After working in a large corporate environment it has occurred to me that the corporate culture has developed a simple pattern matching behavior to determine whether a person is “In The Office” and that being ITO is usually considered a “productive” state. Moreover, the amount of time spent ITO is often perceived as directly proportional to the performance and dedication of the employee.

For example: “Wow, Bob was In The Office early all week and he left after I did every night! What a dedicated worked Bob is!” etc..

Additionally, in these large environments there seem a variety of satisfactory indications that an employee is ITO. In my environment there are 3 primary indicators. One virtual, and two physical. The virtual indicator is measured by an employee’s “online/available” status in the IM client of choice. The two physical indicators are, one, being seen physically in the office by another ITO employee, and two, having your office lights turned on, and having that state be witnessed by an ITO employee.

In summary, as a side effect of the common practice of having the building automatically shut off the lights in your office when you aren’t there, it has become commonplace to assume that you are ITO (and therefore working hard) if the lights in your office are on, even though you may not actually be physically in your office at the time.

This behavior has lead me to design the Corporate Presence Grenade. Simply put, the CPG is a device that will emit a burst of 8-12nm infrared energy at a programmable interval to convince the infrared motion detector in your office that a human is in the room and to leave the lights on.

An employee armed with a CPG can be more productive than ever before! The reality is that in the Information Age there’s no reason to be chained to a desk other than the false perception that ITO matters. With the CPG you can have the best of both worlds!

Think of the respect and recognition you’ll get while using the CPG! The CPG will retail for less than a RonCo Rotisserie Chicken Oven and is *guaranteed to net you a 25% raise in your first 90 days of ownership! I’m taking pre-orders now! Look for the CPG on store shelves or in your grocers freezer by Christmas!

PRE ORDER TODAY!

*guarantee void in all states that contain vowels.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2004 @ 6:12 pm on the category Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.