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robintek

Aug 01
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Contingent Cargo Insurance: Your Last Line of Defense

By Business Protection Bulletin

1608-bb-2If you want to talk about a big insurance policy, let’s talk about contingent cargo insurance. Freight insurance covers product of an enormous value, and there’s a lot that can go wrong at sea. A car accident that you can walk away from is not likely to cost your insurer more than five figures. A serious problem on the open waters can lead to millions of dollars in losses. A freighter is basically a small town with an engine on it, so you need a heavy-duty policy to cover every trip.

A contingent cargo policy is taken out by freight brokers in order to insure against any claims made by the shipper. Shippers are expected to hold the brokers accountable should there be any significant losses or damages in transit, and will only come into play should the carrier refuse to honor a claim. For instance, if the captain throws a cargo container into the sea in order to, say, pick up speed in order to escape approaching pirates, the carrier is unlikely to honor the claim made by the shipper. In this instance, contingent insurance would then pay the claimant.

Contingent motor cargo insurance isn’t exclusive to maritime transport, of course. Anyone who carries cargo may carry contingent cargo insurance. This means trucking companies, airplanes, trains, even somebody who’s pulling a big enough trailer with their car may carry a contingent cargo policy. Essentially, if you’re carrying more cargo than you cover out of pocket, then a contingency cargo policy may help to keep you in business no matter what goes wrong.

Contingent cargo coverage, of course, only covers the cargo. This type of policy will help to ensure that, should something happen to the cargo, the shipper will be reimbursed without the carrier needing to pay out-of-pocket for damages or losses due to a train accident, a ship sinking or similar disaster. The carrier, driver, captain, train conductor, the company that owns the truck or railroad or ship will still need to cover their own end on every front required within their industry. Contingent cargo plans won’t cover, say, a ship worker whose leg is injured on the trip and is entitled to worker’s compensation. Contingent cargo insurance means that, if none of the other policies that you have in place will cover your cargo losses or damages, then you still have a last line of defense to fall back on.

Aug 01
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What Makes Logging Insurance Different From Other Fields?

By Business Protection Bulletin

1608-bb-1In some ways, logging insurance is like any other field of insurance for a blue collar workplace. Your big concerns are things like workers comp, general liability, contracting issues and so on. If you work in logging, you’ll encounter a number of factors and complications that you might not have to face erecting one story homes and remodeling office buildings, but generally speaking, if you’re familiar with something like construction insurance, then you’ll have an easy enough time adapting to timber logging insurance.

The key difference is owed to the environment in which your people will be working. A construction site is a relatively controlled environment. The forest brings with it a number of hazards that are trickier to manage and prepare for. Likewise, this environment brings us to the matter of transporting equipment and materials in and out of and through the forest. A construction site is stationary. Once you move your equipment in, most of it is where it’s going to be until the project is finished. A logging team is eventually going to run out of lumber in one area, and they’re going to move on to the next.

Many of the policies and provisions that a logger will buy are the same that a construction company would purchase, but they may be more extensive for the logger, for instance:

  • Pollution. The logging industry is often targeted by environmentalist groups, meaning that without adequate pollution insurance, you’re asking for a scandal.
  • Loading and unloading liability. Your crew is migratory, they’re going to be doing a lot of loading and unloading, meaning that the chances of dropping a toolbox on your foot is multiplied at every stop.
  • Power line damage. Put simply: You’re knocking big trees over. It’s not unheard of for one of them to fall right onto a power line.
  • Fire damage. Your team is creating just as much kindling as they are lumber.
  • Accidental overcut. It happens: Your crew gets a couple of maps mixed up and they wind up chopping wood on someone else’s tract. Accidental overcut insurance protects you from any losses you’d incur over this.

Some mills offer rewards to logging companies that come with a robust logging contractors liability policy and a top-tier workforce simply because it’s safer for everyone involved in the deal when all bases are covered. Logging can be a very rewarding industry, but mistakes can be very expensive without the right coverage.

Aug 01
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Workers Comp and Cabin Fever

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

1608-con-3Being stuck at home on workers compensation after an injury is easier for some than it is for others. If you’re only working construction in order to pay the bills, and your real passion is daytime TV, then you’re one of the lucky ones. For others, it’s easy to go a little stir-crazy after the first week of reruns, game shows and soap operas.

It’s easy to fill your time with various activities. You can play Xbox all day, you can watch your favorite movies, you can build a model ship or take up Sudoku. It’s not so much a matter of finding something to do, it’s a matter of finding something important to do. For many of us, work isn’t just a way to keep a roof over our heads, it’s a way to contribute something to the world. We take pride in driving by an office building and saying “I installed the A/C ducts in there.” Somehow, putting together a jigsaw puzzle just doesn’t deliver the same sense of gratification.

So it’s not just about filling your time up, keeping your hands busy, it’s about finding a way to make a meaningful contribution, even while temporarily unable to ply your trade. In other words, even if you stay busy, you can still wind up feeling depressed if, at the end of the day, you look at how you’ve been spending your time and you think “Who cares?”

Finding a way to fill your time that is actually meaningful is more challenging than simply filling your time with whatever distractions you can find. A meaningful pastime is…Something that you’re interested in.

  • Something that you’re interested in.

  • Something that makes a difference on some level, and…

  • Something that is accessible.

Something that interests you means that it has to be meaningful to you, first and foremost. Meaningful in a broader sense could be helping a cause that you believe in, or just taking some photographs and entering them in a local contest. As for accessibility, well, if you broke your ankle at work, then this is not the time to volunteer for an AIDS walk.

The frustrations that we encounter when cooped up at home are not just about staying busy. If all we want to do is stay busy, we can buy a pack of cards and play solitaire for eight hours a day. It’s about doing something that enriches your own life, and which returns a feeling that you are contributing something to the world.

Easier said than done, certainly. But just because you’re stuck without work for the time being doesn’t mean that you’re completely out of options.

Aug 01
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Identifying (And Saying No To) Dangerous Work

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

1608-con-2You’re not going to last very long in the construction business if you turn down any job with even the slightest hint of danger. In building contracts, your whole business is dealing with pneumatic drills and sledgehammers and table saws all day long, oftentimes three stories up in a building with no walls on it. The trick is being able to identify unmanageable, unnecessary danger, and knowing when to say no.

The source of danger doesn’t always come from the nature of the job itself. Roofing a two story home offers the risk of falling and spending the next couple months on worker’s comp, but that risk is relatively slim if you have the right tools, the right people, and the right timeline and budget to do the job safely. On the other, something as simple as building a doghouse can lead to serious injury if you’re trying to rush the job along for a client with unrealistic expectations.

The cornerstones of safety on a job site come down to the following:

  • The time and budget to do the job safely. A client asking you to do a $2,000,000 job for $500,000 could well be the biggest contract a fledgling company has ever been offered, but it may well be the last one they’re ever offered if they wind up understaffed and under-equipped in order to stay within the budget.
  • A crew with the requisite experience to handle the job without incident. Some tasks we learn on the job. Electrical wiring, welding and operating heavy machinery usually aren’t those. Don’t take a job if you don’t have, or can’t get, the people you’ll need to do the dangerous parts.
  • A safe work environment. If you’re hired to install sunlights in a section of a shopping mall and the proprietors refuse to close that section off while you’re working there, an injury is effectively guaranteed. Construction is best conducted in an environment that the construction company is able to control.
  • Proper insurance coverage. Adequate coverage doesn’t ensure that nobody’s going to get hurt, but it does ensure that you’ll be prepared should that happen.

If you don’t have these cornerstones in place, then it really doesn’t matter how well trained your people are in responding to an emergency, because they’re not going to be able to keep up with the emergencies that are taking place no a daily basis.

Aug 01
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Handling Lead and Asbestos and Other Hazardous Materials

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

1608-con-1If you work in construction, it’s not uncommon to encounter asbestos, lead, and other hazardous materials on a remodeling or deconstruction job. When that does happen, here are the appropriate steps you’re going to want to take:

Clear the Area

If you find asbestos in a home, you’ll want to clear the area right away. Lead exposure can take years to create any lasting damage in the human body, but even mild exposure to asbestos can be dangerous.

Report

As soon as possible, report your findings to the proper authorities. In more cases than not, this will be the EPA. False alarms do happen, it’s not uncommon for some other material to be mistaken for asbestos, but the EPA will typically have some tests conducted in order to determine what it is that you’re dealing with. You’ll also want to let your client know that anyone who has been living or working in the building has potentially been exposed to the hazardous material.

For Asbestos and Other Hazards: Get a Professional

If you’re removing asbestos, you need to be certified, and if you are certified, you still need to report to the proper authorities that you’re going to be taking asbestos out of an old home.

If you would like to get certified to remove asbestos in order to prevent any findings from slowing a construction job down too much, you can get started at the EPA website. https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/training

For Lead: Proceed With Caution

You can remove lead on your own in most states with or without certification, but it can be a tricky process. Make sure that anyone involved in the job is wearing a dust mask, goggles and gloves, and be sure to clear the area to ensure that lead dust doesn’t get on anything. Sweep and clean the area thoroughly when you’re done.

Replace

Asbestos is more troublesome than it’s worth, but it is very good at one thing: preventing fire damage. It is nearly impossible to get the stuff to burn. Following the removal of any hazardous building material, you have to take a moment to consider why it was installed in the first place. Lead pipes are easy enough to replace with PVC, while asbestos removal should be followed up with the installation of something to replace it, like fiber-cement siding.

Finally: You’ll want to keep an eye on the health of yourself and your crew. The real threat is prolonged exposure, and most remodeling jobs are over and done with by the time the effects of exposure to hazardous materials can really be felt, but as always, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Aug 01
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Beating the Summertime Overheat

By Cyber Security Awareness

1608-cyber-4If you live in a milder climate like, say, the more comfortable parts of California or Washington, or a colder region like the Midwest, then you have perhaps never given this any consideration, but in states like Nevada, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, then you know how the Summertime heat can affect your electronic equipment. On a particularly warm day, your laptop might become too hot to even rest your hands on for typing. This isn’t only a nuisance, it can cause serious long-term damage.

Identifying Overheating

If your operating system doesn’t allow you to monitor internal CPU temperature, then you can download a program like Real Temp to keep an eye on it. Beyond this, there are some obvious signs of overheating:

  • Choppy, “glitchy” graphics. This is most obvious if you’re playing games on a PC or a gaming console. When the framerate slows down and starts looking like an Ray Harryhausen stop-motion monster movie, you’re probably dealing with overheating.
  • Your device shuts itself off. A lot of operating systems will automatically shut the computer or device down when the CPU temp gets too high.
  • Intense slowdown. When it takes a few seconds to move your mouse cursor across the screen, overheating is a likely culprit.

Dealing With Overheating

Here are some of the easiest ways to manage overheating on hot days:

  • Double check your fans. Open up the case and let the computer run. If your fans aren’t spinning, it could be a loose wire or a fan that needs replacing. You can use a desk fan to keep your computer cool until you can replace the internal fans.
  • Keep the room’s temperature cool. If you live in a warmer state, then during the Summer, you probably shouldn’t be running a PC or even a gaming console in a room without any temperature control.
  • Keep a can of air on hand. The dust that collects inside a device is like a warm, cozy blanket that traps heat within the components.
  • Task manager, end process, end process, end process, end process… Ending and uninstalling unnecessary background processes can put less of a workload on your computer, preventing it from overheating. If you’re not sure which processes are safe to end and which programs are safe to uninstall, Google them.
  • Become a night owl. This is more realistic of an option for some than it is for others, but if you like working at night, Summertime is the time to do it.

We spend so much time chasing bugs and viruses that we sometimes forget that computers are physical machines, and sometimes it’s not a worm or malware, it’s just running a bit of a fever.

Aug 01
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Sci-fi Concepts That Are More Sci Than Fi

By Cyber Security Awareness

1608-cyber-3It’s getting to the point where science-fiction is having a hard time keeping up with science-fact. If you put a sci-fi movie into production right now, the fancy gadgets you have on display might be found in the clearance section of your nearest Wal-Mart by the time the movie is actually released. Here are some devices, gadgets and gimmicks shown in movies that real-life developers have already figured out, or are at least very close to cracking:

Predator’s Stealth Camo

The story goes that when Predator was screened for an audience of top-brass military professionals, a high-ranking general pointed to the Predator’s invisibility cloak technology and said “Make that for me.” We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting closer all the time. It’s a little impractical for combat operations right now, but a group of researchers in Japan have developed a material that can be used to see right through the wearer. It requires a computer and a projector as of now, but the effect is nevertheless stunning.

Lightsabers

The challenge with a real life lightsaber is not actually creating a devastating beam of light, but telling that beam of light when to stop. If you want a superpowerful lasersword that will burn holes in your drywall if you’re too careless with it, you can actually put one together with a handful of parts from the hardware store and eBay. Similar projects have been built to launch a “blade” of flaming propane, but let’s be honest: If it’s not a laser, it doesn’t really count.

Artificial Organs

Repo Men featured Jude Law as an agent who retrieves artificial organs from patients who can’t afford to make the payments. They got one major detail completely wrong: In the future, artificial 3D bio-printed organs are not going to be expensive enough to justify paying Jude Law a commission to go get them back. As of now, an artificial heart costs around $125,000 and an annual maintenance fee of $18,000. However, as 3D printing becomes the norm, the cost is going to be driven way, way down, and bio-printing is no exception.

James Bond Villain Doomsday Devices

The Navy is currently using a laser, known as the LaWS, Laser Weapons System, powerful enough to destroy boats and drones. And it’s operated with a video game controller.

There have actually been stories of filmmakers and science fiction writers being contracted to help develop new technology for the military and other organizations. There’s a fun documentary available on Youtube showing how everything from the modern cell phone to voice recognition technology and even cyborg implants were inspired by their developers’ Star Trek fandom. Today’s wild idea is tomorrow’s DIY project you can throw together in your garage.

Aug 01
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Devices We’d Rather Not Become “Smart”

By Cyber Security Awareness

1608-cyber-2The Internet of Things is one of the most exciting things happening in technology today. How can you not like the idea of an air conditioner that checks in with a weather site, and automatically turns itself up just before a heat wave hits, or an HDTV that tracks your favorite shows and makes appropriate recommendations? That said, there are some devices that are just fine the way they are, for instance…

Vending Machines

If vending machines are going to be brought into the IoT, here’s the only feature we want: the ability to tell the supplier when the machine is down to nothing but a few bags of raisiny trail mix and some stale peanut butter crackers. Here’s what we absolutely do not want: For the vending machine to communicate with our Fitbit and refuse to give us the Snickers bar we asked for. If we wanted a smarter way to indulge in junk food, we wouldn’t be eating junk food.

Electric Razors

We’d simply rather there not be a database somewhere collecting information on which body parts we’re shaving. The moles on a man’s back are his business and his alone.

Fax Machines

There’s nothing wrong with a smart fax machine, per se. The issue is simply that most of us wish fax machines would just disappear forever already, and keeping them up to date with modern technology would be a roadblock on the way to phasing them out forever so that we never again are forced to scour the city for a library with a fax machine so that we can send something that we could have just emailed.

Recording Equipment

Microphones, tape recorders, video cameras, yes, we have these all attached to our phones, but there are plenty of obvious reasons why we would want to keep some of these devices offline. In the debate on personal privacy and user consent regarding IoT-connected devices, it stands to reason that there’s some content we would rather not go public until we decide that we want it to go public. The cloud is not inherently less-safe than local storage, but all the same, the double edged-sword of the IoT is that, all too frequently, we trade privacy for convenience.

This list is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but even so, we’re still adapting to the Internet of Things, and sometimes we let our excitement over new technology get the better of us.

Aug 01
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Tips That Ensure You and Your Professional References are on the Same Page

By Your Employee Matters

1608-em-4The professional references you include on your resume should be people who can give you a positive referral. You may think your former bosses, supervisors or managers are on the same page with you, but what happens if they don’t have your best interests in mind? Use several tips to make sure you and your professional references are on the same page.

Ask For Their Permission

Before including anyone one your reference list, ask for permission. The people you think will give you a referral may not want that responsibility.

Make Sure They’re Available

Always verify availability with your references before you list them on your resume. You don’t want to list a referral who has switched jobs or is too busy to talk to hiring managers. Be sure to get accurate contact information before you include a reference on your resume, too.

Remind Potential References of Who You Are

Your former boss may have helped to shape your career, but you could be one of thousands of employees he or she managed. Reintroduce yourself to ensure you receive an accurate referral. You can schedule a quick meeting, chat via Skype or forward supporting documents, including your resume, current job description, work history, strengths and future goals, via email as you make sure your reference knows you now.

Share the Key Facts of the Job

Let’s say you worked in sales but are now applying to be a manager. Your reference may answer questions based on your sales ability and totally skim over your managerial skills. Tell your potential references about the job for which you are applying, share a copy of the job description and outline the reasons why you’re right for the position so that they understand how to answer questions from potential employers.

Find Out Where You Can Improve

Many hiring managers want to know the flaws of potential employees. Discuss the areas in which you need improvement with your references in advance. You don’t want a reference to hurt your chances of landing a job because they share a long list of shortcomings.

Reply in a Timely Manner

It’s unrealistic to expect a reference to reply immediately after receiving a phone call, email or online survey from a hiring manager, but that person does need to reply in a timely manner. If he or she delays too long, you could lose your chances of getting the job. When you talk to your reference, tactfully remind him or her that you appreciate their prompt response.

Aug 01
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How to Write Professional Email

By Your Employee Matters

1608-em-3In a world of Twitter, Facebook and texting, email has taken a back seat. However, it’s still an important communication tool for working relationships. Understand the basics of how to write a professional email as you stay connected at work.

Use a Proper Salutation

From the beginning of your email, establish that you are a person who understands courtesy and manners. To do that, address emails with the recipient’s name. An example salutation is “Dear Ms. or Mr. Last Name.”

Request Rather Than Demand

It’s easy to use email to demand things from others. Consider requesting rather than demanding, though, as you keep your professional relationship and collaborative reputation intact. Instead of writing, “Place the report on my desk by five”, write, “Please give me the report this afternoon.”

Watch Your Tone

Written words are easy to misinterpret since you can’t hear someone’s voice or see their facial expressions. While you can’t always predict when someone will misinterpret your email, you can read it before you hit send. Cut curse words and inflammatory language, and if the tone could be construed as sarcastic, rude, bossy or anything less than professional and courteous, rewrite it.

Proofread

Spelling, grammar and punctuation don’t always matter in personal communications, but they are essential for professional emails. Use complete sentences and proofread your emails carefully before you send them. If you’re not skilled in this area, spend time learning the rules or ask a co-worker to help you edit.

Maintain Privacy

In your rush to make a sale or handle an issue, you may include sensitive information in the email or cc information that should remain private. Be sure to respect the recipient by not sharing his or her email address without permission or including an outsider in a private conversation.

Follow Up in a Timely Manner

An email overload may cause you to delay responding. Quick replies can improve your reputation, though, and symbolize that you value your teammates and customers. Set time aside each day to read and reply immediately to email. If you need more time to find an answer, let the person know and then be sure to follow up.

Remember That Email is Forever

Before you hit send on any email, remember that it is permanent. You can delete it, but the recipient may not. Take a minute before sending an email and only send it if you’re okay with it going public.

Remember your manners when you write email, and invest in your career and reputation.

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