Author: lioneltan

Passing the Hot Potato

During the course of your daily work routine, you will probably come across certain tasks that I would term as a “hot potato”. These “hot potatoes” are tasks that do not require much of your time to handle, but you risk being the bottleneck if you do not respond promptly.

Literally, no one wants to hold a hot potato for too long (unless you’re masochistic). If all it requires is just a small diversion from whatever you’re doing, then just handle it quickly and pass the hot potato on. Of course, it will require some skill and experience to determine whether a task is a hot potato.

A “hot potato” is a task where:

 

  • You hold up progress if you do not act on it
  • It does not take much of your time to do your part and pass it on
  • Once you pass it on, you can forget about it and continue with whatever you were doing in the first place

The case of rice weevils

When I was young I was always fascinated by rice weevils, otherwise known as “bee gus”. Being the curious sort, I caught a few from the sack of rice and kept them in a clear case that used to contain Hello Kitty chops (They belonged to my sis. Really!). Of course, being the humanitarian sort, I also left some rice inside.

As you know, children have very short attention spans, and I was no different. I promptly forgot about my collection of rice weevils until months later. I chanced upon it again and I was shocked to find that the rice weevils were still alive, but most of the rice had already been turned into some sort of powder. Cool…

BTW, around that age, I also did some experiments on rice weevils by keeping them in the freezer for longer and longer periods of time to see how long they could withstand the cold. They’re pretty resilient and go into some sort of hibernate mode when you take them out from the freezer. After warming up for a while, they would start moving again.