Giggles

Didn't want to forget today's case of the giggles and the reminder of the gift I was given of making myself laugh, quite easily. Hopefully, I'll start to make a point of jotting these instances down, but I'm not going to jinx myself and will now just shut up and share...

My department at work has been joyfully force-feeding us Lean concepts and instead of tiring out our gag reflexes, most of us have become efficiency cum queens. I've grasped onto the fact that Lean's origins lie in Japan and have taken it upon myself to become my team's de facto Tokyo tourist guide. It started with being juvenile and looking up some Japanese slang (like aho = dumbass), but now it's becoming ingrained in my random thoughts... ultimately leading up to today's giggles.

An important Lean concept is "kaizen" (pronounced k-eye-zen) which loosely means "change for good", but was beginning to get confused and becoming synonymous with large-scale events designed to incorporate rapid change in large, inefficient processes. Well that was all cleared up today when it was explained that "kaizen" is any change that moves us toward an improvement, large or small.

So, leading up to the reason for my self-pleasin' and touching on my self-appointed role as Tokyo tourist guide, I now make a point to blurt out random Lean/Japanese terms to 1. try to be a team player and 2. entertain myself... and now, without further ado...

Top Reasons to Yell Out/proclaim Lean/Japanese Terms, as well as a possible term (in no particular order):

- Scream "KAIZEN" when changing any routine, such as putting socks on first or suddenly wiping back to front.

- Call everyone by their "Japanese" name by adding "-san" to folk's names (extra credit for bowing and slapping "Most Honorable" in front).

- Study some rudimentary Japanese and make lame rhymes out of it to confuse those not in the joke, which is probably most everyone, i.e. "ichi, ne, san - KAIZEN!!!" or "1, 2, 3 - Change for Good!!!".

- While doing said rudimentary linguistic studying, think out loud often.

- While it's probably elementary and campy, I can almost always make myself laugh by combining common foreign terms with stereotypical themes from that culture, such as doing lame kung-fu motions and mumbling foreign car manufacturers (extra credit for mimicking overdubbed movies where words don't match mouth movements).

Any and all suggestions that get you laughing in the middle of a team meeting are welcome and encouraged.