8. Going Home
“Mechanization best serves mediocrity.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
Thanks to the wonders of technology, wild life can be tracked, using minuscule devices. Determining whether a species is on the brink of extinction along with population counts and where it thrives are a few uses of radar, drones and acoustic sound tagging. This enables scientists to effectively manage habitats and protect birds and animals. A Passive Integrated Transponder tag (PIT) can be attached to an animal for tracking and identifying it. Coded wire tags (CWT) are also used. Also very helpful are numerous APPs, digital cameras, tablets, laptops and Smart Phones. Instead of climbing up to the roof to determine when it’s time for a new one, a drone can handle that task. Fractured necks aren’t any fun.
What is broken, or seems to be, is the spirit of a person who is energetic and wants to effect change but is held back by someone else. I’ve seen too much of this over the years. For too long, we’ve heard the advice: If you work hard, you’ll succeed when coming to America. If you proceed that way and have to do so at a few companies, you’ll only succeed at winding up in the hospital or worse. The right way is to work smart.
Consider two employees at a corporation, Frank and Joe, both programmer analysts in different galaxies. They have the same assignments to complete a project. Frank heads over to his cubicle and digs right in. Joe goes to lunch, taking all afternoon but doesn’t order any martinis. His boss is the head of Kruger Industrial Smoothing, played by Daniel von Barger. The organization, introduced on Seinfeld, is described as the disorganized and unprofessional company with the motto, We don’t care, and it shows.
A few days later, Frank sees his project leader and states that he can finish in four weeks. While Joe was out to lunch, he did some analysis and by working in the normal manner, concluded four weeks would be sufficient, but by working smart – doing the job differently – he could finish in three weeks. He reports to his boss that three and a half weeks should be sufficient for the job. Joe finishes the work in three weeks. He hands over the completed task in three weeks and two days, avoiding appearing too soon with what he did. Had he done so, his supervisor may have asked him to do unachievable things on his next assignment. Frank brings the desired result to his manager in a day short of four weeks. Was Frank or Joe the employee out to lunch?
In chapter 2 I mentioned the purchase order system with the lesson that I should have ignored my boss and done the project my way, finishing it. I doubt that my boss would have known the procedure I followed. Working smart beats working hard, any day.
Throughout my computer dealings in the corporate world, the process didn’t vary much. The users presented requests for programmers to investigate and make appropriate changes. The manager placed each issue on an inbox on the top of his desk. When an employee came into the supervisor’s office, the latter handed the former a request from the bottom of the pile. This was wrong, dumb and not really thinking smart, just doing things as before. My suggestion is to ignore all the requests until the user calls and asks about progress on his request. At that point the boss summons a programmer who’s been dozing too much in his cubicle and gives him the assignment with a request for a progress report by the end of the week. A few days later the leader contacts the user and mentions that he’ll know more by the beginning of the next week. Eventually the change is made and everyone is happy, especially napping Nick.
This approach shows common sense. Many of these requests never get finished and need not be because the user forgets about them or moves to another branch. A few users may get run over by a steamroller. Employees are happier with less work and the hours can be reduced to 30 hours a week instead of advancing to 50. This is progress using innovative thinking.
In the mid 1970s, I was asked to write a report program using the software, Culprit. It may still be in use. It was an easy task that I finished and then the program was put into production. It ran monthly for a while until one day I was told that the user didn’t receive the report. I looked into the matter and found out why, discovering that it hadn’t run the month before either. I fixed the problem and wondered if the job really had to be run at all since no one missed it the first time. At other corporations I saw reports that filled a box of paper or more each month – that’s a few reams. Did anyone read these environmental eviscerations of the forests? You could tell who did by the people with hernias. Anyone who needed the report only looked at the last page. A much smarter idea was to put the mass of data online and not print it. Have mercy on the woods, please.
Speaking about reports, my printers at home haven’t always behaved. Granted they’re machines and subject to malfunctioning, but mine seems to be allied with the paper companies who profit more from jamming. At times printing a single page ends up with three pages of output: some printing on each of the pages. All have to be recycled and I have to try again. Maybe the printer needs a colostomy. Too many times a blank page winds up between page ten and page eleven of a fourteen-page report. I assume you all know about the printer cartridge conspiracy.
For many years, I’ve always hated unnecessary work. This relates back to ignoring any concern for working smart. One example took place in the late 1990s at a Y2K assignment in Rochester. Our project had programmers and testers. The former analyzed the software, made program changes and tested what they did. I was in the latter group, which did more extensive testing of the program and the system that included it since this required more advanced skills than the programmers. While doing my job, I found one program that didn’t work, implying that the initial effort by some programmer was wrong. Somehow it looked right, and it was. The software used for testing had bugs. This happens too many times and is frustrating and unnecessary. The year 2000 problem, which I wrote about in a short book that was never published, should never have happened, costing an estimated $300 billion in U. S. currency. Fortunately, the year 2000 came without real problems. Maybe I’ll revise the book for Y3K.
A more recent annoyance happened on Monday, March 9, 2015. I turned on my desktop computer and headed to the Internet using my favorite browser. Soon I lost my toolbars – both the top and bottom ones. I recorded a few error messages, so I could relay them to a technician. Not easy to do, I found a phone number for that browser and called for help, relating those words. I talked to a person in a land far, far away and he listened for a while and then wanted to get into my PC. I refused and asked what I should do, but he insisted on control. When he mentioned a credit card, I uttered the word, no and he hung up. Somehow I survived the disappearing tool bars in the morning, which may have been caused by some settings.
Later I returned to work on my PC and I’m not sure when the problem was resolved. Just by turning off the device may have made a difference, but something else could have taken place. The individual I talked to for help may have felt guilty and taken care of it. Because of all the interconnections of software, I’ll never know and I was happy for the fix. Obviously, I had too much unnecessary work – thanks to computers.
Mark Knopfler performed “Going home”, the last song on the soundtrack of the 1983 motion picture, Local Hero. Mick Hucknall sings “Home” on the 2003 release of the same name.