a million times a trillion more (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-11-01 05:35 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-11-01 05:35 pm
Friday open thread: concrete actions with tangible effects
It's been a long and difficult week, for various reasons, and I figured that since I need a boost of optimism, others might appreciate it as well. It's with that need to feel motivated and uplifted that I bring you this week's prompt:
Tell me about concrete actions you have taken today (or at least recently) that will have a tangibly good effect on other people's lives.
This could be at the level of an individual stranger, or your friends, family and colleagues, or bigger — actions to help your community, fellow citizens of your country, or people on the other side of the world. No action is too big or too small to be counted here: it simply needs to have been undertaken with the aim to make at least one other person's life better.
I'll start with something in my professional life: for the past few days, a PhD student has been emailing me back and fourth with problems with her database search for academic articles to use in her literature review. Every time she tried it, she ended up getting 20,000 articles found — an overwhelming number — and everything I told her to do via email just did not fix the problem. I knew she shouldn't have been finding that many, because I tried searching the same database with the same words, and was getting around 100 results, maximum. In the end, I asked if she had time to jump onto Zoom, got her to show me her screen and demonstrate each step she was taking (right down to accessing the database). It turned out there was a very simple solution: she was searching in the wrong tab. When she switched to another tab, suddenly she found the same 100 articles that I did. Her relief was palpable, and she sent me an extremely grateful email afterwards, saying that she'd been in a huge state of stress and panic, and I'd restored her good mood, meaning she could go into the weekend feeling confident and productive. It took only ten minutes to solve her problem, once we were looking at her live demonstration.
The second example is a bit sillier. I went to the pool this morning to swim my regular 1km of laps. Normally I swim in the Medium speed lane, but it was really crowded, and the Fast lane had only one guy in it, swimming quite slowly up and down, so I went in the Fast lane with him. After about half of the 1km, another guy joined us. He was a very fast swimmer. Now, part of my issue with swimming in the Medium lane is that I am faster than all the other swimmers who use it, but slower than everyone who uses the Fast lanes. I normally elect to stay in the Medium lane, but the other slow swimmers drive me up the wall because they never pause at the end to let me overtake them, and indeed they force me to overtake them while swimming — and often speed up when I try to do so. (There are people that I will routinely overtake seven or eight times in forty laps.) When I am the slow swimmer, I never want to be that annoying, so I maintain a heightened sense of awareness of my own speed relative to the other swimmers and keep an eye on how close they are to me. And therefore, this morning, whenever I saw the faster guy drawing near, I'd pause at the end of the lane, let him pass me, and then carry on. This is, to my mind, the correct lane etiquette, and the appropriate way to behave in order to maintain harmony in a shared space with swimmers of different speeds. It cost me nothing, and I hope it made my fellow swimmer's morning swim more pleasant.
Finally, and obviously on a much larger scale, I made my regular monthly donation to the Ukrainian military through the Come Back Alive charity. It is unjust (and an appalling precedent) for a nuclear-armed dictatorship to attempt to change the borders of another country, dictate its foreign policy, and destroy its existence as an independent nation by force; the most effective way to prevent that happening is to give the Ukrainian military what they need to withstand and prevent it.
I will remind any citizens of the United States among my Dreamwidth circle of the existence of the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisfinecrew comm, whose sole purpose is to encourage these specific types of small scale, concrete actions in the US political context.
Tell me about concrete actions you have taken today (or at least recently) that will have a tangibly good effect on other people's lives.
This could be at the level of an individual stranger, or your friends, family and colleagues, or bigger — actions to help your community, fellow citizens of your country, or people on the other side of the world. No action is too big or too small to be counted here: it simply needs to have been undertaken with the aim to make at least one other person's life better.
I'll start with something in my professional life: for the past few days, a PhD student has been emailing me back and fourth with problems with her database search for academic articles to use in her literature review. Every time she tried it, she ended up getting 20,000 articles found — an overwhelming number — and everything I told her to do via email just did not fix the problem. I knew she shouldn't have been finding that many, because I tried searching the same database with the same words, and was getting around 100 results, maximum. In the end, I asked if she had time to jump onto Zoom, got her to show me her screen and demonstrate each step she was taking (right down to accessing the database). It turned out there was a very simple solution: she was searching in the wrong tab. When she switched to another tab, suddenly she found the same 100 articles that I did. Her relief was palpable, and she sent me an extremely grateful email afterwards, saying that she'd been in a huge state of stress and panic, and I'd restored her good mood, meaning she could go into the weekend feeling confident and productive. It took only ten minutes to solve her problem, once we were looking at her live demonstration.
The second example is a bit sillier. I went to the pool this morning to swim my regular 1km of laps. Normally I swim in the Medium speed lane, but it was really crowded, and the Fast lane had only one guy in it, swimming quite slowly up and down, so I went in the Fast lane with him. After about half of the 1km, another guy joined us. He was a very fast swimmer. Now, part of my issue with swimming in the Medium lane is that I am faster than all the other swimmers who use it, but slower than everyone who uses the Fast lanes. I normally elect to stay in the Medium lane, but the other slow swimmers drive me up the wall because they never pause at the end to let me overtake them, and indeed they force me to overtake them while swimming — and often speed up when I try to do so. (There are people that I will routinely overtake seven or eight times in forty laps.) When I am the slow swimmer, I never want to be that annoying, so I maintain a heightened sense of awareness of my own speed relative to the other swimmers and keep an eye on how close they are to me. And therefore, this morning, whenever I saw the faster guy drawing near, I'd pause at the end of the lane, let him pass me, and then carry on. This is, to my mind, the correct lane etiquette, and the appropriate way to behave in order to maintain harmony in a shared space with swimmers of different speeds. It cost me nothing, and I hope it made my fellow swimmer's morning swim more pleasant.
Finally, and obviously on a much larger scale, I made my regular monthly donation to the Ukrainian military through the Come Back Alive charity. It is unjust (and an appalling precedent) for a nuclear-armed dictatorship to attempt to change the borders of another country, dictate its foreign policy, and destroy its existence as an independent nation by force; the most effective way to prevent that happening is to give the Ukrainian military what they need to withstand and prevent it.
I will remind any citizens of the United States among my Dreamwidth circle of the existence of the
thisfinecrew comm, whose sole purpose is to encourage these specific types of small scale, concrete actions in the US political context.
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Otherwise - such small things, argh. I'm teaching people to draft, as always; a brand new paralegal has asked to join one of my workshops and I actually don't think she will get a lot out of it as it's reasonably complex stuff for people who know their way around what we do. So I was going to say no, but I kept coming back to the idea of being so excited to start somewhere new and being told on day 1 that no, you're not good enough. I'll do something in the session that's just for her.
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That Diwali baklava is such a lovely tradition, and it makes me feel cheerful to read about it.
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I rarely see people mask on public transport these days, but what does always help me retain my faith in humanity is my memory of the time when masking was legally mandated. At least in the part of England where I live, this resulted in almost universal masking in all indoor public spaces (shops, workplaces, public transport etc) for all but babies and very young children. People were very rule abiding, in spite of attempts by far-right conspiracy theorists to discourage compliance. As much as I wish more people might continue with this behaviour without the law to compel them, I do at least find comfort in the fact that they diligently masked when the law required it.
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I also got my COVID and flu shots today, which I hope will be a tiny contribution to Victoria's collective well-being this winter, and this afternoon after work I set a reminder on my phone to pass along a compliment that one of my bosses gave about a project that one of the coworkers I supervise recently completed. I'm sure he also gave it to her directly, but surely she'll also appreciate hearing that he's been telling other people how well she did too!
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Your comment is also a good reminder to get my own vaccinations this winter. I get flu vaccines for free through my work, and they're currently available via drop-in at the hospital near my library's building, so thank you for prompting me to set aside time to do this next week!
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This also brings me to what I did! I brought candy for the check-in people at the airport and shared cardamom buns with the flight staff. Everyone was so happy and it really was lovely to see that.
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I bet those airport and flight staff really appreciated what you did. Airports and airlines must be such awful places to work — passengers are always stressed and in a bad mood — so anything to brighten their day is very kind.
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And then there's all this stuff to stop Jersey Zoo from going down the plughole ...
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The Jersey Zoo situation sounds like such an exhausting saga.