I have been in this building, and this wing of the building, and using the break room in this wing of the building, since December 1999, when we moved in. (In a brilliant confluence of planning in advance and unfortunate lease agreements, we ended up moving in over Christmas weekend. Not only that, but it was, as you’ll note upon consideration, a week before Y2K. But I digress …)
So I know how things go. I know how things are arranged. I know how things are meant to be set up.
Like the coffee carafes.
We have insulated jugs that slide under the coffee maker and then keep the coffee amazingly warm for several hours afterward (meaning no burnt coffee as the pot sits on the hot plate — very nice). There are four of them, and since time immemorial (or at least since 12/99) they have been, from left to right next to the coffee maker:
- Costa Rican (a light brew)
- Vanilla Nut (my preference)
- French Roast (dark, and made darker by brewing 1½ pouches of coffee)
- Decaf (feh)
We dabbled briefly with a fifth, European Blend, but it never quite caught on …
So, that’s the order, as decreed by tradition and God.
Except …
There have been some changes in the building arrangement over the last few months. The business unit whose wing this is has been decreasing in size, and our engineering group has been expanding. So there are now strangers on the floor.
But, still, they’re engineers, y’know? So respect of order and existing arrangements should be their cuppa.
Evidently not. The coffee carafes have gotten all higgledy-piggledy, turning up in pretty much any random order you can imagine.
This is not easy, mind you. The carafes sit on little stands. Only one can be brewing at a time. To get them mixed up, you have to have one under the coffee maker, take another one down, put the newly-filled one up in the wrong spot, and put the to-be-filled one under the coffee maker.
This is, evidently, what is happening. And it is driving me absolutely buggy.
I mean, these this isn’t rocket science, folks! There is an order to things, and there’s no particularly good reason to change that order, and every reason to keep it consistent. To wit, the carafes are identified by little velcro-backed laminated tags describing their contents. But, given an order, nobody actually looks at the tags. They look at the coffee level in the small gauge along the front, but not at the tags.
Which means, if the pots are reshuffled, who knows what you might get.
I tell you, is this any way to run an engineering firm?
As I was making a new pot this morning, I noticed one of the tags on the side of the coffee maker was out of place. There are seven rows for the “day of the week” tags (so you can tell if a pot was made today, or is left-over from yesterday or over the weekend). There’s also a miscellaneous row for extra flavor and “1½ bags” tags.
I fixed the one that was out of place. Then noticed another. And another. And another.
Folks had just been putting them back at random. At random. Are they mad?
As I was doing this, one of the new engineers started to chuckle at my efforts. “That’s what we like to see, someone who likes to organize.” I grinned wanly.
As I left, he chuckled some more. “It’s just too much effort to put those all back where they belong.”
An engineer said this. An engineer.
Rrg.
Ahhh…But an engineer with an Imp of the Perverse sitting on his shoulder.
As with all things there are Order Engineers and Chaos Engineers. You seem to have a bunch of Chaos Engineers. It is a good thing that they have an OCD person to take care of the order thing for them.
Good luck with that.;->
Agent of Order, that’s me.
It’s not rocket science–but it is social science. And most people, I have found, are lacking in social skills.
Too (sadly) true.
Other fun with OCD people.
Back at the Flats we had one designer that was nuts (for many, many reasons besides OCD). The “cowboy” designer found this to be a great source of entertainment and went about moving things in the OCD designer’s office a quarter inch in random direction everyday. After about a week OCD designer drew a template on his desk with a sharpie so that he would know if anything had been moved.
Talk about putting chum in the water…
Also.
One thought did occur to me on the carafe situation. You have learned to get the coffee from a location.
Watch as monkey “A” learns to get the Banana…um sorry…tasty goodness when he hits the upper right corner of the screen.
The new engineers have learned to look at the label of the carafe and take the coffee listed on the label so position doesn’t matter to them. They would get miffed if they got a type of coffee different from the one labeled on the carafe. “Why can’t people read the frelling labels and put the correct type of coffee in them!”
Watch as monkey “B” learns to get the tasty goodness by pressing a certain symbol on the screen. When the symbol gets moved the monkey learns to press the symbol and not the location. Now lets put the two together and see what happens…
It’s when the other monkeys come in and rearrange all my brightly colored stones that it makes me want to climb up in a tree and hurl poop at them …