Organizational consistency
One of the factors that determines the success of an organization is the dedication and attention to detail demonstratd by its employees. Not just those that are out in the public eye, but also the countless peons who slave away in soulless cubicle mazes, generally with no hope of ever getting recognized or paid a decent wage. More often than not, it’s these folks who determine whether your ship sinks or swims.
So if you’ve looked at the players and coaches for the Houston Texans and wondered why they’ve never been able to make it to the playoffs (or even just have a winning season) in seven years of mediocre existence, the answer is clear: they’re phoning it in from the bottom up.
Now, I’m not a Houston Texans fan myself. I don’t dislike them necessarily; I just don’t care either way. As a kid, I kept up with the Oilers, but by and large my allegiances have always been with the Denver Broncos. Some dude paying way too much money to get a team back in town and then building a huge, sterile concrete tomb with a roof that moves back and forth isn’t going to change that.
Anyhoo, a couple of weeks ago I somehow ended up on the Houston Texans 2009 Uniform Schedule page. I don’t know how exactly. Sometimes I just wander out the internet with no real purpose and see what I can find.
What I found on that particular page was an amazing testament to half-assedness. A shrine to worker bee indifference. A shining example of someone being given an assignment they thought was dumb and not even halfway paying attention to the crap they were shoveling out just to keep the man off their back.
I don’t really see the point in posting a schedule of what your football team is going to wear each week, but if you’re going to do it, isn’t it worth doing correctly? Shouldn’t everything your organization put out for public consumption go through some sort of quality check process?
If you’re the Houston Texans, apparently not.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2009 Houston Texans Uniform Schedule:
For those of you who lost count along the way, that’s 36 errors up there. Pictures of wrong teams. Wrong helmets. Wrong jerseys. Wrong pants. The whole thing is an exercise in abject failure.
At least somebody at the Texans office eventually noticed. The page was corrected about a week ago and they even took the time to photoshop a couple of pics so they’d work. Maybe there’s hope for the Texans after all.
My wife pointed this out as something that I must read. Given that there were a lot of pictures – this was right up my intellectual alley. At any rate – the numerous errors you pointed out got me looking for even more. Soon I noticed that the Houston helmet seemed to just be a flipped image instead of the right logo. Upon further investigation – that was actually correct. (I learn something every day)
BUT!! The position of the helmets was totally inconsistent. Sometimes the ‘home’ helmet was on the left instead of the right. Assuming that was an error – it would add 10 MORE errors to the post.
But even for a team like Houston – this seemed like an incomprehensible amount of errors. It’s as if a dog or a very intelligent hamster was making the updates. So, I took a look at the 2008 Houston schedule and lo and behold – it just is a partially updated page. The opponent helmets matched the 2008 opponents and the uniform combinations seemed to be what was used last year. However, the dates of the games and the text opponents are the 2009 information.
Still does not speak well of the quality control before hitting the ‘publish’ button.
Well done, Joe. The inconsistent helmet positioning brings the total number of errors to 46.