Month: November 2016

To follow up to my last post, where I showed off my progress so far on our Metaphor Machines.

So, to recap…..

What is a Metaphor Machine?

So, a Metaphor Machine is a Rube Goldberg Machine, compressed into a small machine. Each aspect of said Machine is a metaphor for something.

What Revolution Did You Study?

We studied the Meiji Restoration, which will be explained in the video we made later on.

Making the machine was quite an adventure. It all started with getting sorted into groups, and studying our revolution. That went well, and we started to do a time line

The top line shows the cause and consequences of each key event in the revolution. The second line would show the steampunk aesthetic to it. The third shows how it relates in Crane Brinton’s Theory. We were doing well…….

Until the news hit that we had all of our information wrong, that is.

Yeah, not happy about that. We had to redo our entire timeline. But it turned out for the better, as the revolution made a lot more sense now.

Then it got to building it. It took three weeks to work on, starting with the base, to the floors, to the little details. But, in all, it turned out great

So….. what now? Explain in detail how the building went, show off each little bit and how it’s a metaphor?

Hah, I’m too lazy to do that. Let’s watch a video instead

That was the emotional roller coaster of our Metaphor Machine!

I hoped you enjoyed this post, the video, blah blah blah

Read ya later!

Ruby

My titles these days are slacking. I was gonna write a pun about bread but I though you’d find it stale…. Okay sorry about my pun-pernickles. I need to stop

Anyways, this blog post is about grade 9 bring your kid to work day. Now Ruby, you might be asking. What does that have to do with bread? Well, my dad works for Cobs Bread

The main Cobs Bread office for North America that is. I was pretty excited to go there, to say the least. I mean…. it’s bread. Food, I am happy around food.

So the day started at 7:45, when we left the house. The traffic was terrible, it was dark and rainy. The start of a bad horror movie type of weather

So we got to work around 8:00. My dad showed me around, introduced me to everyone. He works with nice people. We sat down in his office, blah blah blah emails

Above, my dad (the world’s largest ham)

That’s when he started to explain what he does. He showed me the sales for this week, how they’re doing (I feel like releasing them isn’t a good idea). They have their own website, only accessible to anyone who works at Cobs. It shows their sales, bakeries, franchisees, etc. The sales are quite complicated. They start with their annual budget, then it sort of goes through a metaphorical funnel. Parts of sales go into different things. Repairs, ingredients, maintenance, so on and so forth.

Cobs is actually doing a promotion for maple scrolls vs cinnamon buns. It looks like this:

It looks like the US presidential race. With pasteries! The marketing team actually didn’t mean for that to happen. But I suppose it’s fitting for the time. By the way, if you’re interested in voting, vote here

He then started talking about the bakeries. They’re trying to open one up in Fort McMurray, so he took me through the process. It’s like buying a house, really. He checks the price of how much it costs to put in everything, how much allowance the landlord has given. He subtracts that from to total price, which reduces the cost. Then he checks the agreements, and if he’s happy he sends it off the the landlord. About 8-9 months afterwards, they open up a new bakery.

I looked around his office, and noticed the Corporate Citizens Award on his desk. Apparentally they won that three years ago. My dad ‘forgot’ to put it in the trophy case out front

The trophy my dad possibly stole

He also talked to me about franchising. Apparentally thousands of people want to franchise for Cobs, hundreds get interviewed, but in the end only a few start to go into training and franchise.

Franchising, pretty much, is when you get someone else to run a bakery. 7% of the sales that the franchisees make for the bakeries goes to the office. They have to do serious background checks, such as if the franchisees have recently sued someone, they need to make sure they don’t do that often so that Cobs doesn’t get sued.

Fun Fact: Cobs originally started in Australia and was called Bakers Delight

It still goes on today, hence why my dad sometimes has to go to Australia for business.

My dad also does a lot of communication. He links in with everyone and gets every that they’re doing to connect to help the business running.

Now, his job sounds very fun, right?

Wrong

In his words; “75% of my day is spent on the phone, 25% is spent doing emails”. Fun, yeah… Though he does have a nice view of the skytrain, and Columbia College.

So the day went on. Somewhere around 11:00, one of the marketing ladies asked me to do a job. I had to fill out a survey, to see if it was user friendly. That took about ten minutes, and I got to see what goes into being a franchisee, like money, time, dedication. It takes a lot, trust me.

I also got to help with a brochure to get people interested in franchising a bakery in Tsawwassen. I was given a draft, that I was aloud to write on to see what could be changed. Very work.

I really enjoyed this. It was fun to help with marketing, and to find out what my dad really does. It was kinda boring to sit through phone calls and meetings, but my dad thinks so too (even if he’s not supposed to).

It really surprised me how much my dad actually does. He communicates, he helps with finances, real estate, and franchisees. I didn’t think he did that much.

I don’t think I’d consider my dad’s job as something that I would enjoy doing, as it’s a lot of sitting at a desk with numbers and emails, which I don’t really enjoy. Not that it’s dull…. but it’s kinda dull. Sorry pops.

Well, that was my day at my dad’s work. It wasn’t too

crummy

Okay I’ll stop now.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed reading

Read ya later,

Ruby