If the diamond is real, you won't be able to read the newsprint through the facets; if the diamond is fake, it's just like looking through, well, glass.

Failing Hard Drive says Some failing hard drives can be coaxed into a few more minutes or hours of work if they are cooler than usual. One method is to put the hard drive in a freezer for a short amount of time (15 - 60 minutes), preferably inside of a air-tight bag to reduce the possibility of picking up moisture from the freezer. Another trick is to spray a can of compressed air on the hard drive while it's in use. (Compressed air is very cold.) It's unlikely that the drive will work for very long, but this can be enough if you just need a few critical files off of the drive.

Applicant says When potential employers and recruiters do a search for candidates using services like Monster and Hot Jobs, their search results are ordered based on when the resume was posted or last modified. This helps them identify "fresher" candidates. Resumes that have been last updated over a month ago tend to appear much lower in the result set. So keep your resume "fresh" by making very minor changes to it about once a month -- for instance, add a period or change a single word anywhere in your resume and resave. This ensures that your resume will always appear near the top of the results.