Deck the Cubicles
PMBOK and Prince II approved method for tracking the number of days to Christmas
My attempt to ignore the festive season is proving to be as unsuccessful as my attempt to ignore a midget I saw at McDonalds. He insisted on standing on his tip-toes to order, even though McDonalds kindly provides a small, yellow, “little people’s” staircase for just such a purpose. I offered to pick him up and put him on the counter, but he rudely turned down this considerate suggestion. So much for trying to help your fellow man! He also didn’t see the irony in ordering a Big Mac…
Now, back to why I find the festive season irritating… For starters, I can’t stand the crowds in the malls, the gaudy Christmas decorations, the creepy Santa Claus in the shops and most annoying, the Boney M Christmas Carol CD playing incessantly everywhere you go! As exciting as retrenching people is, the best job I’ve ever had is still working at a Häagen Dazs in London. The only blemish on this otherwise joyous working experience is the fact that the manager insisted on playing the Boney M Christmas Carol CD all day. “It’s evokes all that’s good about Christmas”, he said, not realising how quickly you want to smash the little drummer boy’s drum over his head after you’ve heard the CD repeat for the third time!
Some companies take Christmas quite seriously. From about now, Christmas decorations start going up around the office, stockings get hung up on cubicles in the vain hope that someone might put something of value in them… like an AIG bonus and tiny Christmas trees are sprouting on people’s desks. Not wanting to feel left out, I’ve put some tinsel on my probably dead pot plant Adam Smith. Invisible Hand high five!
Two years ago, our team bought a whole heap of Christmas decorations to add some artificial Christmas spirit to the drab, dungeon-like floor we were working on. The procurement process was quick (only four people needed to sign-off) and much to our surprise (and the surprise of the people we retrenched a little later that month), our Christmas Decoration budget was approved. We contacted the companies’ preferred, BEE-approved (black economic empowerment, for non-South African readers) Christmas decoration vendor and promptly bought the decorations we requested.
Included in our stash were ten advent calendars. Advent calendars are a great way of introducing disciplined project management techniques to tracking the number of days to Christmas. Plus, there’s a chocolate coin to eat everyday until Christmas (Microsoft Project offers no such benefit). We thought this was an excellent bonus to purchasing these particular advent calendars, until the following morning when we realised that the cleaners had eaten all our chocolates! It seems the Invisible Hand was hard at work the previous evening. Festive externalities – what can do?
I’m beginning to think that I was a little patronising to the midget I met at McDonalds. Maybe I should have gone the extra mile by referring him to an ad I’d seen asking for “little” people to apply for jobs as elves at a local shopping mall. There I go again, just trying to help my fellow man!
