It's Winter - Turn the Heating Off

I read an interesting article yesterday, which detailed the lengths that some companies are going to in order to realise savings during these economic hard times.

Some companies are still going for the traditional 'swathe' rationalisation mentality. i.e. lop off big chunks of an organisation, re-assign the work, sell the workers' desks and PCs and hope for the best. Others on the other hand, are examining all inputs, outputs and 'contribution' items or bits of a business, which cost money.

In order to translate this in to English, I witnessed the latter yesterday whilst on the 18:45 FCC train from Kings Cross to Kings Lynn. The train was decidedly 'split'. Those who sat on the left (facing the direction of travel) looked decidedly uncomfortable. Many were red-faced, fanning themselves and stripping down to their bare essentials.

On the contrary, those on the right were sat comfortably, reading, chatting, enjoying the wintery blackness out of the window. Occasionally dozing off only to be woken by the odd shudder of the train as it rattled round the right-hand bend in to Letchworth.

So what caused this divide? The plague? Had some cheeky adolescents put some itching powder on the seats of those on the left? Was it down to the work of God?

No. It was because FCC were trialing a new cost-efficiency lean six sigma bright idea. They had turned off the fans on the left hand side of the train but not the right. Thus reducing the amount of power need to run these systems by 50%. That is an ingenious saving if you think about it. Even if it did leave half the passengers red faced.

We could all learn from this…