Background:
Making a wind chime gives children the opportunity to create a simple design.

It also gives parents the opportunity to teach children how to use a hammer safely, and to discuss the connections between the wind and the seasons.

What to do:
1. Mark five evenly spaced dots along the bottom of the cardboard strip.
2. Make a large hole through the cardboard at each dot with a hammer and nail.
3. Decorate the cardboard with markers if desired.
4. Tie the metal objects to the cardboard with the 12″ lengths of yarn.
5. Make holes in the upper corners of the cardboard and tie the longer length of yarn through for a hanger.

Use
Hang the wind chimes on a porch or near an open window.

So, Ted said it was a long story and that nothing happened.

I perceived Ted’s response to be something other than a denial. I heard someone who thought that a situation had been worked out and that he simply did not want to go into detail about Ghandia’s business. I actually thought that Ted took the high road. He respected her privacy.

He could very easily have said, “Whoa, wait a minute! What did she say? She was spooning back at ME! She grabbed my arm and held it around her. SHE is the one who’s always touching me, leaning on me. She is the one who suggested we sleep next to each other.

She was raped and now she is overreacting because she still isn’t over that trauma.” But he didn’t. He just tried to let it die so that Ghandia’s personal life isn’t dragged out for the world to see. “It’s a long story. A mistake happened and I rectified it.”

And when he said nothing happened, I’m guessing that he meant that nothing happened that should be made into a big deal.

Brian told Helen that Ted said nothing happened. Helen promptly went over and relayed this to Ghandia.

I’m sitting here trying to think of something to say, something wise, something witty. But I just can’t come up with anything.

In my opinion, Colby should’ve won. Not that I disliked Tina (in fact, I really liked her and defended her against all the nutballs who say she backstabbed Mad Dog). Out of the four votes for Tina (Elisabeth, Jerri, Alicia, and Keith), Alicia gave the only sound reason for her vote (she was able to make it this far WITHOUT winning immunity challenges). Two of the four were simply illogical popularity votes. And Jerri voted for Tina only because Colby didn’t kiss up to her.

In my Manly Man predictions, I predicted Colby and Tina to make the finals (I finally was right and the Unbelievable Bloombergini was wrong on something), but I predicted Colby to take the prize. My reasoning for Colby or Tina to NOT select Keith to be with them in the final was the same as Colby’s reasoning (the best people should be in the final – not the person who’s going to give me a definite win). And it is this reasoning that will afford Colby easily more than a million dollars in endorsements and whatever else comes his way.

As I watched the post-Survivor wrap-up and as I listened to Tina speak each time, I just can’t imagine her having anything close to what Richard Hatch has as far as post-Survivor fame. My prediction for the biggest earners: Colby, Elisabeth (these two are a given), Rodger, and Amber. Kimmi has already demonstrated herself to be the winner in capitalizing on the Survivor fame by doing the stupidest things, and I believe she’ll continue to do so.

Here are some of the first things that come to mind as I ponder the three hours of tonight’s Survivor:

* I could’ve done without the 45 minutes of introspection and showing Colby, Keith, and Tina pondering their fate and thanking everything down to the tree bark. Boring. But the show has already demonstrated a keen sense in milking the money out of the advertisers and the advertising time, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

* I loved the tough questions Colby and Tina were asked. Even Mr. Gumbel asked a few tough ones.

* Jerri’s question to Colby and Tina, which was so obviously Jerri expecting some sort of apology from them, completely backfired. Instead of Tina mentioning how she lied to Jerri or Mad Dog, Tina mentioned the beef jerky incident and how horrible she felt for screwing Kel as they did. Nice job, Tina!

* Kel said how he still very much dislikes Jerri, accompanied by a whole audience applauding in agreement. (I would’ve like to have heard Kel say something like, “And you STILL think I had beef jerky, with all the security we went through? You are such a stupid bitch.” I would’ve liked that. Actually, I would’ve like to have heard more from Kel. I think he and Michael were two that deserved to go further than they did.)

“Well, that’s the problem. You can’t put things like that in a garbage disposal!!!!” he yelled up at me.

“Huh?”

“Cucumber skin is way too tough for a garbage disposal.”

Now, you don’t talk to a man when he’s in that kind of mode. Because of course a woman doesn’t understand the fine workings of such a sophisticated piece of heavy metal jaws that can’t chew a puny rind. Right.

I called Kevin, who installed it, who promised to come look the next morning.

Last night, with The Crisis over, I said,

“Bill? I made some marinated cucumbers. Would you like some?”

“No. Now I hate cucumbers.”

(Which of course made us both laugh. But he wouldn’t budge on the cuke skin issue.)

And, as I assume you know, none of us are easy to live with. We all come packaged with styrofoam quirks. I’m very lucky that Bill makes great allowances for my various peccadilloes. That’s not a herd of new pets I’ve adopted, but it’s one of my favorite words, so I’m using it.

Turns out the piping from the dishwasher was too small/narrow to handle the new addition. Kevin fixed the pipe and it will be fine. I asked him to write a note saying that this disposal can handle everything but a hip bone……but instead I shall become a subversive, stealth user of my own electric pig. It’s easier.

I sent the following e-mail to Bill at work—

Dearest Husband,

Until you can do over part of our conversation last evening, I figured I’d have the following T-shirt made for you to wear…..

Your loving wife

To which he responded…… (meaning he’s not giving one inch, Mr. Sillyman

Dearest Beverly,

I think that is an emblem you should wear with proper humility and
admonition.

The Husband

But speaking of trying to prevent future terrorism from humans, not gadgets, get this:

Kevin’s theory of thwarting airline hijacking: Make every passenger eat a pork rind before they are allowed on board.

See? We all look at the world through weird lenses.

Woody Allen once did a comic monologue about his small appliances being Anti-Semitic. At first I decided to blame Arab terrorists, but it didn’t help. We are an interdenominational household. Likely my Insinkerator is not a bigot. But we’ve all been more than a bit raw at anything unexpected of late.

Bill (who is very smart, but not particularly handy and is also frightened of plumbing that does not respond to the suckage of a rubber plunger) decided to ‘take a look.’

I went upstairs because it’s never pretty when he does that. And he likes to place the blame when things go wrong. Things don’t ‘just happen’ in my husband’s world. They happen….because….

Since the dogs and I are handy, quite often things are our fault, one or all three of us. No wait. Bessie doesn’t do anything wrong. Just the new poodle, Lillian, and I are the screw ups.

I get bruises BECAUSE I don’t watch where I am going. This is true. But it’s also true that no one can see a black dog in a dark room when one or both black dogs have decided to change where they sleep in the middle of the night. Ow.

One time I heard a really loud THUNK in the kitchen, and a really loud silence. I waited. Finally I walked toward the echo of the THUNK to see Bill standing in front of the open refrigerator, clenching his jaw, staring into the chilly depths while a huge jar of pickles was rolling away from his foot.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“Yes. I’m just trying to figure out how I can blame this on you.”

We laugh a lot after these things are over, but when they are happening, he thinks it’s a disaster.

BACK TO THE DISPOSAL HURL

Remember those old guys on SNL when Billie Crystal and someone else used to do stupid painful things to themselves and then say, “Ooooh. I hate when that happens.”

While I tiptoed upstairs, my husband kept flicking the switch on the disposal and kept getting covered in green garbage. He was apparently testing out some theory.

“WHAT did you PUT in here!?” he yelled up at me, where I was uhm, trying to stay out of the way. Yeah, that’s what I was doing.

Looking ahead, the challenge for a service company like ours is ongoing improvement. At DCC, we must continuously improve quality and refresh our products, or we’ll be out of business in a short period of time. In our fast-moving industry, new products are generally passe in three years.
Our company has an ongoing commitment to the quality process from senior management, and the Baldrige-based Dana Quality Leadership Award process at DCC and Dana Corporation will continue. It does yield results and is considered by Dana people to be the best process for quality improvement.

President Clinton said of the winning companies at the 1996 Baldrige Award ceremony: “These are people who understand that quality is a journey, not a destination.” DCC people are committed to continuing this journey, which we believe, is the best way to serve our customers and the shareholders of Dana Corporation.

Steve Taylor is Vice President – Marketing, Dana Commercial Credit. Dana Commercial Credit is one of North America’s leading information technology lessors.
SIX SIGMA

A sigma is, in statistical terms, a standard deviation. Remember the Bell curve? One standard deviation above and below the average would encompass roughly two thirds of all of the set. In school, one sigma would represent the “C” students. Two sigma above the average would be the “B” students while two sigma below would be the “D” students. Three sigma would represent the “A” and “F” students. To carry it out further, six sigma would then be six standard deviations, or a total of twelve deviations above and below the average, and would encompass 99.999999% of the set.

Motorola first used the term six sigma to define a quality model in their manufacturing process. In quality terms, six sigma would have only 2 defects per billion. However, due to process drift, six sigma tolerance allows for a +-1.5 sigma drift resulting in a net tolerance rate of 3.4 defects per million parts.

To apply six sigma, the process needs to be identified with specifications as to what constitutes a defect. The process is measured and defects reported. From a quality improvement standpoint, defect rates outside of the six sigma tolerance are evaluated to determine the cause. Processes are reworked and re-measured. Ultimately, through this process the defect rate will be brought into compliance with six sigma.

We also created and held mandatory Scoring Customer Satisfaction classes for all DCC people, designed to identify their customers and develop a means to assess customer service, including evaluation tools.

In light of previously unsuccessful efforts to develop a quality mindset within the company, improvements in process management had to be positioned as more than just a “flavor of the month” solution. We made it clear that the voice of the employee was just as important as the voice of the customer, and DCC linked process improvements with compensation packages.

A lot of time was expended in educating and training our people in the early going. Our initial efforts at process management paid off, though, when DCC won a bronze medal in the Six Sigma Quality Challenge that first year. More importantly, we received a feedback report, which pinpointed areas that needed further improvement.

The feedback report indicated a need to compare our company with others in the commercial finance industry. As we developed benchmark comparisons with other companies and measurements of both customer and employee satisfaction through surveys, we determined that although we were good, we weren’t as good as we needed to be.

In order to achieve continuous improvement and better align ourselves with service-oriented organizations that exhibited performance excellence, we adopted criteria for the Baldrige Award, which closely mirrors those of the Six Sigma process.

In time, we realized that the quality process was actually working and threw it into high gear. With documented improvement, people throughout the company became more excited about process management, and their involvement and interest deepened.

Everyone’s efforts were recognized by DCC’s continuous improvement in the Dana Quality Leadership Award competition; our winning the 1995 Michigan Quality Leadership Award, a state-level quality award based on the Baldrige Award criteria and, ultimately, the Award in 1996.

The education and strategic planning initiatives that are part of the Baldrige process allow our people to feel more comfortable and confident. As a result, they feel more empowered in doing their jobs. We realize management can’t empower people; they must empower themselves. Our “Ideas at Work” program encourages innovative thinking by our people. DCC people are encouraged to provide two ideas per person, per month, with an 80 percent rate of implementation.

Recognizing that knowledge fuels ideas, DCC requires each person to participate in more than 60 hours of training annually via internal education curriculums, Dana University (our parent company’s education department) and outside seminars. This is three times the average for our industry, and provides a clear differentiator from our competitors. The individual training plans for DCC’s people are tied directly to the overall strategic plan of the company.

Most importantly, we recognized the need to change the mindset of the organization and establish an environment of shared beliefs. We fully embraced the Dana Style of Management to develop a strategic partnership with our people. The belief that people are our most important asset is a cornerstone of the Dana Style. Education, empowerment, participation, innovation, teamwork and promotion from within are not just goals at DCC. The Dana Style makes them realities.
Then, in 1992 Dana Corporation asked us to participate in its internal Six Sigma Quality Challenge. The objective for the program was to promote quality awareness, understanding and involvement in each of Dana’s business units, as well as adopt a divisional approach to continuous improvement.

A major motivating factor and goal was to minimize variation in the processes of Dana’s business units, the majority of whom manufactured products for the world’s vehicular industry. This would lead to improved quality and total customer satisfaction. Six Sigma performance, as executed company-wide, targets fewer than 3.4 errors per one million tries.

Dana Corporation convinced us that Six Sigma would provide DCC with a road map to process excellence, an effective leadership model, an empowerment vehicle, and a planning tool to get the job done and achieve total customer satisfaction. A key to the eventual success of our quality program was the fact that our senior management were the first people to attend self-assessment sessions. They participated in a three-day Total Quality Leadership class at the University of Michigan.

Many companies make the mistake of having senior management be among the last groups to get involved in quality initiatives. In many cases, they send people to meetings, say they are behind them, but do not really understand the quality process.

Focusing on customer satisfaction forced us to step outside the comfort zone of our everyday-thinking process. Service providers traditionally have a difficult time identifying customers and their expectations, let alone measuring customer satisfaction. But, if a service company can successfully navigate the first steps in the process, quality improvements come much more quickly than they do for manufacturers.
After the Total Quality Leadership classes, senior management ordered self-assessments be conducted at every level of the organization and in very department. The goals were to review what we did well, what we did not do well and to measure our performance from the standpoint of customer satisfaction.

The ongoing task of developing quality processes in an organization is not without blood, sweat and tears, yet it can be a very rewarding experience.

The quality criteria serve as a catalyst for effective strategic planning since company priorities are aligned with customer needs. The experience also promotes continuous process management and improvements. A key benefit of this evolution is building a customer-driven organization that actually exceeds customer expectations.

At Dana Commercial Credit (DCC) we speak from experience. In 1996, we received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, generally regarded as the highest award an American company can receive for business performance excellence.

How did DCC get started on the road to business excellence? Our first experiences in making our corporate culture a quality-focused environment were in reaction to the competitive environment of the early part of this decade, when many changes occurred in the commercial leasing industry.

We realized that it would be difficult to compete as generalists. Traditional markets were changing, with a growing trend toward specialized leasing companies. As a company doing business in a wide range of different markets, DCC was caught in the middle.

DCC surveyed its customers and found that our business priorities were such different than those of our customers. We realized that the company needed a well-defined strategic focus aligned with that of our customers, so we decided to focus on the under-served microcomputer equipment industry. We also knew our success depended on significant improvement in the quality of our products and services.

At this time, quality circles were in vogue and DCC participated in this trend. After a while, though, our focus on quality circles was questioned. These activities appeared peripheral to the company’s business focus, taking too much time away from people’s primary duties without producing tangible results. Employee suggestion programs, likewise, produced mixed results. This was due, in part, to a lack of commitment from management to actually implement suggestions. In retrospect, we realize now that “suggestions” can be simply disregarded, while “ideas” are often discussed, considered by groups and more often implemented.

In 1991, we conducted the first cultural survey of our people. The results were disappointing, to say the least. The survey indicated there was low morale, a lack of trust in the company’s management and poor communications. This provided a wake-up call to management, and provided the impetus to move toward continuous process improvement — directed by our people

More to the point: Human invents email or ASCII art or FTP or the World Wide Web; almost immediately, sexually explicit stuff flows covertly from human to human. It may be just 0′s and 1′s, but it’s also the old in and out.

Naturally, as sophisticated people, we defend to the death the right of consenting adults to “consume” pornography (there’s an interesting verb), although we do not, of course, consume pornography ourselves. Indeed, on the basis of public statements, it is a mystery who actually consumes pornography. It’s a $15 billion a year business with no customers. Maybe it’s one guy with a lot of money. And he ain’t talkin’.

What is interesting about pornography, on the Web or anywhere else, is that it is almost instantly profitable. From a strictly commercial point of view, it is the ideal business.

Customers are undemanding, provided a certain minimal level of quality is maintained. Even if that level of quality falls to incredibly abysmal levels, customers are reluctant to complain, because complaint indicates consumption. And even though pornography is now widely available on any number of adult sites, it is still relatively pricey. Indeed, it is astonishingly expensive considering how cheap it is to produce, and how easy it is to recycle in various formats once it is produced.

Illustration: Charles Stubbs

Even better, since online pornography is strictly digital, you can sell it and still keep it. Indeed, you can sell it to many people at the same time-and still keep it. This is also true of (say) something like online journalism, but large numbers of people are not willing to punch in their credit card numbers and pay vast sums of money to read online journalism, no matter how witty or well-informed.

In some cases, you don’t even have to have a product except that which God gave you. There is on the Web a woman named Crystal. She will verrry slowly take off her clothes while you watch her. At the same time, she will type personalized messages to you and you alone-messages like “Hi, baby” or “Oooh, I like that.” Darned personal. And for the privilege of watching this, people will pay $5.96 a minute. And assuming Crystal does actually take off the few clothes that are hanging off of her, everyone is happy with the exchange. This is why capitalism is so amazing.

As hard-headed businesspersons, we must ask what we can learn from this. Why are costs so low? Why are customers so docile? Why is the profit margin so high? And the easy answer is: shame.

Pornography is a shame-based enterprise. People are ashamed that they consume it. They deeply believe that they should be charged a lot of money for it, because it is a deeply bad thing they are doing. They should be punished at the pocketbook. And if the production values are low or the product not quite what was advertised, well, it’s their own darn fault. They knew they shouldn’t be doing it. Momma told you not to come, as Three Dog Night once put it.

So the idea for the young and the avaricious is: Identify another shame-based commercial enterprise and promote it on the Web. This would seem to be difficult, because many shame-based enterprises are illegal-and rightly so.

But the Web is just information. It is a virtual world, and there are only a few crimes in cyberspace, unless and until the virtual leaks into the actual. So, let’s think for a minute. What about www.killyourspouse.com? You know you shouldn’t do it, you know you wouldn’t do it, but now you can do it without actually doing it.

Of course, you would experience shame when you logged on. You would need to pay for the privilege. And if it was tacky, what would you do? Sue? Ha ha ha. Same with any of a hundred other notions.

Naturally, as a human being and an upright citizen of the world, I deplore all of these ideas. I am merely serving as a catalyst, providing a theoretical framework for discussion.

Remember: You didn’t read it here, and it wasn’t me, and this is not my real name. Hi, baby. Oooh, I like that.