Category: Work

“They’re just not the best person for the job,” Boss said.

“I know, but at least it will get done,” was my reply

“But it could be anyone,” he continued. “We picked Friend almost at random,” he sounded a bit defeated. “We’re paying Friend too.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “It could have been anyone: Confidence, Smooth, Respite, anyone. Truth, we just picked Friend without thinking who would actually know the best price to sell it for.”

“But at least we would have some money,” I said. “Some money now is better than a little more money later. Isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Boss said in defeat. “If nothing else, we’ll at least have a catalog of the stuff.”

There was a brief moment of silence. I was about to escape when Boss tried once more.

“Stalwart would be better,” he exclaimed.

“But look who we have painting doors at the DC,” I said. I had spent most of that morning painting three days at the warehouse.

“You didn’t have to paint those,” Boss said. “Stalwart could have done that. It would have taken a week, but it would have been the right person.”

“And yet, it has been four years since we got those doors and they still hadn’t been painted,” I said. “At least this way the doors are painted and we Friend will sell some of our stuff.”

There was a moment pause between us.

“It is better to just get it done, even if it is the wrong people doing it,” I said as I smiled and left.

The moral is that sometimes you can use management to get things done but sometimes you can’t. Sometimes everyone, including the managers are so busy working on yellow alert with nearly critical issues that the small things slip through the cracks and once they have slipped long enough, like unpainted doors, you get used to them and stop thinking of it being incomplete and just think of it as a bad job.

At least, one week before I leave back to school, the doors are painted.

August came and I was getting ready to go back to school. Through the hectic process of purchasing store of stuff and opening two stores of our own a lot of stuff that nobody wanted to deal with at the time had been crammed anywhere it would fit. Most of the stuff went to a back corner of the warehouse where few but me ever ventured. Through the summer I had grown tired of hearing “didn’t we buy one of those from the stores?” The rumored list of the items purchased had proved impossible to find, and I wouldn’t have trusted it anyway. I decided it was high time to gather all the technology stuff from everywhere, get rid of the useless stuff, repair the worthwhile stuff, and get as much as possible into production.

Going through the warehouse was fairly easy as most of the technology was in one place. Confidence and I took a truck load of stuff to a donation center and I began amassing a second pile. After the warehouse was cleaned out I took on the supply room.

The Supply Room had long ago become the premier storage center for everything that nobody knew anything about. I decided to clean the whole thing out and organize it. I had chosen the perfect day as there were few other people around to monitor what I was throwing away. My general rule: if we haven’t used in four years, we probably won’t use it in the next year. The donation pile grew and grew, nearly doubling in size.

Towards the end of the cleaning I rearranged the files and tackled the bottom shelf. On the bottom shelf was a number of white Plexiglas sheets with white tube screwed to them and wires running everywhere. They had appeared on the bottom shelf sometime while I was at school and nobody knew what they were.

I pulled them out and as I carefully read the tiny writing of the tube and realized that alien-like things were the antennas that go to the used wireless devices. I had seen them all summer, it just took a while to realize that I was actually looking for them. If they were snakes they wouldn’t have gotten me. But if they were walking sticks, they could have stayed there for a very, very long time.

Some time ago, right before I left for school, my employer purchased the inside of a few stores from another company that was liquidating them. Among the items purchased were several Cisco wireless access points, scanners, copiers and other expensive equipment. I left for school and Renown helped oversee the removal of said equipment. When I got back from school I commented that our new stores should have wireless because we bought new Cisco wireless devices. The owner agreed but didn’t know where any of the devices were. In fact, he commented that we should have a plethora because of the new ones that we bought and thought we have sent back and the used ones we bought that he had personally watched the removal of.

I searched every IT room we had and for months had no luck.Finally, mid-summer I was in desperate need of a CAT5 cable in one of the new stores and found a box that had several such cables. As I dug through the box I also found the once lost wireless devices that we had bought new. I was so excited and got them setup right away. The owner however, grew anxious because we were still missing the used wireless devices. “We sent the Ciscos with the antennas together,” he kept saying. I kept thinking “Antennas, I would think that I would have noticed if there were a bunch of antennas laying around:

A couple of weeks later I was cleaning out the IT room at the warehouse and realized that if the old Cisco wireless devices had been hungry snakes they would have bitten me, spit me out, bitten me again, then they would have eaten me before I even realized they were there. As I went into the IT room I looked at The IT shelf, and there, right in front of me, were six Cisco boxes. Two were for the wireless in the warehouse and were empty. The other four each had a single device in them each marked for the location we had removed them from. They had been right in front of me, and I had in fact been looking at them, the whole time. I had found most of the missing technology, but we were still out antennas.