Some people complain that women are difficult to understand. Obviously they haven't spent the last couple years trying to divine the thought processes of my company's owners and upper management. They are supposed to be men of business. Yet you wouldn't know it from their actions of these past few months.
Lately there is something magical about the term "two years." All their business decisions are based on whether or not something to pay for itself in the next two years. Today we had a major discussion about upgrading the computers on the production floor. Most of them are still running on MS-DOS. (For those of you too young to remember DOS, there was a time when you didn't have pretty pictures to click on your computer screen. You actually had to type commands, most of which resembled ancient Druid prayers. And a lot of times you found yourself praying that they would work.) So it's kind of encouraging that upper management finally realize the need to upgrade the production methods into the 21st century. It is discouraging that we spent over an hour needlessly discussing whether they want to connect the computers using network cables or through wireless means. They finally came to the conclusion that they will only act if one of those methods can pay for itself in two years or less. How they plan to separate the cost of the network connection from all the other hardware and software upgrade costs is beyond me at this moment.
There are more asinine details to this and other goings on at work. But those are for another post.
1 comment:
As a Quality Engineer I'd be willing to bet the productivity would pay for the upgrades in faster computer speeds, clicking instead of typeing commands and retyping mistakes. That of course dependes on the frequency of use of the computers. You can turn that two year question around and ask the more important question "how much would you save in two years by upgrading".
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