Remember the two hawks and the squirrel while I was Bowhunting?

[Captain]

Y'all may remember one morning while I was Bowhunting I had two hawks fly in on a bunch of squirrels under my feeder and all of them got away except for one squirrel that was in the "hole" under the feeder. I gave play by play that morning of the two hawks waiting him out until he finally made a break for it and lost the battle....
I posted a picture that day I made from my phone in the stand that morning. It was a little hard to make out due to lighting and trying to zoom in etc...
I was going through my trail camera photos today and the trail camera made a picture about the same time as I did. And it is a lot clearer....
You can see the Hawk sitting on the top of the feeder much better in the Trail Cam picture. The second hawk was out of frame in a tree to the right.
Phone picture in low light
IMG_4644.jpg
Trail cam picture much better
WGI_0185.JPG
That was a neat thing to watch.
Take Care, Captain

[Captain]

I just noticed that was on September the 11th and the time was just about the time the planes hit. WOW.
I remember hunting till 9 that day. As we were leaving my buddy was locking the gate to piece of property we were hunting and I was sitting in the truck waiting on him. I cut the radio on and heard the news. I remember telling him that someone had flown a plane into the building in NY. We both were thinking a small plane. We drove to a little country store where we usually ate Breakfast and they had the TV on. Man that was a shock...

[Arty]

I was sitting in a "six sigma" class in Lynchburg. It started at 8am.
We had a break and someone came in and told us.
Class ended abruptly about 30 minutes later when someone came in and said a second plane had hit.

I sat in front of the tv for 3 days non stop after that.....

Except to go buy 10 American flags and hang them everywhere I could find to hang one.

One place I particular that I hung a flag was on the post of my mailbox. I was out there about lunch time the day after the attack. Had my flag and pole and a bunch of heavy duty zip ties.
I was about half way done when a sheriff patrol car came driving by. We lived on a main state road at the time so he was moving at a pretty good clip. About a quarter mile away he saw me on the shoulder of the road and saw the flag. He slowed down a little. Then slowed a little more. Then more. By the time he got up to me he was almost at a stop. He looked at me, then the flag, and he stopped completely, rolled down his window, and saluted the flag. That moved me BIG time, and I looked at him, then the flag, and saluted as well.
He sat there a second, then drove off. I finished fastening the flag to the mailbox post.

We never said a word to each other. Didn't need to. We both knew.

[BarryBobPosthole]

Oh brother. Six sigma. You a black belt?

BKB

[Arty]

Indeed I am.
Or used to be. The company I am with now doesn't do that shit.
THANK GOD.

When I joined that company (GE) and I heard about people being green belt and black belt... I seriously thought for a few days, "they offer karate here?!??!" I'd never heard of it before that.


Oh. By the way posty. The Cards can NOT leave a guy on base in the first inning and win this! Wtf!?!?

[BarryBobPosthole]

Been telling them that since yesterday myself. They look less star struck tonight.

I work on a lot of six sigma projects and have for a couple years. I was offered a black belt spot but chose to stay On the business side. Its a frustrating process. I've seen some projects that go well, but most never seem to ever get completed. Its like everything else, it depends on the person running it.

BKB

[Arty]

I completed my "project". But looking back it was something that any base line manager could / SHOULD have already done themselves.
Literally was just a clusterfuck situation that just needed sorting out.

[Thumper]

9/11 ... I was still self-employed. I was up planning my day with the tv on when all hell broke loose. I was GLUED to the tv. Cleared my calendar and stayed in front of the tv for days ... never leaving the house. I was so moved (all sorts of feelings ... sadness as well as pissed off) that I actually called (REALLY, I DID!) the local Army recruiter, after the dust settled, to see if there was any way I could re-enlist. I was told I was "too old". I was actually going to drop my life as I knew it and go shoot as many rag-head, camel jockey, sand-niggers I could find! Man-o-man, Lynn said she'd never seen me so pissed off!

[Captain]

Didn't y'all just fly in from TeeDubs like he day before the event??? You, Bucky, Posthole????

Sent from my iPhone using Forum Runner

[Niner]

Ah yes... Six Sigma. I believe that is Latin for "more meetings than work being done".

I USED to work for a division of Generous Electric back in the '90s when that crap first became a popular "management tool". It basically was, I will believe to my dying day, the reason our whole division was sold off "in the dark of the night".

Back then GE expected a 10% growth per YEAR. We'd been well exceeding that....until Welch launched SS. The following year we made something like 8 or 9% growth.....And we were sold off to one of our competitors.

I still have my GE stocks and tiny retirement package. Hoping SOMEDAY those stocks will be worth something again.

[BarryBobPosthole]

Yep, Captain I want to say the three of us came back through Minneapolis from Terry's on September 10th, which they say is about the time the guys who did it came through Minneapolis as well.

Niner, you provided a pretty apt description of six sigma. I have a good friend who worked for Motorola for several years and she says the exact same thing. The thing is, I am all for data driven business decisions where it makes sense. And six sigma is just a process for gathering, analyzing, and coming up with action plans based on it. And there's nothing wrong with adding some science to the data analysis either, which quite obviously (since its so popular amongst upper management) any kind of statistical analysis seems to look like magic to MBAs. But I can tell you one thing that I have learned from my 34+ years of experience that no six sigma guru has ever been able to come up with a response for: I can take three or four experienced people who actually do the job and in about an hour come up with a better or equal plan of action for resolving a particular problem. It takes a six sigma team about six months to get to the Improve or Control phase of a project and that's if they're lucky. It seems to me that six sigma is most often used in companies where the institutional knowledge isn't trusted enough to run a business. and that's where management deludes itself into believing that it's them and not institutional knowledge (i.e. the PEOPLE whowork there) that is actually responsible for the business results.

And that's my two cents on that bullshit.

BKB

[Thumper]

Yeppers, I got home early on 9/11 (I wish I'd kept my ticket stubs to frame). I guess we were just a few hours short of being stuck in Canuckia for quite a while. I remember they ended all air travel and border crossings. Heck, so many people were stranded at the airports, you couldn't find an available rental car ANYWHERE. Travelers who didn't even know each other were going in together on a rental to get home.

My work schedule was VERY flexible back then. I ONLY worked commercial contract accounts and there was no set schedule ... I just had to get them done by the end of the month. I'd already returned from quite a few days off and was planning to work that night after a nice nap. I think I went for about three days straight with no sleep and didn't get a bit of work done.