Cocktail Confessions

The last few days I’ve had a mild case of writers block when it’s come to thinking about a topic to discuss .  Oh, I’ve had a few ideas percolating within the old noggin, mostly about my upcoming few days off, or some great beers I’ve recently had.   However, just as I was about to put it off for yet another day, I realized my place of employment has a rich cavern of stupid gems I can mine from on a regular basis, and today I struck gold!

We have a thing at work called ’5S’, and the majority of normal folk can’t tell you what all the S’s stand for (Sort, Shine are all I can remember), but it’s an idea developed by the Japanese that has something to do along the lines of making your place of employment a better overall experience.  It has to do with maintaining a clean and safe environment, things should look tidy and put away, everything in order…blah, blah, blah.  In concept it sounds like a decent idea, but in practice and personal experience it’s more of a hassle that only a few people seem to really get off on. 

And by a few people, I mean a minority handful of select kiss-asses who take this concept to an irrational level of eleven.  I swear, it has turned these individuals into the Gestapo of ridiculous policies where a committee of ‘yes men’ all pat themselves on the back for forming an adhoc committee to discuss the obvious.  The problem I have with it is that it takes all the ability of logical problem solving skills and responsibility of the sane workers and places it in the hands of a handful who take forever to rule on what would seem a no-brainer to the rest. 

This committee of five or six has a tour once every three months, armed with a digital camera, clip boards, and frazzled panic and walk around the facilities to point out and document things that need to be cleaned up, repaired, or fixed for safety reasons.  Like I said, 5S seems decent in concept, but now its more of a nuisance than anything else.  The majority of big ticket items were addressed the first few times.  Now I have the feeling they are just making shit up or going overboard to justify their own experience.  It’s as if they ‘have’ to find something on each walkthru now, and if they don’t they either failed or try harder.  It’s gotten nit-picky to epic proportions and eye-roll inducing at worst.  I am convinced they are on a mission to write anything down now just so they can say they found something.  God forbid the company actually passes one of these tours.  It has literally come down to things such as which font is used to mark a door, or how wide a tape marker is….a half inch or a quarter inch these days.

All this leads up to today’s asinine event: The speaker.

Apparently they had a dry run today for the actual walkthru on Wednesday of this week.  In one of our least populated buildings there is a secured area that only a few people have access to and way out of the way for a regular employee to find themselves near.   Now in that secured room which has plenty of open space, there is a single mono speaker sitting on a portable plastic step….in the corner. 

There is nothing special or noteworthy about this speaker other than the fact it looks like it came from Radio Shack back in the late 70′s as it is adorned with some tacky beige tweed fabric.  It doesn’t work, or at least it hasn’t been hooked up to anything in at least three years that I have been with the company, and I’m sure many years before that.  Like I said, it is sitting in a corner doing nothing but collecting dust.

Anyway, even though the ‘committee’ has walked through this area multiple times in the past and this speaker has never caused a problem, stolen any kids lunch money, or made racial epithets, today it has now become a red-ticket, high priority, def-con-one issue.  Why today and not the last dozen times they’ve walked through this room?  Your guess is as good as mine.

So the committee of managers and higher-up muckity-mucks decide to talk amongst themselves and call my boss.  My boss in turns talks with another supervisor to discuss who owns the speaker, what is it doing now, what was it’s original purpose, and what can the company do about it before Wednesday.  Both my boss and supervisor then contact yours truly to understand and glean information from me on the history and current dossier of the six inch woofer.  I explain that is has been there for longer than I have been employed here, that it is not hooked up nor has been for at least three years and that no one knows who is responsible for it judging from the quarter inch of dust on it.  I simply reply, “Throw it out.”

I am instead met with “Well, we have to follow procedures.” and “We have to make some calls.” and more back and forth banter between them seemingly goes on for much longer than a govermental selection and vetting process of a Supreme Court nominee. 

Finally, when it is all said and done, they open an electronic ticket for me in our work process flow system to have me dispose of the speaker.  This equates to me printing out a ticket, walking down to the building, grabbing the speaker, throwing it in the trash, walking back, and then closing out the ticket.  My manual labor of throwing the speaker out was all of 30 seconds….the paperwork I had to acknowledge and then sign afterwards about ten minutes worth.

Now why none of the Muckity-mucks couldn’t just throw it out themselves in the beginning and just be done with it?  Why make multiple phone calls to various people to discuss the fate of a speaker that is clear close to forty years old and doing nothing but holding down a non-moving step ladder?  Why open a ticket and assign it to me for something this ludicrous?  Who the hell knows other than to justify their won existence.  I mean why bother with trying to improve employee moral, or invest in new equipment to make our jobs easier, or strategizing about how to improve our overall standing in the marketplace….there are paperclips out of place somewhere and mismatching paper cups in the cafeteria, and by golly, we’re going to find them.