My new specialty: Soft Lumber

Hello. Hello. We're going to be breathing down your necks for this whole week, er I mean, auditing your facility, this week, and we'd like to get an understanding of how your business works, first.

Hmmmm. This conversation turned into a two hour tour of Princeton's finest sawmill. First trees come in, then they get analyzed by a computer in this control room as to what kind of length and size boards will be feasible for each tree, then they get chopped, go through a type of quality control, and come out and get wrapped and sent off. What you, my friend, read in about three or four seconds, I lived through two hours of. Haha. Actually, my attempt to communicate to you the brutality of those two hours is for not. I enjoyed it. I love watching How It's Made on the Discovery Channel, so it's always cool to see what the heck they do behind the scenes before the wood goes on the house or whereever they decide to put it. However, I feel it necessary to insert a disclaimer here for those of you who also enjoy How It's Made: Most of what they tell you is not true. I watched an episode once when they were making a Kenworth Truck (nothin' but love)... and well, I worked in the plant where they made this stuff and that was my home away from home last summer for two and a half months. I think I understood the process pretty well. How It's Made gives you an awfully dumbed down version, misses all of the important details... it was just pitiful. But anyway, yes, our tour of the facility here in chilly Princeton (cross your fingers that it doesn't snow and keep me away from majestic Seattle) was very interesting. Such a mundane product. But totally cool. The tour guide, we decided, has an extremely high level of job satisfaction. I think my job satisfaction mirrors his, but I don't think it would take me two hours to tell you what I do... well, partly because I'm still not sure of exactly what I do ;) HAHA, I joke. I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing :) This is why I enjoy being here in Canada, eh, on this audit because since I'm new, it gives me a look at the whoooooole process in a microcosmic world. We do all audit steps, just on a smaller scale, because, well... the plant is much smaller than say, a Fortune 500 Company... but that's just an estimate :)

In other news: The WSJ apparently says the email era is over... what???? "Why Email no longer rules"... people are moving more towards social networks and community sites. Interesting. I just sent an email about 30 minutes ago.... I think socially that's true, but for work... email is king. Like in accounting, cash is king (which, ironically, is the same sentiment I feel for my bank account... payday tomorrow!). Most social networking sites are great, but some are just far-reaching. Twitter, for example. I signed up for it for a week and then deleted my account. I just don't see the point. I think Twitter was invented for those people who constantly need to stay connected and let everyone know what they are doing. This is probably reflective of the level of importance we all feel. I mean, how many times have you had a conversation with someone and they complained to you about this or that, and you say, "OMG I have it so much worse... This one time, [insert any antidote here]" So Twitter feeds this need of letting all of your tweet followers what you are doing that is so important. And, let's face it, even if it isn't important (I'm sitting on the porch...), you want people to see that you are so important and finally have a moment of freetime for some R&R. Anyway, this rant sprang from the WSJ article about email. I call shenanigans on Jessica Vascellaro. Well, not 100%. 50% shenanigans. Email is still important for work. We can't post crap about confidential information on facebook. However, I agree, I typically "comment" or send a message to my friends via facebook instead of email. Although, I did send an email yesterday to a friend from my gmail account. Email will still be important when you sign up for crap, like notifications from Barnes and Noble or The Loft about when they have sales or if they feel so inclined to send you some discount coupons. Still important for those Nigerian money scams that people are still retarded to fall for. Still a totally viable means of communication. Perhaps, email is the new form of snail mail.

What are your thoughts about this? Is email really the old way? Are we really getting that old, that we now see the shifts and have to adapt to them? Are we going to be those people when we're like 50, we don't understand the "new" technologies, much like our parents today? (My mom still doesn't know how to save a phone number in her phone, for crying out loud! haha).

Cheers,