Totally unplugged

It has been 63-days since I returned to the technological industry, this time my job landed in a local Small Medium Industry (SMI).

I am moving into a phase in my career life where my knowledge and technological skills, some of which I had just advanced from the technological industries which have been known for their frontier high-tech innovation and development, were being challenged.

From a fully wired office to a totally unplugged office, I switch my regular business conduct from a remote access using wired technology to labor-intensive tracking a movement on the production floor.

I have always been thinking online tools are a basic approach to connecting with other people and sharing in 21st century. We live with it, deal with it every day, never had I thought of one day I have to go back to the old ways to the era when people scrambling stacks of papers, flipping page over a page in search for facts.

Here, almost everything is unplugged. I noticed that process data, procedures and work instructions were printed on papers and strictly governed by their “creator”. You think you can fish out technical information right away with just a few clicks, forget about it!

Staring at stacks of papers that kept at the work station, my hands tied. My thoughts were susceptible to attack from tons of uncertainties, where to start in on my analysis work with that vast amount of data right in front of me.

I was skeptical as to whether how fast the valuable nuggets of information could be retrieved from loads of unorganized manuscripts, but intrigued by the challenge of delivering the solution instantaneously to stay competitive in a highly impulsive industry.

The whole idea is pinpointing a gap in the technology landscape that the Malaysian industries are still crossing into.

However, recently I got interested in this kind of work because there had been a lot of fascinating findings when I was physically present at the “crime site” on the production floor; spying on a suspicious crook and waiting for a concealing crime to surface. Many unreported irregular activities might have taken place; these “crooked acts” could not be observed online.

Plugged in or unplugged, does it matter? Looking at parallel between an actual manufacturing practice and in print, I found reasons to withdraw from a wired technology – there’re too many elements from this real life that we just cannot show them altogether online.

The stock market can be down but the stock market is not an indication of where people’s spirits and enthusiasm are, and where their intellectual energy is. – James Daly.

Wai Ping Lee/July 2011