Monday 28 September 2009

Pressure

Sorry dear readers, this one's going to be a self-indulgent moaning on. If there are any present or future employers reading this, can you poease stop now and just go elsewhere on the internet.
Wait, that's just going to make you read on. Bah.
Its the pressure, the strain, maybe even the stress.
I get up at 5:30, and hour on the bus then work labourously until 3pm, another bus ride and I'm home, knackered.
Then I have stuff to do, internety musicy gig stuff, emailing, twittering, facebook and forums, exploring, looking for people, detective work, and chatting. It takes hours and hours, but then I've still got to try to squeeze in going to more gigs, breaking the habit of a lifetime and chatting to people trying to talk them into doing new stuff, networking. And then home again, to sleep until 5:30am.
Also there's boyfriend duties and blogging duties and laundry and eating.
I'm skint so I've to got work and all I have is this back breaking factory thing, six days a week, for minimum wage, hoping payday is sometime this week.
Minimum wage, they cannot pay me any less, so I feel no obligation to think and process and improve. Just to do as I am asked, do it well and go home.
But my mind doesn't work like that, my magic manufacturing engineer superpower is to see the systems, see what works, all the cogs in the factory machine. Which processes are vital and important and urgent, bottlenecks and wastage.
We divide the work between us by space, "you take that side, I'll take this" but we shouldn't, we should divide by priority "so everything, but most importantly make sure this is done". We put tools a long way away so much time is wasted walking. We do things at the wrong time, distruptive tasks when things are busy rather than quiet. Urgent tasks left until the last minute even if there are more important things to be done there.
I see these things but have no compulsion or obligation. Besides there's no forum to suggest such things, management's distant, just an occasional voice on the phone.
I just want a lie in, a couple of hours to engage. I want a refreshing pint of beer with friends.
I'm being spectacularly unsuccessful, my KPIs bare budging above zero. Favours called in without answer. I'm failing, struggling and losing hope. What did I do wrong?
What mistakes have I made?
What's the answer?
How can I succeed in this one?

1 comment:

  1. write a nice letter/email to the Ops manager offering to come in and do a 'no win-no fee' working time assessment of current operational practices. Cite your experience of similar organisations and add a couple of plausible examples based on what you've seen. Then wear a fake beard when they invite you in :)

    ReplyDelete