Three recent articles in the Wall Street Journal indicate that no matter how much technology moves us forward, we still carry a vestigial tail of our past. This post will address office break rooms, pole attachments, and the task of retrofitting old manufacturing equipment with electronic and connected sensors.
Social Media in the Workplace
My first brush with technology in the workplace came during my third summer (of eight) at a department store. I spent those summer vacations in the guts of retailing: unpacking shipments and sweeping floors in the warehouse; loading trucks and breaking down boxes for an industrial compactor; even conducting inventory on the sales floor at time when each article of clothing on the rack was checked against a binder’s worth of print-outs (yes, every single necktie on a 20-foot rack was matched against the list). That third summer, though, was golden, because each employee was issued an electronic time card which we carried with us and merely zipped through the slot at the side of the clock. No more cardboard time cards. No more waiting in line to retrieve your card, punch, and then replace in a rack that had probably been manufactured in the 1950. The new time card resembled a credit card and was radical, hip, high-tech, and cool (the only thing that eclipsed it was the 1973 baby-blue Fleetwood I drove during summer number eight).