Fire Wardens and Pointless Process

At work, we got our Fire Warden coming around to hassle us. It's a part time occupation, so he's certainly not that fussed about it.
What irks me is a job done poorly, which is effectively make work, which is only done "because we have to"; and when a real fire does occur, I'm more at risk because of this busywork than if I had never listened at all.


Here's my tongue in cheek attempt at pointing it out..

The paper instructions

These instructions we're getting are made of cardboard. Which is flammable.
I've noticed that things in a fire like to burn, including cardboard.

People like myself are most likely to litter them about my desk; creating what I believe is called LOADS OF KINDLING.

Is there a benefit to adding more potential fuel to a sudden and unexpected desk fire?

Stopping to read the instructions

In a real fire, I'm expected to stop to collect my instruction sheet, and follow it?

Typically; when unexpected things happen, they are outside of the range of normal.

Am I expected to obey the instructions under normal circumstances?

Since sudden desk fires are by themselves completely unexpected occurences, under what circumstances could I expect a normal, business as usual desk fire to occur; where these instructions will be of use to me?

Can I use my own judgement under abnormal circumstances, like an unexpected fire?

If I can use my own judgement: do I need the instructions; or is it only for those completely normal, run of the mill fires?

The research

With our current fire safety policy and adherence, what current research suggests the effectiveness of it, given our unique circumstances?

ie, that we hire people who like LOADS OF KINDLING on their desks

If you haven't had a chance to; can I suggest the reading of some of the relevant materials; to ensure we're up to date?

Fire evacuation skills training for institutionalized mentally retarded adults
* Training people to get out of a building works well with moneytary rewards.
* The Fire warden should be able to organise drills, and pay people who get out best/fastest. I suggest a mix of Amazing race vs fire drill.


EFFICIENT EVACUATION METHODS IN TALL BUILDINGS
"The movement of people in stairs can be modelled as unified crowd flows. The maximum flow per stair width unit has been measured for different types of staircases, riser heights and tread depths"
"The flow models give optimistic results, since they assume that stairs do not become overcrowded. In case there is heavy congestion, the walking speed and also the occupant flow drop significantly. If the occupant density is more than 3.8 persons per square meter, the walking speed approaches zero (Pauls 1987)"

* If a collection of chubby people (and have you seen some of these people!) cause a bottleneck, we're all doomed.
* Research suggests the Fire warden should be able to issue gym memberships

What other processes seem futile with fire safety in the work place?

Valuations in 2020

Daydreaming at work.

Problem one: The valuation process involves lots of different people - customers, mortgage brokers, the bank / mortgage manager, valuation firm administration staff, and valuers themselves.

There is money involved here, so people like to keep all parts of the process isolated from each other. The upside of this: it prevents fraud. The downside of this: communication overhead shoots through the roof, and everyone has to play phone tag.

So: what if you were to make disposable communication hub (mailing list, or conference call) which lets all parties interact?
And the way you make money from this is to provide a trusted, impartial, honest witness to the proceedings to ensure no fraud takes place - as well as being a facilitator.

Net result:
Everyone involved gets a personal relationship, everyone is happier, communication is more effective, and the customer getting the loan gets to see behind the magic curtain.

This will probably never happen, as it is a radical shift from all previous models; and in general, banks do not make radical changes

Problem two:
Since no one talks to each other during the valuation process, everyone is anxious.

Idea:
Customer walks into bank, gets given a kit - do your own valuation in 3 easy steps, with a secure URL.
They go back to the property, take lots of photographs, and upload them ahead of time.

Give valuers geotracking devices, and wire them up somewhat like in Aliens if you are really gung ho.

When a valuer is inspecting a property, they SMS or otherwise indicate their arrival, which gets picked up by a computer.
This broadcasts emails to everyone and anyone, and they can see the valuation report (at this point, inspection date, photographs) as it happens.

Finally, the valuer goes home and types up the report - adding in his valuable risk analysis and assessed market value..

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HP buys EDS

... but only Slashdot comments make me chuckle.

My Wishlist For Operator

Operator is a firefox addon to detect microformats. For people like me, microformats are an enabler - the enterprise site I work on makes use of them for contact, event, etc information.

The trouble we have is integrating all of our systems. There's the production system, there's the CRM system, there's the Asterix phone system, there's an internal phone/contact list, ten trillion personal outlook calendars, a mix of google calendars, and much more.

Each is its own walled garden.

So, why not use Operator and users to make it easy to import, export granular data - contacts for instance.

To that end, I'd love:
1) A mechanism for Operator to autodiscover actions - like FOAF, OpenSearch, or Greasemonkey user scripts. This should allow me to preview before I install, and have a measure of trust.

2) Actions for popular enterprise open source software - again, get SugarCRM to autogenerate the Operator user-script for its local installation.

3) Make the installation process much much smoother - at the moment, it's a little clunky to add in a new user script.