Motivation

What's my motivation here? It's the classic line from actors, but it works almost anywhere. My motivation?, I'll tell ya. At the moment, my biggest motivation is to get rid of the sleigh beds. At any given moment, its a project that piques my interest and stimulates my mind. And there is always 'personal projects'.

Personal projects are one of the biggest benefits from the company. We just have to pay for the materials used, which we get at a discount. The only other requirement is that you have to get management to sign off on you doing your project. One signature from your Team Leader (which in my case is me), one from 'Purchasing' (to make sure that there is enough materials for the shop as well as your project), one from 'Maintainence' (acknowledging your abilities to work on the machines safely), and one from the 'Shop Foreman' (acknowledging your ability to clean up after yourself).

Since Kelley and I are starting a garden over at my house, and we've talked about commercial rain barrels, I decided that the perfect project would be to make my own rain barrel.

But when I went to collect my signatures today, I ran into a bit of resistance. The 'Foreman' was giving my grief about leaving a mess from when I took apart the headboard Thursday. I milled down the useful wood on Friday, but left the broken framework on the ground. Behind my bench, and up against the lumber piles. Completely out of anybody's way. He told me that he would sign my form, if I promised to clean up. Since I had already made plans to clean up at the end of the day, it wasn't a problem to promise a clean area.

I then made some remark about messes happening (you know, like stuff happens), where he decided to erase his signature, and refused to sign it until I had cleaned.

Now, I understand that he is trying to motivate me to clean. And using the personal project as leverage is not a bad way to motivate, giving it to me and then taking it away only motivates me to not do what he wants.

Unfortunately, half of the owners of the company (there are 6 of them these days) don't know how to motivate people to do what they want them to do. And since they are all technically my bosses, I have deal with them all from time to time, especially when I don't want to.

So this all motivates me to take the day off work. I really wanted to leave today and take the rest of the afternoon off. Instead I decided to take all of tomorrow off. Much better. Which is a good thing, because at the end of the day, I found out that not only did the Foreman not want to OK my personal project, he doesn't want to pass any new work projects down to me before I clean up. Now, that really gets my goat.