Friday, April 02, 2010

What can Brown do for you?: Downtime

Now a few words to set up this story. Every day at break the unload would tell us the percentage of trailers left to unload. So normally we would be around 500-700% and that would take an hour or so (about 7 AM is when we were supposed to finish). Now as a math guy it took me awhile to grasp that something could be more than a 100%, but whatever.

The other thing was that we were still without a building manager. So it wasn't out of the ordinary for the division manager to show up. He would be consider a building manager's boss. He was in charge of more than one building.

Well one day our division manager, Rich, was in the building. Rich was a great guy. I can't say one negative thing about him. He was always kind, positive, and always remembered my name. On top of that, when things got bad he wouldn't yell or scream he would just mentor you. He was definitely an anomaly at UPS.

So at break time that day, Shon (who was running the back cause Tom was gone) decided to have a building meeting to discuss downtime and percentages left. Everyone is there, part time supervisors, full time supervisors, and Rich. Shon asks Rob for the amount left and Rob tells him something like 600%, which is higher than Shon had said. Then when he asks Rob for a downtime Rob says 7:30. Shon without missing a beat says "you're on crack." Rob chuckles and says "you can say whatever you want, but we will be done at 7:30." It was funny to see Rich's and Shon's face when Rob said it. I was standing next to Jordan and we just laughed because we knew Rob pretty well and he didn't sugar coat stuff.

Want to know what time they got down? 7:30

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a former coach, I never understood someone giving more than 100% either. How can someone give 110% effort. Why not 200%, 1000%, or 1,372.62%?