Choice Mindsets

We’re not totally heartless: we acknowledge that we shouldn’t pick on Mitch, Thomas, and Ryan for their common inability to control their height. Just like long-goofy limbs or big feet, these are physical attributes completely out of their control.

Instead, we thought it best to make the following list of the positives of having a staff of diverse height here at Choice One.

• When measuring culvert sizes in the field, we can quickly determine heights from 60 inches to 84 inches without a tape measure.
• Without a few shorter folks, we could never have fit so many of us into one Choice One [clown] car. And without a few taller folks, how could we reach things on upper shelves?
• When taking a group photo, we have obvious candidates for back row and front row. (Although candidates for fluorescent spandex are hand-selected regardless of height.)

With all these important reasons, how could we not appreciate the short, the tall, and everyone in between? However, we’re not getting soft–we’ll definitely keep picking on Mitch, Ryan, and Thomas for other common features they DO have control over. Most notable, they’re all fans of Cleveland sports teams. And that’s just short-sighted.

CAD Designer Kyle Siegrist is getting married in August, and he’s understandably concerned about keeping the Choice One crew happy at the wedding reception. Lucky for Kyle, he can capitalize on sitting in the current most valuable seat in the Sidney office: next to the window where thrilling office expansion-related sanitary work and gravel backfilling can be watched (…a kind of thrill only civil engineers could love).

Smart move, Kyle, collecting quarters in exchange for a construction look-see. And to think, it only took you two years at Choice One to follow in the footsteps of your fellow capitalist coworkers. Kudos on following in the footsteps of someone like Brian “Barney” Barhorst, who operates the Canteen solely to fund his personal travel. But you still have a long way to go to outshine Kaye, who talked her local county engineers into a personal loan.

Kyle, we hope you’re able to save up a few extra dollars for your wedding for dealing with all of us looky-loos over the next few months. We especially hope you get a few contributions considering your window is probably more popular than you are right now—at least until you buy us all beer at your wedding, that is.

On a recent Safe Routes to School Walk Audit, the young man in the photo (not Choice One’s Brad Walterbush on the right and definitely not Craig Eley in the middle) helped us understand how he and other kids walk to school each day. Considering the way this student fits in with our traffic engineers in this photo, it’s no wonder that Mitch asked the quoted question.

How young is too young to be an engineer? We know that a two-year-old is just about qualified to be a surveyor. And we know that a nine-year-old is probably smart enough to write the super long MS Excel equations required to be an engineer (or the equally important pizza consumption calculator). Yet our 12-year-old friend isn’t old enough to drive yet, which means he can’t circle roundabouts again and again and AGAIN just for pure fun, and therefore can’t be a traffic engineer yet. (Seriously, avoid roundabouts if Craig Eley is driving.)

While he may be a little too young to be a full-fledged engineer, hopefully our student friend knows he’s getting a head start in engineering by learning from a traffic legend like Craig. And regardless of his education or age, he has the first and most important aspect of being a pretty cool engineer well in-hand: he’s wearing green!

Every once in a while, we change desks here at Choice One. In our typical engineering fashion, there is a to-scale schematic of the office’s layout, and to Kaye’s point, there is ALWAYS a special, dedicated place for the popcorn machine. Because, priorities.

So why the new seat and popcorn machine assignments? First, if you hadn’t heard, we’re breaking ground on a building expansion at our Sidney office today and need to move folks to accommodate the gaping hole about to be cut in our building. Second, on the surface, this movement helps us get to know and learn from our coworkers. But in reality? We figure everyone should have to suffer sitting next to Mitch or Jeff Puthoff for some extended period of time.

No matter the office layout, our beloved popcorn machine will always be a star here at Choice One. It was featured in one of the first Choice One videos. It’s an indispensable resource shared generously by all, as exemplified by the shoving and elbowing that happens when fresh popcorn is on the line. And no matter the number or placement of employees in our office, we will always be darn sure that our popcorn machine receives a designated place of honor. (And for the record, the popcorn machine doesn’t want to be next to Jeff or Mitch, either.)

A few weeks back, we put engineer Dane Sommer in charge of the entirety of Choice One for ONE DAY, including answering the phones, during which he unintentionally agreed to the purchase of a commemorative plaque highlighting a recent award. The decorative wall-hanging arrived this week, and, as you can see, Dane is VERY proud of it. (And we thought transportation engineers only got excited about designing roundabouts and traffic signals.)

It’s our own fault. Most of us had traveled to Cleveland for Choice One’s biennial company trip. We guess Dane owed us out of spite—as a huge Cleveland Browns and Indians fan, he was just a little bummed that he was not able to join us for a ton of fun* in one of his favorite cities.

Don’t worry Dane, we promise we didn’t go through ANY roundabouts in Cleveland without you. Plus, your accidental purchase marks our first Dayton-region “Best Places to Work” win. So since you’ve created a constant reminder that we’re a “Best Place to Work,” we should probably believe in second chances. Especially if your second chance makes us laugh as much as the first one!