What a heck are you doing?

Lost your mind?
With shaking hands, I was kneeling on the floor. In front of me, a broken strange box. What did I do? That was not planned, but now I got into this situation, and even worse, my working colleagues saw me. The secret I have been carrying all these years has been discovered.

Get your stuff together, I thought to myself. I got up and looked around. My working colleagues were staring at me. “Get back to your work!” I shouted.

With the scattered box in my hand, I walked into the maintenance office. I was looking for Manoel, he was the only person who could help me in this situation.

“Can you hide this?” I asked him.

“Wow… what is that? “. He asked.

“It’s hard to explain” I replied. “ I have been building this over years but today there was a problem and everything fell apart. I am not sure if I can trust you with this secret. Just place it on the shelf so I can pick it up later.”

“ Wait wait wait… Before I place this anywhere, you will have to explain exactly what happened and what this thing is.“

The power to improve

“Well, this cube is the result of 3 years of work. It is a combination of sensors and computing power. It helps me in any kind of situation. There are 5 cameras, 3 microphones, a 3D scanner combined with a processing unit Snapdragon 4. “

“And what do you do with all of this?” Manoel continued asking.

“I analyze my day. You know that in the production line there is quite a lot of repeating tasks. So I decided to check if what I am doing makes sense at all. When I start at a new working station, I place the box near me. During the first 5 days, the cube starts gathering data. Literally everything… The box knows how many steps I take, where I go, how many parts I handle, how much movement I do, how many disturbances are happening, how much inventory is laying around. It is even capable to detect my stress level by using an infra-red camera. After all this data has been collected, my special algorithm can tell me how efficient I am working, how much of my work is adding value, and how much is nonsense.”

“Wow… do you really need this box to tell you if what you are doing makes sense? I can tell you that immediately if you want. “ Manoel started laughing.

“It is a serious situation here. This cube has shown me so many improvement potentials that I became the most productive employee in our whole team. I was awarded the employee of the month and had more improvement ideas than all the other team members combined. And now… The box is broken and I became just a normal guy again.”

“Really, this box could tell you what to do? But how did it fell apart like this?

“ What started as a normal day, soon would turn into this mess I am now. I was in charge of operating the CM3. That is the cutting machine number 3. The paper piles needed to be correctly aligned into the machine and the bundle steadily fixed in place. It is a tiring job, which requires attention and has a high degree of repetition. I have been tricking the machine in order to ease my work. I placed alignment bars and hidden stoppers to speed-up the work. Additionally, I interfaced with my sensor cube to the machines controller making it possible for the machine to automatically identify the working alignment and quantity of paper. Programming and calibrating the machine became unnecessary. Somehow this machine interface must have caused the overload, resulting in the box exploding.

No one else in the factory knew about these improvements, which I had done during my night shifts. As I gained performance, more time has been freed up to develop new improvements. My job became so easy that in fact, I needed less than half of the assigned standard times to finish the job. That was my most well-kept secret for one simple reason: If the supervisor gets the slightest idea about what I did, and how well I am performing, he would cut the standard times by half, eliminating all my free time. That would mean no time to be creative anymore, I would be condemned to do the same repetitive job, day in day out. This really scares me. “

“ I understand now. In fact, you are afraid of doing the same boring job as everyone else. I can understand that. Maybe it is time for you to change your job”

“I dont know…”

“You could take your invention and apply it to other working areas with other employees. You could use it to improve every part of this factory. “

“Then no one would ever like me again. I would just be telling people what to do and people will not understand.”

“You have the power to analyze and improve every part of this factory and are worried about people hating you? We are not here to make friends. We are here to make money, be productive for the company. The management will love your invention. ”

”And how about the employees? Their slack time will be cut to zero. The fun and joy replaced by high-performance continuous work. I don’t want to be responsible for this.”

“Ok, whatever. Give me the box, I’ll keep it hidden”.