Thursday, July 27, 2006

A Job Well Done

I just saved my company $15,000.

No, I did not identify an inefficiency in one of our processes. I just made myself some lunch—or, should I say, I tried to make myself lunch. The directions on my box of rice instructed me to coat the rice with olive oil and heat for 4 minutes, stirring once to ensure uniform heating of the grains. The water was not to be added until the next step (I thought this was odd and re-read the directions twice).

After 2 minutes I opened the microwave to stir the grains for ‘uniform heating’, and was accosted by a cloud of smoke. I slammed the microwave door to keep the smoke from escaping and notified Facilities about my little situation. They came right up and took the whole microwave outside.

Andy, the Facilities Maintenance Supervisor, informed me that I saved the organization $15,000 with my quick response to avert a temporary evacuation of the building. He was duly impressed that I had never left the microwave during the two minutes it took to thoroughly fry my rice and burn a whole through the tupperware. (Not leaving your cooking food is their cardinal rule of microwave use.) I always thought they were a bit anal about these little microwave fires. Now I know it’s because a little microwave fire costs $15,000.

I can hear our secretary re-telling someone the story right now. Maybe my manager will send out an email recognizing my contribution to our organization’s safety-culture. After all that hard work, I’m ready for lunch. I’m going to Arby’s.


Post Script: As it turns out, in reading the directions three times, I somehow missed the words MEDIUM POWER written in all caps.

1 Comments:

Blogger cropstar said...

I think you could call that a JORB well done! Very good Krara. You are a model employee. Just think, if you would have read the directions properly the FMS wouldn't have recognized your $15k savings.
Guess where I had lunch. Arbys! I admit... it was blog inspired. One of these days we'll coordinate our lunch outtings!

9:23 AM  

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