I Swear, Officer, I'm Only Casing This Joint For My OM Class.

I am in an Operations Management course in school. Last night we were learning about project management. The terminology, the skills, the way things can be tied together or broken down into small units. We learned things like the Critical Path, earliest start, earliest finish, latest start, latest finish, slack time, blah blah blah blah blah. As interesting as that stuff may or may not be to some people, I need to know it for my degree program, if for no other reason. The best part is how we learned about this stuff. Our professor split us up into groups of three and we applied the terminology and techniques that a project manager uses to perform a jewelry store heist. She didn't teach us with a lecture, she didn't give us a general description of these terms or techniques beforehand. She just handed out a diagram of the store, a list of activities that were involved in the robbery process and set us to work.

The good news is that if I fail at accounting I know that I can lead a team of highly skilled safe-crackers and alarm-specialists into a jewelry store. If the statistical data that we used was correct, my team had a 99.99999999999999% chance of success. And, hell, if we failed we could at least go out guns drawn, in a "blaze of glory."*

*That was for you Steph. Bon Jovi is my hero.