When life begins to imitate work

It was only a piece of loose wallpaper. Just one. Andy told me not to pull it down. After the bathroom disaster I should have known better.

But I couldn’t stop myself and now we have gone from a decorated, tidy (by our standards) area to 48 square metres of carnage. We can’t enter rooms, can’t venture into the lounge without climbing over chairs and other really important rooms are snarling up as both time and attention is given to getting the ceiling fixed before visitors arrive on the 18th.

Problem is I did this at work too. Except it wasn’t wallpaper. More the proverbial carpet under which IT infrastructure lies. It wasn’t nice orderly set of planks underneath, more like a rope and timber bridge – you know like in Indiana Jones temple of doom. A touch of under investment (like a decade), a few too many repairs (many made of invisible ink) and lots of missing bits…oh and did I mention the river with crocodiles waiting to eat any data stream unlucky enough to fall through? No? Well that too.

And now I’m uncovering the project carnage that this type of infrastructure creates. Want a new report? That’ll be months. Want a new bit of software? That’ll be years. I’m not kidding. Today I found another project that has been in progress consuming team time for nearly 2 years. Want to do some work today? Well as long as you don’t need data before lunchtime and after 4pm, then you’ll be just fine. Oh and by the way – don’t ever log off your machine – you’ll save yourself about 30 minutes every day that way.

Crap. I was bought in to create an Operationally Excellent culture. What’s more the place is an information management company. No assets (apart from it’s people, but that’s another story). No products. No research, manufacturing or design. No warehousing, trucks or plants. Just data. Crap. At least I’m feeling better about my ceiling now.

🙂 another day of semi stressed milk.

Ta ta for now.