January 19, 1995
Dear Everyone:
I'm not sure how or when it happened, but somehow, quite without my
intending it, I’ve become an authority figure.
Recently, I happened to be
passing someone's workstation and overheard them on the phone, saying,
"I asked ‘A’, and she said to do it such-and-such a way, so that's how
we're doing it."
People come to me with questions and I give them answers and they're
happy to be told what to do. They
don't ever seem to ask themselves, "Is she just making that up?"
No, they assume that I know what
I'm talking about and that I'm telling them the truth.
I think it's wonderful that they
feel they can come to me with all their little problems and get the
answers they need. Although, I
sometimes wish they wouldn't all come once.
And, so far, I've been able to resist the impulse to respond to a
question with the answer: "Stand
on your head and spit green golf balls."
In the Wonderful World of
Versatile,
“Jerry” and I have finally managed to get the ball rolling on using the
bar-code scanners to check boxes in and out of the system in
“Livermore”. Only “Livermore” and
“Hobby” use bar-coding. The
"smaller" warehouses don't seem to need it.
And as for “Hobby”, they have
planted their collective feet in the mud and steadfastly refused to stop
using CRMIS until "all the problems have been worked out in
Versatile".
They want all the details settled
as far as bar-coding is concerned before they will even begin to use the
new system.
On the one hand, they have a point, as witness all the "work-arounds"
we've had to come up with in “Livermore” to deal with not being able to
use the scanners (until yesterday). And
the process is still somewhat bulky. “Jerry”
wrote up some "step-by-step" instructions that filled about 6 pages.
On the other hand, “Hobby” has
nowhere near the volume of work that “Livermore” has, and “Livermore”
has been managing quite well. “Hobby's”
just dragging their feet. For
instance, even though they were told months in advance that they would
need a dedicated phone line put in for the modem that connects them to
the system, they didn't even order it until the week after the system
went operational. And they claim
it's still not the right "kind" of line and they don't want to use it
because it will cost them money.
We suspect that they have it in mind to just wait until “Jerry” and I
get out there so that we can set everything up with a little, or no,
effort on their part. However, I
have a secret weapon: “Hobby's”
customers. Once “Dierdra” and
“Regina” and the others get into
Versatile and find out how easy it is to do a keyword search, tag
the boxes they want, and order them all with a single keystroke, they'll
force “Hobby” into using
Versatile.
At this point, we're not exactly sure just when we’ll get to “Hobby” and
the other sites. “Murray” pointed
out that we could center our operations in “Hobby”, where Southwest
Airlines has flights going to “Austin”, “Oklahoma City” and “Lafayette”
every hour or so. That way we can
stay flexible. Naturally, “Hobby”
would like us to come out as soon as possible.
But the “Livermore” people have
already said they don't want “Jerry” and me disappearing until they're
more familiar and more comfortable with
Versatile and we want to keep them happy.
Besides, I want to make sure that we
miss Mardi Gras time in
“Lafayette”. I saw
The Pelican
Brief. Being in a town
where 10,000 people are partying on every sidewalk doesn't appeal to me.
Our (tentative) plan is to
concentrate on getting the Bay Area users trained first, then tackled
the Central Time Zone.
As for the bulky work-arounds, last night I wrote some little batch
files that take six of “Jerry's” steps and condense them into a single
word. So it's already getting
better.
As long as they keep doing what I tell them to do.
Love, as always,
Pete
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