Fisher Price Technology Integration

November 16th, 2006

I couldn’t resist linking to this story. Now that I have a few weeks of big-company experience under my belt, I found this particularly hilarious. Read it on The Daily WTF.

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Not as Strong as we Think we Are

November 16th, 2006

This being my first big-company job, I’m getting used to all sorts of big-company things. Like cubicles, helpdesks, lots of emails, and lots and lots of acronyms. In fact I like to say that if you picked three letters at random from the English alphabet and put them together, it would probably stand for something here at Wells Fargo.

When I’m sitting in my cube, and happen to not be listening to Jen’s iPod, I hear all sorts of things: phones ringing, my cube-neighbor crunching on her mid-morning snack, keyboards tapping, and someone jamming the refilled paper cartridge back into the printer. Then I catch bits of pieces of conversations: about budget savings, labor resources, and some guy talking about the FSD for tests on BSA in the PNI environment, which, given the intense tone in his voice, though I can’t understand what the heck he’s talking about, I get the sense that I’m evesdropping on something truly important.

So we had a fire-drill at work today. I was sitting in my cube, being my usual industrious self, and I was startled by this shrill siren that sounds like some obnoxious car alarm as gone off two cubes over. Then a tinny sounding woman’s voice blares through some hidden loudspeaker: “ATTENTION PLEASE. ATTENTION PLEASE. WE ARE CONDUCTING A DRILL OF OUR EMERGENCY RESPONSE PLAN. PLEASE EVACUATE THE BUILDING NOW. ” I grab my backpack, because if this were a real emergency, I wouldn’t want my Nintendo DS or Jen’s iPod to get all burned up. Next thing I know I’m filing with a mass of people towards the stairwell. Apparently people know what to do in this kind of situation. We reach the outside door, and follow the horde of people who are walking down to the corner, then across the crosswalk to the what appears to be our destination between two buildings across the street.

There was this moment when the light turned yellow while dozens of people were still in the crosswalk, and someone wearing this reflective orange vest had to shout to the crowd, “Stop! You need to get out of the street!” Later when all thousand or two of us were at our destination in groups according to floor, I started thinking about what if this were a real disaster, like our building was on fire or there was an earthquake or something. And I don’t know, I just had this sense of how vulnerable we are. I mean the people crossing the street would have kept following the person in front of them, no matter if a bus was about to run through the crosswalk.

And while I’m sure many in that crowd had been through some sort of emergency preparedness training or meeting or something, what actually transpired was we just all followed the person in front of us. There was another moment when we were filing back into the building after the drill. The lobby was packed with people all trying to get on the elevators that would whisk them back to their respsective floors and back to work. The people traffic was at a stand still, and then I saw some people going through this doorway off to the side, and the woman at the security desk had just said that we could take the freight elevator, and so I just followed people into that adjoining room. And then when I got in there it turns out that no one in front of me knew where the freight elevator was, and after a moment standing there not knowing what to do, we just wandered back to the horde in the lobby.

So all of this made me think how we all do fine and dandy and feel in control and maybe even a little powerful as long as things happen as we expect them to. But throw some big curveball at us, and immediately we’re clueless. We’re no longer powerful and in control, and we’re in the crowd just following the person in front of us. Then we need someone to tell us what to do, and where to go, and when we get there, what to do next.

Standing there in the crowd, I found myself humming this song, by Rich Mullins. The message is about faith, but I found it was strangely appropriate:

Well, it took the hand of God Almighty
To part the waters of the sea
But it only took one little lie
To separate you and me
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are

And they say that one day Joshua
Made the sun stand still in the sky
But I can’t even keep these thoughts
Of you from passing by
Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are

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