Flowcharts

I wouldn't have made it through last week—or any other week—without my flowcharts.  Flowcharts are almost as important as food in my world.  I have developed a process for creating my charts that has to be repeated every single day.  This is an arduous task, but AcMo’s continued success depends on constantly generating more and more complex charts.

These charts suck time away from other activities because I have had to do them by hand since our smart board stopped responding after the TV remote went through it, and we’re having trouble finding replacement parts.  AcMo’s business foundation is evade, adapt, and survive, so we had to abandon dreams of an expedient repair until the technology has caught up with our needs.  This still leaves us without a place to publish our numerous flowcharts.  I wanted to write on the walls, but I’ve been warned off doing that because only crazy people and small children write on walls.

I developed a workable model utilizing an environment I knew all too well.  I have been sneaking into the coffee shop after hours every night to create the next day’s flowchart.  Some insensitive employee continues to erase my life’s work and replace it with the daily specials by the time I arrive in the morning to claim my corner.  This is maddening.  I’ve sent anonymous letters to the management to ask them to step in and resolve this, but nothing has happened yet.  I even threatened to lock myself in the coffee vault to stage a sit-in, but they just laughed at that.  It turns out the locking pins were removed from the vault when the building was transformed into a coffee shop.  This also means that the coffee isn’t as secure as everyone thought.

My daily struggle has taken its toll on my writing hand.  I need a new solution to keep the process flowing in the proper direction and I need it now.  The track season is approaching and we have a lot of operational hurdles we need to solve before the season starts.  First and foremost we need to secure new vehicle delivery sources for our hyper car lap challenge.  This challenge is an excellent opportunity for a dealership to step in as a title sponsor.  We promise to hold a six-month bashing moratorium for any dealer that sponsors the event.

Here is an example of a chart that has become an invaluable resource during our track sessions:

I have to be honest and state that I sometimes have trouble following all of the lines.  The research department told me that coloring the lines would reduce my difficulty, but as always, they were completely wrong.  I’m not even sure why I keep that department.  The only thing I’ve found that helps is to tape the chart to the windshield of every test vehicle so it can be viewed while driving.  Doing that gives me additional time to memorize the easiest paths toward bill generation.