Memory Lame
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Pride in incompetence
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I was just too young when I was young, or maybe too gullible, or something...
Have you ever noticed though, that less and less people take pride in their work anymore? In fact, some people I deal with seem to revel in their incompetence at their job, a kind of "look, I'm so fuggen useless and I'm still making that asshole PAY me for my services!" kind of pride at yet another job fucked up...
Why I reckon it *could* be me, is that when I was growing up, it seemed to me that people actually gave a shit about their jobs. Maybe I just perceived them as 'grown-ups' and knew that grown-ups were practically perfect in every way, maybe it just seemed to my young mind that these grown-ups were doing things that I considered unimportant and thus it made me think that in order to perform such unimportant tasks, they had to take some strange pride in their work. But the fact remains that I still feel that work ethics have changed tremendously in the last thirty years.
When I was 11, I met my first incompetent. She was my friend's mum, and she worked checkout at our local grocery store. I used to amuse myself by racing the cash register, and one day I noticed a miscount of around a dollar in the store's favour. Being a polite little lad, I was very polite in pointing it out, and also noting that since the amount corresponded to a particular item's price, that it was most likely that this item had been rung up twice. No scanners back then, it was all manual punch in the price...
Thing is, she knew my mum. and she complained to mum about me, said I was a 'little smart-ass'... I ask you - what sort of internal reasoning led her to believe that her fuck-up was due to me being a smart-ass? How convinced of her own competence did she have to be?
I read somewhere that more incompetent people are most convinced of their own competence than more competent ones. Because they are so bad at what they do, they don't realise that there's a lot of improvement to be made in their performance, while a more competent person is more aware of what their duties entail and more critical of themselves because they *know* they could improve a lot.
I believe that, implicitiy and completely...
When I was 20, I went into a stereo store to buy myself a reasonable stereo system. I discussed what I wanted with the salesdroid, and then pointed out two turntables which I thought were to my specs. Salsedroid immediately ignored both of those and pointed to several other, more expensive, and actually *lower* spec, units. He was selling to me based on price and had no idea of specs whatsoever!
After asking him once more to stick to my specs and not to the catalogue prices and getting nowhere, I'd had enough of him. Back then, you expected the salesperson to know at least *something* about the product they were selling...
I asked to see the store manager, explained that I had the then not inconsiderable sum of $5,000 in my pocket in cash to buy my stereo equipment, and that his store had just lost that sale because of the incompetence of that salesperson. I bid goodbye and only walked back in once more a few days later (after buying my gear at a store where the staff knew something about their products) to see what had happened. I was gratified that the salesperson had apparently been sent packing. Managers took $5,000 seriously in those days...
Thing is, for those days, that was still considered inexcusable, offensive, and unprofessional.
Nowadays, it's the fashion...
On a similar vein, more recently I was shopping for a secondhand laptop and walked into one of those computer trader shops, and finally found a laptop in my price range, but... so little RAM, such a low-powered CPU... It wouldn't run Windows 98, which is what I wanted it for, so I asked the salesdroid if they would upgrade the RAM for me so it wouldn't swap out all the time, and mentioned that I needed it to run W98.
'Oh it'll run W98 fine' was his breezy reply, 'it just depends on how much of Windows you install."
Pardon? You mean I can install a cut-down version of the W98 kernel? Can you tell me how? You mean save hard drive space not RAM, don't you?
'Ah, you just uncheck some stuff when you install it..."
By that stage I'd had enough, and said, in a voice loud enough to carry all over the store, that I was going somewhere else to spend a few grand, somewhere where the staff knew anything at all about what they were selling. The manager came over not to apologise, but to try and convince me that his salesperson was right, that any dickhead knew that if you installed less of the 'fruit' as he called it, it would use less 'memory.' At that point I just shook my head, called the manager a name I'd rather not repeat here, and walked out.
More? My next door neighbout works as a delivery truck driver for a whitegoods outlet. He has a diesel 1.5 ton truck, and every morning I hear him crank and crank and crank that truck, because he doesn't know enough about that truck to know that you should hold the key on preheat for a minute before starting, so that it won't have to supply current to both the glowplug and the starter... If it was just a few weeks I'd believe that his preheat had burnt out and he was waiting on spare parts, but it's every workday morning for a year now, so it's obvious he's either just clueless, or else he doesn't give a shit.
I believe the latter actually, because a few times he's come home with deliveries still in the back of the truck, canvas-covered rear wide open to thieves and often to the rain, and I wonder why the store keeps him on...
Went to a restaurant with three friends, checked in at the counter, and then sat there for about 15 minutes without anyone bringing us a menu or asking us if we wanted drinks to begin with. Quite a ritzy restaurant, it charged a premium price and was supposedly one of the best new venues in the locality. After 15 minutes I used the mobile phone to ring the manager and ask if there was a chance of being served, the reply? 'We're not busy, you would be served as soon as you arrived. When were you thinking of coming?'
I informed him that we'd been sitting at table 16 for almost 20 minutes now without any contact, and there was a profuse rush of apologies, but still no waiter.
About five more minutes elapsed before one did arrive, so we placed our orders and waited some more. By this stage some 30 - 35 minutes had elapsed since we first came in and were asked to take a seat. None of us were badly dressed, nor were we rowdy or otherwise objectionable, after all, we wanted our dinner. About seven of around thirty tables were filled by that stage, absolutely not a busy evening.
No excuse for it, really. But that's not the end of it...
About halfway through dinner, my friend's coffee ran out and they flagged a passing waiter and asked for another cup. We finished the meal and were still waiting for that coffee. Two more of us felt the need for a post-prandial coffee so we flagged down another waiter, asked again for the first coffee, and asked that another two also be brought out. Waiters were walking by at the rate of one every few minutes, and we waited for about ten minutes before flagging down another waiter. Yes, he'd check into it, yes, he'd make sure our coffees arrived as soon as possible.
Another ten minutes and we got up to leave. At the register we noticed that we'd been charged for those three extra coffees, and asked to see the manager. Explained to him why we had decided to go to a coffee shop instead of waiting for almost 30 minutes for a coffee after the poor evening's service we'd already had. And he went and asked his waiters who said they'd never received any orders for extra coffee! (Yeap those same extra coffees which were on the tab, that's the ones...)
When we pointed this out, he said he had to back his staff and the extra coffees must have been entered 'in error...' At that point we'd all had enough, and I'm glad to say that this particular restaurant, which was a new venture, went broke and was taken over by new management in its first year. Reviews were shocking and mostly singled out the lackadaisical service. (ted, added in 2023 from memory. Sorry, still not divulging the name of the place or the manager, the place had an African country as the theme is all I'll say.)
That points out something to me. The manager had the chance to smooth things over and keep four regular customers, because the food was indeed excellent. Instead, he chose to support his staff, staff which cost him more and more clientele, more and more bad word of mouth, and less and less income.
And yes, we did tell everyone we knew about how the place had been, and probably cost him another 100 clients among our circles of friends, and I daresay that every other dinner party that his incompetent staff drove away from the restaurant also badmouthed the restaurant to *their* friends...
Here's someone who not only was incompetent, he also seemingly looked for and fully supported incompetence in his staff because he himself knew so little about how a competent restaurant was run...
So is it me, or is ignorance winning the race?
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. I am shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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