Polystyrene Tiles

So .. what is the easiest way to get Polystyrene Tiles off a ceiling?

The reality is that apart from a Mr. Bean-esque explosion in the middle of the house – it is very hard work. The key is to understanding how it was put up in the first place. The tiles that I was dealing with had five blobs of adhesive, one in the middle and one on each corner. This led to the use of a fairly substantial burger flipper from my BBQ set. I needed a flat bladed utensil that allowed me to reach right across the tile from corner to corner. Anything less and I ended up damagin the tile.

Now … I know that I am trying to get the tiles down and therefore I don’t care if they get damaged, but I do care about having to clean up after myself. The Burger flipper was an old one, and I sharpened the end so that it would cut into the adhesive between the tile and the roof. As with serving cake, the first one is always a mess, but from there on it becomes easier. Start at the nearest corner and slide the burger flipper in to release that corner. Next release the other corner nearest to you, then slide the flipper under the central blob of glue. Finally the back two corners can be attacked and you should get the whole tile down in one piece.

Once you have completed removing the tiles there are two options with the rest of the ceiling.

1. Getting a sharp flat tool, scrape the adhesive off the ceiling trying as much as possible not to gouge out great holes in the plaster or leave lumps on the ceiling. A 16m squared area to about 3 person days to tidy up. Alternatively …  
2. The simplest answer is to get a plasterer to “overboard” the ceiling. This means putting plasterboard up and covering the ceiling and re-plastering the ceiling. In the words on my plasterer – “It took you 3 person days … I can have it overboarded in less than an hour!” – sold to the man in the overalls.

Those are your options and that’s what I did!

Business Value

I think that, way too often, we get bogged down in the technology and don’t spend enough time taking a good long hard look at the value to the business community.

Another pet hate and therefore analagous to the above … Accountacy for Accountancy sake! I have just spent the last few days working on the budgets and forecast for the rest of 2007 until the end of the calendar year as well as the forecast for 2008. The problem I particularly face is that I have inherited a budget in my new role that wil lnot reflect what my new organisation structure should be. Having designed the way I want the organisation to work, I now need to tailor it to fit the money that I have. I accept that I don’t have a bottomless pit to work with, but it is a constraint I would rather not have. I guess the next issue becomes the internal negotiation for funds and the inevitable intra company transfers.

I have always thought that accountants have managed to pull off an incredible stunt in terms of making themselves indispensible to business. No longer do they worry about the money that is going out of the company and accounting for that in minute detail, they now have manufactured a role where they track every last penny that moves within the company as well. If I want a resource who is already paid for (ie: a salaried employee) to come and do some work for me whether for a short or long period of time – I have to find some virtual money to pay for them with. Instead of focusing on the business that is transacted we focus on the cash that is exchanged between departments.

It’s a gravy train!

Where is the business value? I have to justify doing a piece of work to my internal stakeholders even though no actual money will be spent! I take the people that I already have, assign them to the particular task and away we go. Somebody somewhere will of course question this and ask me who is going to fund the work.

Ford used to call them “Blue Dollars”, I’ve heard them referred to as “Wooden Dollars”, either way they don’t really exist and we need an ever expanding army of bean counters to count virtual beans!!

OK – I know the rhetoric … I just wanted to get that off my chest.

More importantly I do believe that, as technologists, we need to be able to justify what we are doing in terms of Business Value. I sat through a presentation the other day when I was shown some very cool interfaces to web-sites (no names, no packdrill etc). The problem is that most of our customers accessing our sites from home are disadvantaged and therefore probably don’t even have a computer of any sort. They were taken aback when I asked if their software was backwards compatible with Windows 95. Some people out there have never upgraded and don’t see the need. I digress … again!

Business Value … Technology can be cool, exciting and enthralling, but the rest of the world don’t see it like that. technology for technologies sake is a complete waste of time and effort. I need to justify my spend on staff and equipment etc. New technologies are going to have to prove to me that they can provide a direct business benefit before I will even entertain them nowadays.