Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Management Woes



The pictures are of the Prius I drive. It has been in service less than 60 days. None of those marks were caused by me (there but for the grace……) The incident of hitting a curb two days ago by the driver I relieve ruined a tire and bent a rim.

My employer was recently acquired by a larger and allegedly better funded company. Merging the two corporate cultures isn't going well. As an example, the Prius I drive’s temporary registration expired 4/10/15. An extension isn't hard to obtain, nor terrible costly. Instead, all of us drivers are now scofflaws. We are assured the company will pay any tickets. Gee, that is comforting but having that on my driving record won’t help my personal insurance premiums.

I keep reminding myself I am a retired ringmaster and only a fill in monkey in this particular circus. It is hard to see sloppy practices and disorganization, things that don't cost much money to fix, and not say anything. Little things like no toner for the copy machine and no towels or toilet paper in the bathroom and twelve post’ems on the edges of a computer monitor are red flags to an old manager like me.

The folks who work full time and count on that paycheck to feed their families and pay their bills have my sympathy. The day to day uneasiness and questions of long term survival can’t be easy for those who can think. Like most firms, most of the workers are in condition “White”.

As lesson learned in the dim past from college business classes is workers will intuitively determine management’s dominant desires, regardless of management’s proclamations, and fill those dominant desires. The example is rude bank tellers who may get scolded for being rude but will be fired if their tills don't balance. On that basis, I can only conclude the management wants chaos and confusions as that is what they are getting. My conclusion? The top managers have their collective heads up their asses.

Am I a hypocrite for staying on the job? Don’t think so, as again, I'm a fill in temporary money in that traveling circus. I'm keeping my mouth firmly shut. The last thing I want at this stage of my life is to go back to herding cats, and they might try to promote me if I appear to be an answer to their problems.

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

I've got a few spares I can throw your way... :-) And good thing you're not 'counting' on the money... I don't think they're going to last very long.

Well Seasoned Fool said...

Trivial problems compared to what you face. We don't have any engineers.