« poor forgotten afghanistan | Main | work... »
April 07, 2003
just in time theory
so back when i was in college (man i love saying that, even though it hasn't yet been a year), i developed a theory as to why me and many of my friends chose to write and turn in papers right before they were due. now logic would dictate that this is because we were lazy procrastinating mofos, but my "just in time theory" would beg to differ. i recently described it over messenger to my friend molly, here's a, expanded sumation. ok here goes:
there's a well known dictum about manufacturing and production, that the longer you have something sit on the shelf, the more it degrades, degrade in this sense meaning loses it's value. a good example would be computer hardware. if you construct a high end system, then it's state of the art for all of 3 weeks, after which something else more high tech comes out, putting your already constructed machine on the road to obsolesence.
now since manufacturing and technology have developed to the point where things can be built and completed in such a small amount of time, in as short as hours, then the most cost effective way to serve a client is to manufacture everything right before you send it out, just in time, hence the term just in time production.
let's take this practice and move it over to the chore of writing papers for classes: in the same sense that preconstructed products can be left wasting on the shelf, then as i see it, the longer you let the information accumulate in your head and sit there simmering in it's own juices, the higher the quality it attains before you finally have to bang it all out onto paper, hours or even minutes before it's due. one could say that the pressure of the impending deadline causes a kind of clarity of vision, enabling you to focus entirely on the frantic yet measured task at hand. plus the fact that you finish it just in time to turn it in means that you don't sit around afterwords wondering if you should have revised it more or changed it, because you didn't have any time to. it's a done deal, a finished product.
i feel like the theory does pretty well up to here. once i got to this point in the explanation, my friend molly interjected something about "what if they paper is already a week late?" she admitted that the professor didn't seem to care that it was late, and i managed to link this to something about enoui in society and how people aren't surprised when they don't get what they want when they want it. i mean, if a product that was supposed to arrive tuesday arrives thursday, it's not such a big deal. we can usually shrug shit like that off.
molly then commented on it being very frustrating, that she wanted her motivation and drive back that used to produce such quality stuff. i started to bring this back to the theory, that she needed to "harness the pressure of an impending deadline better," but she startled me by saying that she must have "shat it out somewhere down the line," meaning her drive.
i tried to connect this to alienation in the workplace and workers showing up and shooting up the office, but she just giggled at me. it was then that i let her get back to writing her paper, and i went looking for a beer, basking in the re-occuring afterglow of having actually managed to graduate university, something neither i nor my father had so much expectations about.
dan says:
i'm telling you, this theory can save humanity.
molly says:
i don't doubt it, dan.
mollys says:
hehe
the next thing i write will be about how looking for jobs is worse then having them, cause who wants to go hunting and pleading for something they don't want?
Posted by bendan at April 7, 2003 10:11 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://drewish.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/533