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Friday, February 08, 2008

More Seconds

This is Steven Petrick Posting:

A follow up to the seconds post, and sort of an example.

We have one door from the office to the warehouse. It is through this door that all business traffic for the day passes, either orders being sent out to the warehouse to be filled, or requests for support from the warehouse, or labels for packages to go UPS, or packages going by post office coming in for delivery to the Post Office. There are of course other reasons for things to be going through that door.

The thing is, that door can stand closed (to conserve heating and cooling in the offices) for as much as seven a three quarters hours of any normal business day. But somehow, more often than not, and for totally unrelated reasons, two people will head towards that door from opposite sides at the same time. It is the location of most of the "collisions" that occur in the office. The door either suddenly swings in on the person approaching from inside, or is suddenly yanked away from someone approaching from within the warehouse.

This does not happen every time, but it is quite common (and a reason we want a new door that has a window in it so that traffic can be seen).

But it is more than that.

We often go quite a while with no phone calls, but if we leave one person in the office for any length of time, we will get two phone calls almost back to back, and they will be the only phone calls we get the whole day.

Today was another case in point. We had two visitors, neither of which had a specific scheduled time to arrive and both of which required us to deal with them for things that needed to be done. What were the odds that both would arrive within 15 minutes of each other, thus interfering with each other and the process of getting things taken care of?

And of course today the fire department had to drop in for a reconnaissance mission (they were not here to inspect or fight a fire, they just wanted to go around the neighborhood, and see what special circumstances their neighbors might require if they were ever called to that address). We all wanted to cooperate with them very much, and they gave us a few clues and hints of things a fire inspector might be looking for that we could take care of now. (Which gives me an additional task to take care of tomorrow morning in addition to trying to get traction on other tasks).