12 June 2008 11:44
Yesterday the company bought us pizza while we sat down to listen to a speaker expound on stress management. The scene was comprised of roughly 70 blue collar workers wolfing down free pizza and pop while the PowerPoint waxed eloquent about the importance of a varied and healthy diet. We also learned about the benefits of yoga and meditation, impromptu walks, and (I quote) "sending out your thoughts on the right frequency to attract [good] things back to you".Most of what she said had some degree of validity, but her presentation was way off-target for her audience. I could stereotype our workforce as "male, beer-drinking, pickup-driving rednecks" without missing the truth by too much; it's not that bad but it's also not the kind of group that's going to enthusiastically agree that yoga is "cool". We did learn that laughter is the "best medicine" when it comes to relieving stress. I hear you're not supposed to mix medications on your own, in which case I hope cynicism isn't a 'medicine' or my following attempt at workplace humour is definitely 'laced':
'Pentagon' (sometimes referred to as 'Pentagone') is the name of our inventory management software.
The other day I got a call from our guy in Florida, he was wondering where a sudden raft of mystery parts had came from that suddenly appeared on his inventory report. Turns out they were miscellaneous low-dollar parts that we've never inventoried before until an over-zealous parts guy listed them in the computer wrong on the last shipment. I spent an hour trying to fight the red-tape over in the parts department to get everything changed back to consumable so that we wouldn't have to manually count 150 individual eight cent cotter pins to confirm they were all there, much less have to fill out paperwork every time we use one. (The demoralizing bit is I'm not sure I was successful, time will tell when next month's report comes out). Sure, inventory makes sense for the high-dollar items like radar units and attitude indicators—the NVG sets I mentioned are $9,500 a pair (and yes, we're missing one). But therein lies the frustration for Pentagon tells us we should have 'x' number and we only have 'x – 1' physically in stock...the software is useless to tell us where the errant pair wandered off to. So my question is, why bother knowing it's missing?
It works for me, every time I find a ten-dollar bill in a random shirt pocket when doing my laundry it makes my day a little brighter. That wouldn't happen if I kept track of all my cash religiously.
11:44 email me permalink / commentary (0)
