Opie Taylor Visits Corporate America - Oct. 2002
I am fortunate to have been working in Irving, Texas since 1986 for a major healthcare corporation as a graphic designer/photographer/animator/videographer... "jack-of-all-media". You might think that working at a government regulated manufacturing facility wouldn't allow for too many wildly creative projects, but you have to allow for some fun in any line of work or you'll go crazy or die of boredom.
Many of my in-house customers show up at my door when they need something entertaining and unusual. On one occasion I was asked to create a Hollywood Oscar themed recognition presentation for the quality assurance department. The customer wanted a movie-related award title for each of the 36 site Operating Procedures. The actual procedures had titles like "Supplier Evaluation and Control" and "Engineering Change Process". Now, try to weave some humor and creativity into subjects like that. Well, the right side of my brain was strained for a while but we ended up having a lot of laughs with this presentation. What I did was present the made-up award name along with a sound clip or music and the audience would try to guess which actual procedure it referred to. As an example, The "Robert Deniro 'You Talking To Me?!' Award" (accompanied by a sound clip of Deniro's famous line) went to procedure Q14 - Complaint Handling Processes. But I saved the best for last and with it fulfilled my career in multimedia. I thought that Procedure DA-18 - Product Inspection, Acceptance and Release sounded alot like a policing type procedure. Well, this was such a setup for me, TAGS fan that I am. At this facility, operating procedures are referred to as OP's for short. Every time I hear someone talking about OP number such and such, I picture little Ronny Howard and have always wanted to use a picture of him in an "OP" presentation. Well, here was my chance. The search was on. I clicked through the many TAGS websites for Opie pictures and to my amazement found a photo of Opie holding a Deputy Sheriff's badge. How perfect! I titled the last award of the presentation "The Ron Howard Deputy OP award" and played the TAGS theme music.