I was in a supervisory position some years ago with no real hiring or firing authority, but with a responsibility to keep things going on as even a keel as possible and that was not easy. I had a staff, some of whom were of questionable maturity, who managed in various ways to seriously provoke their co-workers and to engage in dangerous horseplay. A Tektronix 585 oscilloscope almost got knocked over one day and those of you who are old enough to remember that beast will also recall how big it was!
Sadly too, the company's business fortunes were not going well at that time and nobody's job was secure. Morale was going down every day, tempers were growing short and to my mind, the situation had too many of the aspects of dust in a grain silo.
I needed a remedy for this and I found one.
Everyone who came into work each day had to walk through this office area where there was a chalk board on the far wall from the doorway. That board was always covered with half-drawn schematics, some scribbled calculations and some obscure notes of one kind or another, often many days old.
I started coming in super early, way before anyone else's arrival. Each morning, I erased the board completely, gave it a washing down and then I wrote the title of a non-existent book with ascribed authorship to a non-existent writer. Some examples were:
Modern Anthropology by Yeti Sasquatch
Great Social Events by Ming Gling
Classical Music by Julie Yard
This was in the days before "Car Talk" was being heard on National Public Radio so it took a while for this to sink in, but eventually it took effect. One person got the joke and laughed a little. Then someone else got it and soon the jokes took everybody's attention. Other title-and-author jokes started appearing and not by my hand.
People were coming in at the start of the day specifically to see what would be written.
The key to this was that nobody could come in and see something like that without laughing at least a little bit and once having laughed, their negative moods were broken.
Tom and Ray don't know it, but they owe me one.
Comments