Category: Life
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Warehouse becomes a home
As the year closes, so does another project. For the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve been working on implementing a new SAP-based warehousing system at my long-standing client. This has been my seventh SAP project, but probably the one I have enjoyed the most. This has been largely due to the fact that I have been required to actually teach (normally I manage to delegate that to my underlings), and the fact that most of the users have been ‘real people, with real jobs’. Mainly forklift operators, who go to work in company-provided work clothes with their names stitched onto their… Read more
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Asset Retirement vs. Depreciation
Maybe it’s an age thing, but recently I’ve noticed that a lot of my fellow workers (or at least the full-time employees) are starting to talk about how long they’ve got until retirement. Like seriously talking about it, even though it’s 11 years away or something. They’ve probably got countdown apps on their iPhones that wake them up every morning: “You have 4,000 days left to retirement”. I guess that’s what comes of having a decent, company-subsidized pension scheme and a retirement plan. My retirement plan is simple: Work until I’m no longer employable and then kill myself. I tell… Read more
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They should rename it the Hindrance-Desk
As Training Lead, one of my responsibilities is to provide User Procedures for the system we’re implementing. Because users have a nasty habit of taking my official global User Procedures and changing them to match what they want to do, I publish them in Adobe PDF format. And because I generate all of the User Procedures out of OnDemand, I just get OnDemand to publish directly to PDF, which it will happily do if you have the full version of Adobe Suite installed. In order to meet licensing requirements, here at my current client if you need a piece of… Read more
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Extended Warranties: Putting the ‘con’ in ‘consumer electronics’
At the risk of sounding older than my tender 43 years: They don’t make ’em like they used to. Consumer electronics, that is. Last month my TV finally packed up (and within a month of getting my surround-sound in place, FFS!). This is a Toshiba 50″ plasma flat screen, which I bought for the not inconsiderable sum of $2,000 three years ago (actually as a 10-year anniversary present for the wife – ever the romantic, eh?). About a year ago one of the HDMI ports stopped working, which was irritating but not the end of the world (it has a… Read more
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Soul Training
I’m two weeks into an eight-week residency in ‘beautiful’ Port Allen, Louisiana. For those not up to speed on their American cities and states, Port Allen is on the other side of the Mississippi from ‘beautiful’ Baton Rouge (and about an hour up the coast from New Orleans – you’ve heard of that, right?). Both Baton Rouge and Port Allen pretty much exist only for the petroleum industry (hence my being here), and both sides of the river are chock full of refineries, tank farms, and barge moorings. Both cities tend to prepend ‘beautiful’ to any mention of their names… Read more