You can just do things. Great story. I earned us a whole year of beautiful starry nights by removing the inspection plate at the base of a streetlight standard, putting on some safety glasses, cutting the conductor with a pair of wood handled pruning loppers, and resetting the plate. I don’t like light pollution.
My Dad used to lay on his back in his backyard with a .22 loaded with subsonic CB cartridges and routinely take out the single streetlight that similarly ruined their view of the night sky.
My latest hack at the gym has given me hot showers for years. I’m not paying for a premium membership to freeze my ass off when I go to shower. The boiler at the comm ctr is so far from the change rooms that the hot water needs to run for at least 20 minutes before you get hot water to the shower head. But the shower stalls have those buttons that turn off the flow after 15 seconds. They also have hold bars below those taps for elderly people to hold onto. The shower room has a wood handled squeegee that you can use to sweep excess water from the floor back into the stalls. All I do half an hour before the end of my session is set up my stuff outside the stall to make it look inhabited, unscrew the wood squeegee handle and jam it between the wall and the support bar so it holds the flow button down. Place the squeegee head on the floor just inside the curtain to keep water from flowing out of the stall. Then go do final sets and come back to the nice hot shower that my inflated membership fee is partially paying for. I tried telling the facility owners forever to remedy the lack of hot water in the change rooms. On the first attempts I would only let it run for 5 minutes between workout stations and recheck to make sure I wasn’t flooding the building.
I can’t remember the last time I used the shower at home.
Another recent hack is to deal with the fact that I don’t like being tracked at work. I am self motivated and always push the ball forward and add value throughout the day. We use this GPS enabled timekeeping app that was originally intended to eliminate paper time cards and make payroll easier to process. It shows a complete GPS track of the users’ whole day. It also helps avoid the problem that was creeping in of field staff parking at a dead end road and playing dominoes all afternoon. It was a legit issue. Guys got canned for not working. If you turn off location services, it clocks the user out. Then our idiot owner and our new Nazi accountant decided that even salaried management staff should also be required to use it.
I now clock in on an alternate device, tuck that sucker into a SLNT faraday bag, and clock out in the same parking lot that I clocked in at the end of the day. Work hours captured, zero GPS track. Zero stress if I actually have to live my life and get a few important things done during the day with the hours of time I’ve liberated through working smart and automating many of my job tasks by 75%. I’m still always on duty, respond to calls instantly and cheerily, and never miss a beat. But now I don’t have a digital leash.
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