Have a Green Day

Have a Green Day

Current mood:okay

It started out like most things at work, just a joke to lighten the mood a little. After a while it became a conversation starter and occasionally serves as a warning sign.

We have this thing at work called "5S" that is a mindset of the Six-Sigma way of life. The long and the short of it is that everyone follows standard guidelines for things like office supplies to build scale and efficiency. A specific effect that led to this blog is that we get a limited number of dry-erase markers (six: black, brown, red, orange, blue and green, plus an eraser). There are other rules about lining up pictures, furniture and papers at specific angles to the edges of the tables, but that's a little more detail that anyone needs to hear.

 

Before we started implementing 5S, I was pretty optimistic that I could live the guidelines since I was already a tenth of the way there - I'd been doing Half-S work for years.

This is my wall calendar.

 

 

I like to cross off days so I know what today is. I do this because I have trouble with thethree month format. It makes me look at the wrong month, use the wrong dates and suddenly I'm asking people to deliver stuff to our manufacturing plants on Sunday the 28th of January instead of Wednesday the 28th of February. I've lost count of how many times I hit SEND, throw out a random swear word, recall the email, and re-SEND because I had the wrong date. After a while I stopped caring and made people guess which month I'm talking about. It turns out it really didn't matter most of the time anyway since timelines always slip.

If I were truly conforming to 5S, I'd pick a color and use it every time I crossed off a day. I never cared much for conformity, so I started experimenting with the other colors. After a while, someone asked me if the different colors meant anything. Off the top of my head, I looked at the last few days (which were orange and green) and said "it tells me how crappy the day was". 

After a while, the color coding developed based on the following key. The days are rated by complex equation involving a number of factors like:

 

How much I can get done

How much I lose control of my projects

How many interruptions I get.

How many times I think "This is bullshit" (double credit if I actually say it out loud)

How many times I walk out of my office and tell Laurie "I quit"

How many times I think that rolling around naked in tiny shards of glass would be better than what I'm doing.

 

You get the idea.

Blue is a great day, Green is OK, Orange is crappy, Red is a disaster, and don't even talk to me if yesterday was a Brown day. On Brown days, I seriously consider faking my own death to get out of work the next day.

Here's an example of a good few days:

This one, I'd rather forget. Note the Red Sunday and the Orange Saturday.

Black X's are for days I didn't actually work at all. You'll note the number of colored X's on weekends and you'll get a further appreciation of how much I love my job.

 

 

I've been tracking this now six months. I've talked about it so freely that people IM and email me asking what color today is.

So far, the tally out of 164 days (including weekends and holidays):
41 Black 
2 Brown 
40 Red 
49 Orange 
30 Green 
2 Blue 

So what does this tell me?
1) I really don't like my job because the average day is a crappy Orange. This comes as a surprise to no one at work (or home, or mySpace for that matter). The position I'm in is basically a fast track position to 'wherever you want to go next'. It's high visibility, fast paced, insanely overwhelming and you learn a lot and you have the pleasure of dealing with sales people who believe the universe revolves around them. I like to think the upside is that I have job security because no one else would want it.

2) I am a cynical bastard who should be glad I even have a job. I've watched several installments of "Dirty Jobs", mainly the ones where the guy cleans up large amounts of animal feces. There are some days where I think being that guy would be a refreshing change of pace.

3) I like to find ways to enjoy myself even if the world is crumbling around me because I know my job is important. This is probably the thing that keeps me coming back to work. I realize that I'm just a cog. I realize that it's temporary. I realize that at this point in time, I'm the best person for the job and I need to do the best I can for the company to succeed. That doesn't mean I can't have fun with the calendar, post Dilbert comics on my window or have the Demotivations calendar right next to my Color codes.

I like to think the grass is greener (or bluer) on the other side. I'm biding my time until this rotation is over. My boss totally rocks and she does what she can to keep me from walking out (which I won't really do no matter what happens ... I think). In the meantime, I'll keep buying SuperLotto tickets and crossing off the days.

I now realize I could have summarized this entire blog with "Take this job and shove it." But then I couldn't use the pictures...

Have a Green Day... no make that a Blue day, everyone.

So how's your day going?