Category: Work
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Rental Case
Last summer I was fortunate enough to be sent on a six-week trip to Europe, courtesy of the project I was working on. Well, I would have considered myself fortunate were it not for the facts that (1) this was Rotterdam – not known for being one of the beauty-capitals of the world, and (2) I spent almost every waking hour in a warehouse stacked to the rafters with automotive oil and other specialty lubricants (and not the fun kind, either…). I’d been over to Rotterdam a couple of times before, and had spent several years living in Brussels (one… Read more
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Blowing Chunks
I was in a workshop on training recently, delivering a session on curriculum development for my new project. Typically, because I’d joined the project late (having been tied up on my previous project, which refused to free me up), the existing project team had tried to do this bottom-up, by deciding on what they were going to teach (by way of defining the learning objects to be developed) before deciding who they were going to train or what they needed to be taught. So I was now trying to retro-fit a more structured, classical approach to curriculum development onto what… Read more
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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