January 17, 2020
Dear Everyone:
About three and a half decades ago, I was running a very large central
file room, consisting of hundreds of thousands of paper files for the
most part; there were also carefully filed strips of extra-stiff
cardboard with tiny pieces of rock glued to them in precisely the order
in which Nature had laid them down eons ago, and a library card catalog
cabinet filled with glass microscope slides.
But mostly it was large paper files.
And over a half-dozen full-time employees, plus various
contractors, so called because the Company hired them by the hour from
an employment agency with which the Company had a contract.
The majority of these files were jointly used by two departments which,
for the purposes of identification, we will call “Department A” and
“Department B”. One day, the
Powers That Be decided that they wanted to know how much each of these
departments were actually using this large, centralized file room.
In other words, what percent of the files were requested by
Department A and what percentage by Department B.
So, for about a month, we kept track.
Each time someone requested one of these files, we would ask them
in which department they worked.
At first, people were reluctant to answer this question, as they
assumed we were going to start charging them for our services.
But we reassured them, and kept track and reported back to
Management the result:
Department A: 50%;
Department B: 50%.
Management replied, “Fine.
Keep track for another week or so and make the numbers come out 60/40.”
In other words, they had already decided what they wanted to do
and wanted the numbers to justify their actions.
This was a prime example of Management finding a solution, then
searching for a problem to which to apply it.
They wanted to separate the two departments and ship one of them
to another location. But
then, how would they both use the files in the centralized file room?
Answer: We would “simply”
replicate the “most important” files to go with the department that
would be departing. So how
many, out of hundreds of thousands, were the “most important”?
Only about 46,000 of them.
Management also decided that these files would need to be pulled apart,
prepared for copying, then reassembled, both the original and the
duplicate. All the while
keeping everything available, should anyone request one of these “most
important” files.
To avoid hampering normal operations in the file room, Management
decided that the whole operation of pulling apart, copying, and
reassembling would be done after regular office hours.
At night. By two
contractors and myself. Of
course, I would continue to run the daytime operation as well, sort of.
It only took a couple of weeks for Management to realize that two
contractors could not process 46,000 files in anything like the time
frame that they had in mind.
The idea of doing the work during the night shift was also abandoned.
Before you knew it, I had dozens of contractors working in every
nook and cranny that I could find.
The copy center took over multiple conference rooms, running
extra copy machines at full tilt.
After a month or so, the copy center started outsourcing the work to
local suppliers who were more than thrilled to get all the extra work,
and the revenue that went with it.
The manager of the copy center told me that, in his opinion, the
person who made the most money out of the whole project was the copy
machine repairman who was running up and down all of Northern
California, keeping all those overworked machines going.
It was, as one Supervisor dubbed it:
“The Management Decision that resulted in so much overtime that
my lead file clerk made enough money to buy herself a fur coat and put a
down payment on a condominium.”
Yes, that was me. I’ve
traded up twice since that first condominium, from roughly $87,000 to
nearly half a million, judging by current prices.
And I still have the fur coat.
Why a fur coat? This was all
taking place in the mid-1980s.
I began to wonder if I would ever have something to show for all
the work I was doing, riding herd on the mass of temporary workers, plus
the usual “getting the wash out” of running a very large file room.
Then, one day, I heard an ad on the car radio announcing that Macy’s
would be having a special sale on fur coats.
In a flash, I realized that I was making enough money to “afford”
a fur coat. Especially as it
would be On Sale!
I dragged “Jeannie” with me to the store the next weekend.
After all, she’d been in a fur department once before.
Way back when she was still in high school, our Dad received a
bonus at work that he decided to spend on a special gift for his wife.
And he wanted it to be a surprise.
He picked “Jeannie” up after school one day and took her to a Macy’s
store that featured a fur department.
He needed “Jeannie” because she happened to be the same size as
our Mother. “Jeannie”
happily tried on one coat after another, passing judgement on color,
style and length.
Both of them were completely oblivious to the angry looks directed their
way by customers and sales associates alike, observing that “filthy old
man” purchasing an outlandishly expensive gift for his little “sugar
baby”. “Honestly!
She’s barely more than a child!”
Fast-forward to my decision to reward my hard work with something
tangible, and furry.
When “Jeannie” and I arrived at the fur department, I discovered that
fur coats don’t have size labels on them.
The sales associate looked me over briefly, then guided me to the
appropriate rack containing coats that just happened to be my size.
I decided on a garment that would have been a jacket on anyone else; on
me it was almost knee-length and qualified as a coat.
It was “Indigo” fox from Finland.
Never mind how much I paid for it; I saved $200!
And it was considerably less than the down payment on the
condominium.
That winter was one of the coldest on record.
But I was always warm from the knees up.
I recently retrieved the jacket, nicknamed “Fluffy” for obvious
reasons, out of storage.
After 35 years, it’s in better shape than I am.
Love, as always,
Pete
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