Productivity boosting, corporate style

I don't normally blog about work, but since this is about a corporation rather than a person, I must break my rule for a brief rant.

The Company has put a new series of signs up around campus, the kind that you drive by and read one word of the sentence on each subsequent sign, until the entire message is revealed. Like the farmers used to do in their fields – “Eat” “At” “Joes”. These signs, however, say:

• “Be”
• “More”
• “Productive”

followed by a brief ad for Tablet PC. Legitimate, I suppose, but I was too annoyed by the message preceding it at that point to pay attention to the ad. What makes the powers in marketing think that it will be a good motivational idea to throw up some signs around campus urging already overworked, highly productive, very stressed out people to be more productive? Am I supposed to think, 'oh, what a helpful suggestion!', and go about my day refreshed and renewed?

(On a side note, if this works, perhaps I should go home and put signs around the bedroom: "Pick" "Up" "Your" "Socks". Nah...)

I don’t know what it would take for me to be more productive – an extra memory chip for my brain, perhaps, or five more employees, or another six months of project time before we lock down, or, most helpfully, a nice long sabbatical – but let me tell you this much. It sure isn’t a tablet PC. All a tablet PC would do for me would be to make it easier for me to deal with email and other tasks during meetings that are boring and that don’t really require my attention, because a tablet is so much quieter to use than a laptop. I often feel bad when I’m tap-tap-tapping away at a mail during a meeting. So I tap-tap-tap slower and more quietly. But that slows me down - grr. Now, with a tablet and its nifty little pen thingy, I could scribble away without detection! Hrm. Maybe there is something to this.

Shortly after absorbing this inspirational message, I came in and immediately had a catastrophic failure on my laptop, the kind where you have to flip it over and take the battery out to unfreeze the thing and then your mail still doesn’t work for the next several hours.

Funny how a day that began with such an inspirational message may have ended up being my least productive in years. :)