ISO Fails
ISO 9000/2001 is about processes. All business activities have processes domented to ensure consistency, uniformity, and to nurture best practises. Here are some tips on how to make this fail:
Acronyms. Acronyms are those ever popular shortcuts built on company jargon. These can be industry standard, government issued, or just the comoany lingo within a particular organization.
Make sure they mean something useful. For example, if your process refers to a particular file that is a required element in the process, then the correct acronym to use, if at all, would be based on the actual file name. Be consistent, both in the theory (ISO), as well as in practise.
Clean, Clear and Concise. Take advantage of white space, by not cluttering the page. Flowcharts should be simple. If too complicated, then the process has not been broken down enough.
Consistent. If you refer to something as a duck, then it's a duck. Don't switch gears and call it a drake, a mallard, ir anything else. Keep your ducks in a row.
To be continued...
Monday, March 26, 2018
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Food
I'm attending a conference this week. I am also listening to the Hay House World Summit. The first speaker I listened to was one losing weight naturally. Keep a journal. Record not only what eaten and when, but also emotions before and after, stressors, etc. Great idea! Parallels what I learned in my counseling.
Clashing with this: the food at the work conference is plentiful, free and quite a bit above average.So I am eating wayyyy more than usual. No thought going into this at all. What a dilemma! I am not kicking myself or beating myself up about it, but I need to remember the food diary concept for after this week is over...or next. I will be traveling next week so I will be off my regular feed for some time yet. I hope I can develop a shorthand by then so that I have some sense of building.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Family stuff
A perfect day with family. J organized a party to celebrate the spring birthdays. Epic fail skyping w njo but ended with phone calls on speaker. The family was together and it felt like family. Curt was in a good place too. But most of all, J had organized it all. I was quite not stressed. Nice. Happy.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Work Relationships
I am not here to be friends. I am here for the money. If I make friends along the way then I am lucky. Friends are not why I am here.
Unfortunately, I have abandoned all my friends by moving here. I don't know how to maintain long distance friends. They do not seek me out either. I feel alone and abandoned...which in and of itself is a statement that shifts the blame away from me. I blame others for this thing I have created.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
It's been some time since I've been here, which is actually quite the understatement. What's been going on? I got hired by the company I was contracting with, and moved to the metro area. I used to commute 3 hours a day because being a contracted employee was not worth the effort and expense and risk of moving closer to work. I got hired, sold our house and moved to the burbs, so after almost a year of being a permanent employee, I started settling in to the big city lifestyle.
So what do I do, you may ask. I work for a Fortune 500 company as a regulatory affairs specialist. My job is to have bandwidth on the import and manufacturing regulations for any country we want to sell product to, as well as to make sure that everything we use to build our product conforms to the regulations of the country and/or state in which the products are manufactured. I write safety data sheets, which outline the health and environmental risks for the products, so that someone on the receiving end can know what they are getting themselves into. We have many databases -- raw materials, bills of materials, ERP, life cycle management, and all of these require maintenance on our materials etc to make sure they are up to date.
How does one get such a job, you may ask? You must be very smart, you might be saying. I'm smart but I'm also very lucky, and always land on my feet, even though where my feet land isn't always where I was expecting them to. The traditional way to get a job like this might be to get a science degree -- chemistry, biology, environmental science, etc. With this great education, you parlay your skills into the job hunting process and someone thinks you're an asset-worthy investment and hires you. I have a degree in music, with a minor in business administration, and with small amounts of education in computer science. And, as I said, I am lucky.
Here is how I got to where I am today.
Back in the day, I lived in a nice small city in Wisconsin. A city with a nice university and a good technical college. I grew up here. This is home. The city evolved from the lumber era of the 19th century, and even though that was a long time ago, the influence was still affecting modern life. For example, back in the lumber era, our town had a lumber company, and so did the next town to the north. Both companies used the same river to move the logs downstream, and were rivals. The rivalry was still strong, as evidenced by sporting events in high school. The tension was particularly high when the towns were competing. As my city evolved, the lumber era eventually died down and disappeared, except for a paper mill on the river. The industrial age was starting in, and our city scored a major tire manufacturing plant. These were the major industries in the post-World War II era. The rubber plant employees built up the south side of town with modern housing and schools. The rubber plant employees' children went to good schools, and became white collar people -- lawyers, doctors, etc. The paper mill employees mostly lived in the north side of town, in older homes built in the lumber era and New Deal eras. The schools in my town then also paralleled this trend, with the north side offering curriculum geared towards producing well-rounded blue collar workers and the south side offering curriculum designed to advance the children towards advanced college educations, and producing even more doctors and lawyers and such.
I lived on the south side, in the cheaper parts. We were dirt poor and I was smart. I rubbed elbows with those future doctors and lawyers and was placed in the advanced classes with them, because I was smart. I had no clue what a middle-class lifestyle was, but got hints of it by hanging with friends at their houses. Very mysterious, that lifestyle was. I made a vow to myself that I would never find myself dirt poor, and would someday have that newly-discovered lifestyle. My heart was in music, and while this was not my first choice for a college degree, it turned out to be what got me graduated soonest.
By this time, my home town had discovered malls, because those wealthy south-siders were getting tired of running over to the closest major metropolitan area to do some decent shopping. The rubber plant had shut down, and many of the rubber workers had hit retirement age anyway. Malls seemed to be a great way to create jobs again. It takes a lot of jobs to hold down a mall, but these jobs don't pay much, because otherwise prices would be out of sight. After 20-30 years of mall-dom, the local economy was suffering greatly. The city government grew too big for its britches and could not come up with a working plan to attract the big guns -- another rubber plant-sized business would put my town back on track. Instead, the rival town to the north was stealthily building its economy and a brilliant local boy had a revolutionary idea which he chose to bring home and set up in his home town. This became the next big thing, and actually became sort of a Midwestern Silicon Valley. This was the place to get hired, if you wanted to have that lifestyle.
Back in my corner of the world, it was well-known that this was THE place to work, but I was fresh out of college and working the crap jobs that got me through college. My focus was how to get in, and I did it by temping. I signed on at Manpower and started various clerical data entry jobs. I made friends at city hall, at banks, etc. When they offered me a temp position at the Big Thing, I jumped at it. I also had a seasonal job which was not a temp position, so my plan was that hopefully this would turn into a job, but if it didn't, I still had my other job. Seasons changed and it was time to go back. The project that I was assisting with was at a critical juncture at the time that I gave them my notice that the other job was starting soon. They could not afford to upset their apple cart, so I got hired on. Yay! I was in! But a short 4 months later, the critical project was being moved 1000 miles away and the building was buzzing with interviews and activity towards who would be needed to move with the project. I was told that my kind of work was "a dime a dozen" in the new locale, so basically I was up shit creek. As luck would have it, this company had a large number of people facing potential unemployment and did not want to lose these people if they could help it. They did what they called "Opening the Wishbooks", which basically meant that if any other department in the company had an idea for a position in their group, but had never been able to get the company to go along with the idea before, they would go along with the idea now. I had made a number of friends in this department, and these friends helped feel out these new positions and matched me up with a potential suitor. By sheer luck, I found another position that was willing to train me to learn everything I needed to know. Lucky and Smart, that is me. I learned. I grew. I developed my personal niche, filling a gap that nobody else could fill. The company was bought and sold, and I stayed with the new company. The new company was a true Silicon Valley company, a bunch of spoiled teenagers compared to the mature adults of the company they had purchased. Money grew on trees in their mind, and nothing was too good. Salaries were generous. But such reckless business practices caught up with them and layoffs became a regular quarterly event. I discovered my biggest mistake. I had developed myself as a niche player, but my "official" job description did not include any of the specialized services that I had been providing. Believe me when I tell you that what is on an official piece of paper is the ONLY thing that upper management recognizes. Again, my tasks were considered "a dime a dozen" and as the company quietly went bankrupt, my number came up and I was let go.
By this time I had a family, a mortgage, and a fairly middle-class lifestyle. My kid went to private school. And I was faced with my home town again and all of its short sighted planning. So, I could try to get a job here in town but there would be nothing here for me that would sustain my lifestyle. I extended my job search to the metropolitan area and again became a temp. The position said it would be working with the Fortune 500 company. Back when I had made my vow of non-poverty, this just happened to be a company I had decided was for me, so I jumped on the opportunity. Again, lucky. I found a position, in regulatory affairs, where they were willing to train me from the ground up. Even with a music degree. Their rationale was that one of their group had a similar situation back in the day and grew to be one of the elite. I was hired on the spot (as a temp), but I WAS IN. After 5 years of this, I was hired on as a permanent employee. My income went up, too, and I moved to an area where the cost of living was similar to where I was, except that all the food and alcohol is somehow more pricey here than back home, but I guess it balances out
So, that's what I've been up to, overall. Namaste.
So what do I do, you may ask. I work for a Fortune 500 company as a regulatory affairs specialist. My job is to have bandwidth on the import and manufacturing regulations for any country we want to sell product to, as well as to make sure that everything we use to build our product conforms to the regulations of the country and/or state in which the products are manufactured. I write safety data sheets, which outline the health and environmental risks for the products, so that someone on the receiving end can know what they are getting themselves into. We have many databases -- raw materials, bills of materials, ERP, life cycle management, and all of these require maintenance on our materials etc to make sure they are up to date.
How does one get such a job, you may ask? You must be very smart, you might be saying. I'm smart but I'm also very lucky, and always land on my feet, even though where my feet land isn't always where I was expecting them to. The traditional way to get a job like this might be to get a science degree -- chemistry, biology, environmental science, etc. With this great education, you parlay your skills into the job hunting process and someone thinks you're an asset-worthy investment and hires you. I have a degree in music, with a minor in business administration, and with small amounts of education in computer science. And, as I said, I am lucky.
Here is how I got to where I am today.
Back in the day, I lived in a nice small city in Wisconsin. A city with a nice university and a good technical college. I grew up here. This is home. The city evolved from the lumber era of the 19th century, and even though that was a long time ago, the influence was still affecting modern life. For example, back in the lumber era, our town had a lumber company, and so did the next town to the north. Both companies used the same river to move the logs downstream, and were rivals. The rivalry was still strong, as evidenced by sporting events in high school. The tension was particularly high when the towns were competing. As my city evolved, the lumber era eventually died down and disappeared, except for a paper mill on the river. The industrial age was starting in, and our city scored a major tire manufacturing plant. These were the major industries in the post-World War II era. The rubber plant employees built up the south side of town with modern housing and schools. The rubber plant employees' children went to good schools, and became white collar people -- lawyers, doctors, etc. The paper mill employees mostly lived in the north side of town, in older homes built in the lumber era and New Deal eras. The schools in my town then also paralleled this trend, with the north side offering curriculum geared towards producing well-rounded blue collar workers and the south side offering curriculum designed to advance the children towards advanced college educations, and producing even more doctors and lawyers and such.
I lived on the south side, in the cheaper parts. We were dirt poor and I was smart. I rubbed elbows with those future doctors and lawyers and was placed in the advanced classes with them, because I was smart. I had no clue what a middle-class lifestyle was, but got hints of it by hanging with friends at their houses. Very mysterious, that lifestyle was. I made a vow to myself that I would never find myself dirt poor, and would someday have that newly-discovered lifestyle. My heart was in music, and while this was not my first choice for a college degree, it turned out to be what got me graduated soonest.
By this time, my home town had discovered malls, because those wealthy south-siders were getting tired of running over to the closest major metropolitan area to do some decent shopping. The rubber plant had shut down, and many of the rubber workers had hit retirement age anyway. Malls seemed to be a great way to create jobs again. It takes a lot of jobs to hold down a mall, but these jobs don't pay much, because otherwise prices would be out of sight. After 20-30 years of mall-dom, the local economy was suffering greatly. The city government grew too big for its britches and could not come up with a working plan to attract the big guns -- another rubber plant-sized business would put my town back on track. Instead, the rival town to the north was stealthily building its economy and a brilliant local boy had a revolutionary idea which he chose to bring home and set up in his home town. This became the next big thing, and actually became sort of a Midwestern Silicon Valley. This was the place to get hired, if you wanted to have that lifestyle.
Back in my corner of the world, it was well-known that this was THE place to work, but I was fresh out of college and working the crap jobs that got me through college. My focus was how to get in, and I did it by temping. I signed on at Manpower and started various clerical data entry jobs. I made friends at city hall, at banks, etc. When they offered me a temp position at the Big Thing, I jumped at it. I also had a seasonal job which was not a temp position, so my plan was that hopefully this would turn into a job, but if it didn't, I still had my other job. Seasons changed and it was time to go back. The project that I was assisting with was at a critical juncture at the time that I gave them my notice that the other job was starting soon. They could not afford to upset their apple cart, so I got hired on. Yay! I was in! But a short 4 months later, the critical project was being moved 1000 miles away and the building was buzzing with interviews and activity towards who would be needed to move with the project. I was told that my kind of work was "a dime a dozen" in the new locale, so basically I was up shit creek. As luck would have it, this company had a large number of people facing potential unemployment and did not want to lose these people if they could help it. They did what they called "Opening the Wishbooks", which basically meant that if any other department in the company had an idea for a position in their group, but had never been able to get the company to go along with the idea before, they would go along with the idea now. I had made a number of friends in this department, and these friends helped feel out these new positions and matched me up with a potential suitor. By sheer luck, I found another position that was willing to train me to learn everything I needed to know. Lucky and Smart, that is me. I learned. I grew. I developed my personal niche, filling a gap that nobody else could fill. The company was bought and sold, and I stayed with the new company. The new company was a true Silicon Valley company, a bunch of spoiled teenagers compared to the mature adults of the company they had purchased. Money grew on trees in their mind, and nothing was too good. Salaries were generous. But such reckless business practices caught up with them and layoffs became a regular quarterly event. I discovered my biggest mistake. I had developed myself as a niche player, but my "official" job description did not include any of the specialized services that I had been providing. Believe me when I tell you that what is on an official piece of paper is the ONLY thing that upper management recognizes. Again, my tasks were considered "a dime a dozen" and as the company quietly went bankrupt, my number came up and I was let go.
By this time I had a family, a mortgage, and a fairly middle-class lifestyle. My kid went to private school. And I was faced with my home town again and all of its short sighted planning. So, I could try to get a job here in town but there would be nothing here for me that would sustain my lifestyle. I extended my job search to the metropolitan area and again became a temp. The position said it would be working with the Fortune 500 company. Back when I had made my vow of non-poverty, this just happened to be a company I had decided was for me, so I jumped on the opportunity. Again, lucky. I found a position, in regulatory affairs, where they were willing to train me from the ground up. Even with a music degree. Their rationale was that one of their group had a similar situation back in the day and grew to be one of the elite. I was hired on the spot (as a temp), but I WAS IN. After 5 years of this, I was hired on as a permanent employee. My income went up, too, and I moved to an area where the cost of living was similar to where I was, except that all the food and alcohol is somehow more pricey here than back home, but I guess it balances out
So, that's what I've been up to, overall. Namaste.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Perspectives on ....
It's going to be a sad week. Aunt Norma has decided to remove her feeding tube, discharge herself from the hospital, and go home to die. I don't know when this is going to happen, and I don't know how long it takes to die. I do know that I don't hear nearly enough from the family for my taste, and although I thought that I was a family member, this whole experience of her having the stroke, the waiting in the hospital, and interacting both with her and with my cousins has made me acutely aware of just how much of an outsider I am to them. I feel very alone and I feel pushed out of the circle. And I'm fighting and pushing to get back in but they won't permit it. This is very hard for me to reconcile in my mind because this has been my family ever since Mom died, and now I see that apparently I was mistaken on that huge detail, and that apparently this was a fantasy on my part. Which is crushing for me. What do I do about this?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Blessings from Somali
I was blessed today with two lunches. One I found in the cafeteria, and it was good enough and met the criteria that I have to eat around these days. The second was hosted by the cleaning people in my building. This is a fairly new group of staff, since 3 months ago, and the majority of them are Somali, and mostly women. I had stopped a handful of them one day last week because they had had a party in the caf with the most aromatic food I'd seen. It looked luscious. When I asked them about it the next day, I finally was to understand that they were celebrating that one of them had gotten her citizenship. I had wanted to know where they ordered the food from but they had made it all! They said that if I like the food that they would call me the next time they had it. Which is great lip service if it had come out of an American's mouth.
Today was that next time, and shortly after I had finished my first lunch, Hamila and Sadia came to my cube and told me that they had food up on 3rd floor and that I should come with them. Up in a conference room were maybe 20 Somali, 2 Hispanics and 3 Minnesotans, and they had a feast going on! They handed me a plate and had my try everything and it was just amazing! They are such gracious hosts! I felt quite honored to have been asked into their private celebration, and I am happy that I may have some new friends. I need to find a way to repay their kindness. I'm thinking about maybe scoring some expensive spice for them, and lots of it.
We could learn so much from that level of hospitality. I was SOOOO stuffed, but it was so worth it! Anthony Bordain, I feel you, man!
Today was that next time, and shortly after I had finished my first lunch, Hamila and Sadia came to my cube and told me that they had food up on 3rd floor and that I should come with them. Up in a conference room were maybe 20 Somali, 2 Hispanics and 3 Minnesotans, and they had a feast going on! They handed me a plate and had my try everything and it was just amazing! They are such gracious hosts! I felt quite honored to have been asked into their private celebration, and I am happy that I may have some new friends. I need to find a way to repay their kindness. I'm thinking about maybe scoring some expensive spice for them, and lots of it.
We could learn so much from that level of hospitality. I was SOOOO stuffed, but it was so worth it! Anthony Bordain, I feel you, man!
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