GranolaBox

Always Carry a Clipboard

One summer I worked in a Delphi Automotive factory as part of a “show the teacher the real world” type program. It was sponsored jointly by the United Auto Workers and the management of the company. The purpose was to show teachers what technological skills were necessary for the workplace by employing us for the summer in jobs that were somewhat meaningful but didn’t take away union labor.

While I did learn some things that would be valuable for me to impart to my students, I learned many more things about how NOT to work than I’d prefer to share with my students. One technique that I figured out on my own, and later validated by some true loafing professionals, is to always carry a clipboard.

The first job was doing an inventory of the tool crib used by the die cast mold makers and put it onto an Excel spreadsheet. As it happens, the job I was supposed to be doing for the eight weeks only took about three weeks. I could stretch it ethically to four, but needed to waste some serious time before that. I noticed that if I kind of walked around aimlessly, people would look at me suspiciously. Even though the plant employed around 700 workers, someone walking around aimlessly attracts attention.

I decided then that if I were going to walk around aimlessly, I’d have to change the way I did it. I decided to always walk with a purposeful gait to give the impression that I was actually going somewhere. That seemed to allay people’s suspicion, but to put it “over the top” I carried a clipboard.

Armed with my clipboard and my anonymity, I set about to do nothing. I’d walk to different parts of the plant, pausing every once in a while to write something on my clipboard. Usually it was letters to my friends, sometimes to-do lists. To-do lists are great to have on a clipboard, and should be placed on top to give the impression of even greater efficiency. After about five minutes or so of writing, I’d move on to another part of the plant and continue writing there.

That was starting to get boring after a couple weeks. Thankfully, another teacher in the program revealed to me that he would be finished with his project far earlier than he thought also, so I suggested he join me. After teaching him my short list of techniques, we decided that we’d work for the next couple weeks as a pair, since doing nothing is made much more efficient in pairs.

For the next couple weeks we walked around the factory talking about everything we could possibly think of. We speculated about the lives of our co-workers. We looked for superlatives in all of the production lines - best looking, slowest working, most likely to cross-dress outside of work, etc.

In the last few days of the program, we put the finishing touches on our projects and fabricated our journals for the previous weeks to make it look like we’d been working diligently the whole time. We also finished a few letters we’d been working on.

Our final task was to write a report that we would bring back to our schools highlighting the skills students would need in the 21st century workplace. Ironically, the skill that served us both the best was the one we left out of our final report.

Comment!

Do you have any great techniques for loafing at work?

Technorati Tags: Delphi Automotive, United Auto Workers, technological skills, workplace, clipboard, die cast mold, Excel spreadsheet, to-do lists, efficiency, production lines, cross-dress, 21st century workplace