It just kind of popped in my head this morning while I was making an attempt to not fall asleep in the shower... I remembered back to my days of my first post-college job. I was working as a systems engineer at a Lockheed Martin facility in Orlando, Florida.

Since I was still living in Daytona Beach at the time, I had a massive commute of 150 miles round trip to work and back each day. Aside from my usual 40 hour per week work load, I was also doing management training. That meant that I was also taking masters degree classes at the University of Central Florida after work. So, back then, my days were about 12 hours long at a minimum. I even slept at my desk from time to time.

I spent a lot of time working on homework and management project papers in the evenings at Lockheed Martin. Around 8:00 or 8:30 at night, I'd be the only person around amongst the vast sea of cubicles that dominated the development area I worked in. I'd take ten minute breaks and stroll up and down the rows of cubicles, reading the comics and looking at the pictures that people had posted around their cubes.

One evening, I was taking one of those breaks when I wandered past a sign with moveable letters that had apparently been part of a tour at one point. Since Lockheed had so many military contracts, it was very common to have colonels and even one or two star generals touring through the work areas to see how the Army's weapon development budget was being spent. This sign's message was pretty simple:

Now, you and I both know that a burnt-out engineer isn't going to leave a sign with moveable letters alone when no one is around to stop him. I started shuffling around the letters and after about 20 minutes, I came up with the following:

I even used all the letters.

There're a few important points here. First off, "LMT" is the NASDAQ ticker symbol for Lockheed Martin. At the time I fiddled with the sign, the company's stock was at an all time low. This was great for me, since my retirement fund was composed mostly of stock. So, I was getting a ton of stock for the amount of money I was investing.

The old timers that had been putting stock in their retirement plans for the past 15 years, however, were getting kinda nervous. Talk about the dropping stock value, possible corporate take-overs, and even layoffs were common watercooler banter.

Anyway, after messing with the sign, I worked for perhaps another hour and then started the long drive home.

When I got into work the next day, I found out that the sign had been discovered. My supervising manager didn't even know the sign had been changed, but my manager's manager heard about it and thought it was one of the funniest things he'd even seen. Most employees looked at the sign, snickered, and then went on with their work. It wasn't a real show-stopper at work, but my handiwork was silently appreciated by quite a few co-workers.

Upper management, however, didn't think it was funny at all. They smelled dissention in the ranks... possibly someone from Raytheon or Boeing that snuck in somehow for the sole purpose of lowering morale. For some reason, upper management tends to come up with odd conspiracy ideas like that. Anyway, they decided to take immediate action to quell the impending uprising. They sent out a memo. Not just any memo, though... the memo stated that there would be a company wide pizza party to raise morale. I was told by several other employees, peons and managers alike, that the memo was a direct result of the sign getting changed around.

Now, if your stock is tanking, you probably shouldn't spend $20,000 of your overhead budget on pizza because some yahoo fiddled with a sign. But what do I know? I had only been doing management for a year or two by that point, and the folks comprising upper management had been managers since the days when flogging employees was still considered acceptable business practice.

Moral of the Story:
"The squeaky wheel gets the greasy pizza."