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Ratio Pi

Ratio Pi was one of the younger members of the Ratio family and was tasked with general housekeeping chores. He was the annoying robot who tweeted at Virgin thousands of times until they agreed to fix our broadband. Going on to spend his days checking the status and addresses of our modems, resetting them if there were any issues. He was also the stalwart disciplinarian who curated the office's Spotify blacklist; skipping Bieber, Little Mix and any other artist who got played more than six times in a single 24 hour period.

Problem

We realised the team were spending an inordinate amount of time on general housekeeping tasks when they could have been using that time to make a real impact on business metrics.

Some of the annoying tasks that cropped up a lot were going down two flights of stairs to a basement server room just to reset our internet modem, all because of a dodgy Virgin connection. Something Virgin was not forthcoming about fixing.

Other distractions included deciding who should perform the next tea round and battling over who the current SONOS DJ was.

We calculated a loss of 1 working day (within 1 work week) to “housekeeping” for one member of staff which looked like nothing but lost £’s.

Solution

We decided enough was enough and set about building a quippy little robot to live on our Raspberry Pi that would take care of all the time-consuming tasks around the office, so we didn’t have to.

We also asked him to decide who should make the teas when everyone got a bit of thirst on. He would pick a victim and display their fate on a designated wallboard in the office.

Results

Virgin finally agreed to fix our dodgy connection after repeatedly being publicly called out about it every day for a month.

After measuring staff satisfaction pre and post “blacklist”, satisfaction went up by a factor of ~20% and in general the office was more “vibey”.

Nobody argued with Pi about the result of a tea round, resulting in 389% more hot beverages consumed.

Pi has since retired from the firm with honours and ...we like to think... enjoying a tea of his own somewhere. We miss you buddy 😢.

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