Limburger Anyone?

I think most of us know the book by Spencer Johnson, "Who Moved My Cheese?".  It's a quick and easy read.  For anyone who hasn't had an opportunity to read it yet, I recommend it.  I recently had a HUGE helping of this book's lesson.  In fact I'm still searching for my cheese.

The last six weeks have been, without a doubt, the most stressful of my life.  I have several reasons for this and one of the major contributors has been my workplace.  We recently switched software from TAM (The Agency Manager) to a completely different system utilizing Sagitta and WorkSmart.  It has been a difficult transition for everyone in our office.  We only had, I think, two people who had ever used the new system previously.  Everyone else had been faithfully using TAM for years, and for some, decades.  The most basic and simple information is handled differently in the two systems.

The decision to change systems was not made easily.  The discussion, I understand, took weeks before the decision was made.  Once the decision was made it took months longer to plan and prepare.  Only a small handful from our office actually worked on the project that included several other offices throughout the Midwest.  The majority of us had to wait and listen for any piece of information that came our way.  We were told over and over, "This is going to be GREAT~ this is going to improve your work environment and work load incredibly!"

You can imagine there was A LOT of anxiety, worry and curiosity.

Everybody put on a brave face, smiled and agreed with whatever our planning committee passed on to us.  We all had the highest hopes and best of intentions to work with the new system.  Very close to our launch date we started having training sessions.  Half of us would train in the morning and the other half in the afternoon, giving us two weeks of half working days before the launch.  The thought of only being able to work half days for two weeks was stressful enough!  I was so fortunate to have "pulled the straw" to work in the afternoon training sessions.  I have to give kudos to the morning class for finding all of our bugs and working them out before our afternoon classes began.  Due to their terrible luck our afternoon class was able to spend more time learning, while they spent more time waiting for fixes.

Everyone was nervous to work on the new system and we were all afraid we would somehow cause an explosion if we clicked the wrong button.  But in our perfect world of "test environment" all seemed to go so smoothly!  The examples we used always worked.  The test clients always seemed to have the perfect accounts (in the afternoon classes anyway).  The afternoon students couldn't understand why the morning students were just a bit more cautious about their enthusiasm than we were.  We were lulled into believing that just possibly, come Monday launch day, our cheese of choice would be in the same old place in our cubicles.

The Friday before launch day we all congratulated each other on a fine job well done in training class.  We comforted each other that we would be there to help each other if something was difficult.  We were given Help signs to post on our cubicles to have someone come running to solve issues, should they arise.  So what if we were already behind in our work due to the two weeks of half days, we could make it through this!

Yes of course, we were warned:

"You do understand that your cheese will be moved on Monday, right?"

Naturally we had heard those rumors, but we were confident that at least a few nibbles would be there.

"You understand that you won't be able to bring any of your own cheese with you?"

Well, duh?!?!?!

Then.... what we still refer to as "Black Monday" dawned!

As we all, one by one, settled in front of our monitors (by the way, we now had three monitors each) it started to sink in.  It was as if we had been completely transported to a whole new mouse maze!  What were these strange icons in front of us?  It was like we hadn't spent two weeks in training; like we hadn't been warned; like... like.... LIKE SOMEONE HAD MOVED OUR CHEESE!

There weren't even any nibbles left.

What usually took us 15 minutes now took about two hours - If I'm lyin', I'm dyin' people! - TWO HOURS.  We nearly lost our minds.  Even the teetotalers were considering strong drink.  This wasn't cheese they were feeding us, this was some kind of soy byproduct!

By the end of that first week I think we all had wept, just a little, in memory of our favorite old cheeses.

It was about mid-way through the second week that we realized what we had been consuming was cheese after all.  It was just Limburger.  By the end of the third week, even the Limburger was starting to mellow.

We're all still searching for our cheese.  Mine is a nice smoked Gouda.  I think I'll find it somewhere around week five.