I came across this on a trip to the grocery store the other day.
Does the author realize that if Sarge’s testicles were removed instead of his ovaries, he might stop peeing in the house the other 20% of the time?
A champion’s offspring with no papers? Really! What on earth did the papers get used for, “medicinal purposes”? Is he part Min-Pin, part Maui Wowy? Perhaps they only had enough newspaper to potty train him for 11 months and they were forced to use his pedigree when they ran out?
By the time we got to Lansing this evening, Aimee was barely able to contain herself. Finally, she blurted out “If they offer you a Citi card, are you gonna take that too?”
Citi is one of my least favorite companies. Let me tell you, I can hold a grudge against a company for a long, long time. For the past fourteen years I have gone out of my way to avoid Quality Dairy. In fact, I bet that I have only visited a Quality Dairy store an average of once per year for the past fourteen years.
Anyway, the source of my wife’s mirth began a couple months ago when I was smitten with Bluetooth. First it was Bluetooth headphones, then mice, then an adapter for our home stereo system, and of course I eventually bought a used Bluetooth keyboard on E-bay. $25 shipped. It’s really slick, but once I tried it, I wanted to push the envelope.
Couchtop computing. Sure, it’s much hyped (ever heard of a media center PC?) but is anyone really into it? I tried it out, but I couldn’t see my monitor well enough to actually do anything. That got my wheels turning. I needed a larger monitor. Something large enough that I could sit on the couch and compose Word documents in comfort.
While I was simmering on this idea, the Olympic games began. I’m not into the Olympics, but I am into hockey. The game last Sunday was not to be missed: The USA versus Canada. The two super powers of hockey duking it out. In my ignorance I thought I could probably pay someone on the Internet to let me watch the game on my computer.
I was wrong. NBC kept redirecting me to Comcast. Finally, I realized that if I wanted to ever see hockey on TV again, I’d have to bite the bullet and upgrade our analog cable. It was such a frustrating realization that I nearly threw my computer. Instead, I called Comcast and sullenly ordered the entry level digital package.
If you give a moose a muffin, he’ll want some jam to go with it.
My logic went like this. If I ordered the cable upgrade quickly, I could still watch the final game on TV without getting smoked out at a bar. If I was going to swallow my pride and buy cable TV, I might as well watch the game on a reasonably good TV. If I was going to buy a reasonably good TV, it better be one that I could compose Word documents on while lying down on my couch.
Citi is one of my least favorite companies. It’s right up there with Dodge. And, ironically, Comcast. By the way, I don’t care for television (hockey games excepted) either. But there we were, driving a borrowed Dodge to purchase a super-size me television in time for a Comcast installation.
In case you’re wondering, they did not offer a discount if I put the purchase on a Citi credit card.
Cleaning up a tangled mess is probably not uncommon. Partially collapsed buildings must be carefully deconstructed in order to avoid damage to their neighbors. Failing companies are routinely broken down and sold in as profitable a fashion as possible.
Maintaining the status quo in terms of performance while making corporate changes can be difficult. It’s easy to overlook the value of unwritten knowledge. Even if processes are properly documented it can be difficult to understand the relationships between processes without having experienced them first hand.
Many service workers are unable to fully document what they do because much of they do is dictated by intuition. While recently reviewing a process which was performed by another employee in the past, I puzzled over why her results were so different from my own. Why did customers seem so responsive in the past, yet so lackluster today?
The answer is simple, straightforward. Her experience indicated that unless she prodded customers, customer response would be low. Her process included an unwritten step during which she would contact customers who did not respond in a timely fashion and offer to help them along in the process.
Another situation recently occurred which came from a similar cause: a missing, non-intuitive piece of information which made the difference between a successful project and a disastrous one. What is the role of this intuited knowledge in an evolving company? How can companies avoid faltering amidst the redevelopment of internal processes?
When employees will not or cannot become parties to process improvement, they may become liabilities; their mere presence will increase the cost of doing business. Replacing them will also certainly cause a temporary increase in the cost of doing business, and will create a short term lack of corporate improvement as corporate knowledge is reacquired through accelerated experience.
Improvement is cumulative. Without a solid foundation, future improvement is jeopardized. Broken processes were almost certainly created in shortsighted haste, and avoiding the same mistake in the future can only take place by refusing to take the easy way out.
I recently took the plunge and purchased a “smart phone”. My particular model is an HTC Droid Eris. For the record, it’s cooler than cool. At a cost of $500 without a contract, the phone is still well worth the expense. I’ve been enlightened.
One of the things which I’ve found incredibly cool about my phone is the Pandora Internet radio application. The cost is minimal, and it streams radio directly to your phone. It’s great. Part of the reason it’s so cool, though, is that you can purchase Bluetooth headphones. Unlike the cliché wireless headsets, the headphones look good and they service both ears. They connect wirelessly to my phone, and allow me to listen to music with no cords attached. After a few minutes with the headphones, I was compelled to recant my dislike of Bluetooth technology.
My problem with Bluetooth has been largely in the failure of general Bluetooth adoption. Bluetooth devices are (headsets aside) still rare in terms of consumer adoption. After my revealing phone experience, I had to have Bluetooth on my laptop as well.
An E-Bay Bluetooth dongle cost me a whopping $5 plus shipping. It’s USB and sticks out of my computer only a very small amount. When it arrived, I eagerly plugged it in and powered up my headphones. The ensuing antics reminded me of why Microsoft completely failed with Windows Vista.
Vista on my home laptop works well. I don’t have any major complaints, however I was infuriated to find that Microsoft removed the level of Bluetooth support from Vista that’s available on my phone. Vista cannot recognize an a high quality audio device, and it cannot even use a simple HID device (as in…mouse). But my phone can. Go Google!
It quickly became clear that in order to use my Bluetooth device with my laptop, I would need to purchase a third party Bluetooth stack. At this rate, I thought “Well, they probably did Windows 7 right…maybe I’ll upgrade”.
Windows 7, Microsoft’s new flagship OS cannot use an elegant, mature technology like Bluetooth any better than my phone. Buying a third party stack (Bluesoleil’s stack) cost me an additional $30. If Microsoft had decided to properly equip Windows 7 to meet the demands of it’s consumers, I would have purchased that instead. Unfortunately, despite the catastrophic losses Microsoft took on Windows Vista, it has made an active decision to make the exact same mistake again. Nice work Microsoft! The good news is that at least this time, they have more practice when they execute the marketing blitz to convince people that they want an operating system which has been specifically built not to meet their needs.
The silver lining is that it sounds as though Google is building a PC operating system. If it’s anything like my phone, I’m confident that it will become the operating system that Microsoft failed to deliver not once, but twice.
On Friday afternoon, I commented to a coworker “I think I’ll try to spend some time in the basement this weekend.” That’s where my workshop is, and for some reason it’s relaxing just to hang out in the basement and put things in order.
Today I decided to get off my duff and install the new shocks I bought for Aimee’s car. They’re air shocks, so I had to drill some holes. After drilling the holes, I went to retrieve some tools from the basement.
The floor was wet. Our basement hasn’t been wet since we had a B-Dry system installed, and that’s been three years! My first suspicion was a leaking furnace humidifier, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. As I rooted around a bit, I finally noticed water coming out of the water heater…except that it was coming from places where is wasn’t supposed to be coming from!
So, it turns out that I really did spend time in the basement today. A lot of time. More than I could ever have expected! The really annoying part is that I probably aided the failure of our old water heater. We recently installed a water softener, and despite advice to install an expansion tank, I did not. Plumbing never turns out well, and there had previously been a softener installed without a tank. I was really afraid of upsetting our delicately balanced, non-leaking plumbing.
Today, of course, I finally picked up a tank when I bought the heater.
It cost $40 and installed with a saddle valve that pierced the copper line. If I had simply taken a few minutes to read about the expansion tank, I would have known that the installation was brain-dead simple, and I might have prolonged the life of our heater.
Of course, then I probably wouldn’t have spent time in my workshop today either.
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