Jeffy-san... Touching Lives at Toyota

Folks, we really are changing lives with this blog.

Well, perhaps we are affecting/annoying lives more than changing them. I was reminded of this when I checked the blog hits Monday morning. I know I have mentioned how shocked I am at the variety of international visitors we get to Skiving Off, and through MapLoco, I am able to get a visual representation of our international guests.

Here is the MapLoco screen I was greeted with on Monday. I have masked off most of it to reveal the one I want to call out....

TOYOTA!!!!!!!!!


You might think, "Big deal, Jeffy. You were in the auto industry for over 15 years, surely you have friends at Toyota who are following your BS rants?!?!?!" The reality is that I never worked on any Toyota stuff. I had Honda/Acura projects. I even had a Mazda program, but I never dealt with Toyota.

(Footnote up in the middle of the text: I was taught everything I know about Lean Manufacturing and TPS from Russ Scaffede and Art Smalley...so I am to Toyota what 99% of American black people are to Africa...it's sort of in my DNA, even if I have never been there.) CRAP!!!!! I'm digressing.

Anyway, I have to believe that our visitor from Toyota's world headquarters in Japan was here because of our Fat Tuesday blog entry. If you remember you will see that on February 24th we jump started a couple new Urban Legends right here on the blog. One of those involved a complete fabrication about Toyota fuel tank fires. It seems that in less than one week, some poor sap at Toyota's world headquarters was having to log onto my blog to find out what was being put out there to the general public.

How cool is that?

Now I realize there is no way our new "Burning Toyota" urban legend made it around the globe in less than a week. Instead, he was probably put onto it through a normal Google search for recalls and fires and what not. There are folks in the OEM safety offices who do nothing but monitor the news for the tiniest occurances in order to head off problems before they become big, nasty class action things.

Still, with the auto industry imploding, our little blog pulled at least one salaried employee in Japan away from productive work for at least a couple of minutes.

I can almost hear Clarence Odbody (AS2) whispering in my ear, "Each man's life touches so many others..."