After 18 months of development, my current project is finally being implemented at the first of ten scheduled sites. This being a Warehouse Management project, the site is – obviously – a warehouse. Which means that most of our users are forklift drivers, plus a handful of ‘office-based’ supervisors, and a few gatekeepers.
My training team (three including myself) has been here conducting training for the past month, and this week the developers arrived in force, deposing us from our training room, and generally riding roughshod over everything we’ve had organized since we got here. Despite having managed to navigate our way around the warehouse without incident for four weeks, such freedom was now deemed a ‘safety risk’, and we were forbidden from going back onto the floor, to check in on any of the users with whom we’d spent all that time building up rapport and trust. Instead, a system was put in place whereby access was decided by the color of your hard-hat. (Really. I’m not making this up.)
Some members of the team (management – for all they know about how to use the system – and the lead developer) were given a yellow hard-hat (vs. the standard issue white worn by the warehouse staff), which gave them carte-blanche access to the warehouse; others were given blue hard-hats, which meant that they could go into the warehouse but had to be escorted everywhere (by a yellow- or white-hatter), and the rest of us – the training team included – were given no hat at all, which means that we’re confined to the office block. Which kind of makes me wonder why we are here at all…
Oh, except for the fact that we need to wear a hard hat (and safety glasses) anywhere outside the building, which, given our limited mobility, is pretty much from the car to the office and back. But as I was not given a hard hat, because I’m not on the any of the white/yellow/blue lists, I’m not sure how I’ll manage that. Maybe I could try squeezing one of my (again, mandated) steel-toed workboots over my head and hopping across the car park…
As part of this ‘movement control’, I have been assigned to the guard shack during the go-live (the period when we switch the system on). This is a 4′ x 10′ hut by the gate, some 100yds from the main building and the cutting edge of the warehouse floor, but at least has real, live users in it so I can at least be of some use.
Given that it is a less than salubrious location, this is a constant source of amusement for the rest of the team, who see it as one step above a portaloo. Which it kind of is. This morning I was in the hut (at 6am) setting things up, and was therefore in situ when the rest of the team arrived (the management in a rented Suburban, despite telling us all to car-pool to save costs!). Some of them took great delight in smirking at my situation, remarking “Hur, hur, who did you piss off to get stuck here??”. Which was clearly highly amusing to them, but marginally less so for the poor gatekeeper who was stood next to me, overhearing everything, and for whom this is their entire job. A tad insensitive, to say the least.
The truth is, however, that I have kind of been stuck here because I pissed someone off. Not someone that matters, but unfortunately the person who was given the job of handing out the assignments (the aforementioned lead developer). I’m not sure exactly how I pissed him off, but I suspect it was by repeatedly pointing out the things his team had failed to deliver, or screwed up, to the users. Whatever. Petty git.
Anyway, the guard shack turns out to have a TV, microwave, fridge, heater, and the all-important coffee maker. I also added some DVD software to the PC (which I had to install and configure…) so we can watch movies during the slow periods. And the gatekeepers are really nice, so it’s not exactly a chore being there. Later in the day I went back to the main office (wearing a yellow hard-hat that I had taken the precaution of purloining before the ‘security clampdown’ went into effect – I argued that I needed it to ensure full and unrestricted access to the entire guard shack, and no-one thought to question this), and visited the design team back in the training room (which they have rechristened the “War Room” – I had visions of them pushing models of forklifts round on a map of the warehouse, like a giant game of Risk). And they’re all there, wedged in rows like battery chickens, typing feverishly away, with barely enough room to lift their elbows without taking someone’s eye out (now there’s the safety risk!). Somehow, a couple of days in the guard shack away from them all doesn’t seem so bad after all…
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