We have all heard of bosses dangling carrots in front their workers, but as L.D. tells us, in this instance that actually becomes the "root" of the problem…
When I came in one cold, winter morning, I found my new boss, we'll call him Rob, standing by my cramped cubicle. Rob was wearing his normal Monday tie and matching polyester shirt and the fluorescent lighting striking his slicked back greasy hair was so bright that I had to wipe my eyes to clear the haze. He was, as usual, chewing his bubblegum as though his life depended on it.
Without letting me sit down, he asked for the root password for the Unix server we had running. I replied that the password was carrot, I had always found it easy to remember…root…carrot…
Rob slouched his way across the aisle, plopped himself in his squeaky chair and began to type away. After a few minutes, I began to hear him cursing under his breath as he banged on the keys. Finally, he sprung out of his chair and whirled around. "This password is bogus, chief," he said. "You forgot it, didn't you?"
"Listen, Rob, I logged onto the system yesterday and the password is carrot."
"Yeah, ok buddy," he steamed, his chewing hitting a new RPM, "I see, you're being a wise guy. We'll just get this straightened out."
After five more minutes of typing in the password over and over, cursing his incompetent staff under his breath, he snatched up the phone and put a call into the national support center. He scheduled the server to be formatted, and re-platformed. All this, of course, because the fools in his new department forgot the password.
As you might imagine, no one was very thrilled about the idea of re-platforming a Unix server, but Rob's constant calls moved up the ladder until Management ordered that our department stay through the night and do the job. They also put in a call to have a specialty team fly in that afternoon to supervise as our scheduled and shifts were changed.
Just before the work was to commence, Rob walked around the department touting that he was single-handedly saving the day because we were all too incompetent to remember such a simple thing as a password.
"Listen, Rob, I am absolutely sure that the password is carrot, I promise you," I said.
Rob's face quickly moved into a shade I will call "irate purple". He jumped on me, grabbed my upper arm and dragged me to the Unix box. "Watch!" he yelled, spittle flying in my ear, "I'll type it in front of you! Look here… Your stupid password does not work!"
I watched in silence as he typed in the password: "C-I-R-R-E-T"
Lesson learned: Forget TQM and Six Sigma initiatives; if you want real improvement, send your managers to the local sixth grade spelling bee contests.
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