Don’t Try This at Work

By Bobby Bush
It’s the season to be thankful. I have a lot to be thankful for, and I intend to tell you about it…as soon as I kvetch some more about substandard management practices. It’s what my fans expect, and it’s what I live for.

In past columns I’ve told you some things about the utter and complete absence of integrity in the world of cell phone refurbishment. Here’s how the business works: a client (a reseller, or perhaps an insurance company that promises a free replacement if a claimant’s phone is lost, stolen or broken but doesn’t promise that the replacement will be new or that it will be the same brand the claimant had) is buying rebuilt phones from Refurbisher A. Refurbisher B calls the client and offers to beat Refurbisher A’s price by $5 per 1,000 units. The client says, “I’ll call you back in an hour,” and dumps Refurbisher A, who then puts all his temps back on the street as the client calls Refurbisher B to close the deal.

The refurbishers aren’t the only ones playing the game. After Refurbisher B gets the contract, they call Temp Firm A, the one they’ve been doing business with, to send them a bunch more workers. After they get them, Temp Firm B calls up Refurbisher B and tells him he can beat Temp Firm A’s price by $1 per worker per week. Refurbisher B says (wait for it), “I’ll call you back in an hour.” Temp Firm A’s temps land on the street, no matter how well they’ve been doing their jobs.

Later, the owner of Refurbisher B is talking to the owner of Refurbisher A in their country club’s locker room. He says, “I’m going to have to find me another temp firm. The guys they’ve been sending me lately don’t seem to have even heard of the concept of loyalty.”

Some refurbishers are nastier than others, though, and one day I met the one I’m convinced is the grand champion of them all. On a Friday morning at 9:30, a temp firm called and told me I needed to go for an interview right away. It was a short drive from my house, so I jumped into my interview clothes and arrived there at 10:30. There were several people, but only three of us were applying to be electronics technicians. We filled out our paperwork and were told they would see us one at a time in a few minutes. I sat there and caught up on things with another applicant with whom I had worked back when cell phones were actually being manufactured from scratch in this country. At 1:30 he gave up and went to retrieve his toddler from day care, which was about 50 miles away. At 2:15 a guard asked, “You mean they still haven’t seen you yet?” I nodded. He replied, “Man, I don’t think I would have stayed this long.” I told him, “By now I just have to know how long they’re going to keep me waiting; otherwise I’ll always wonder.”

At 2:45 the chief engineer invited me in. He spent about 20 minutes asking me questions that were basically designed to make sure I knew how much smarter he was than me, and then he introduced me to the production manager. The first words out of the boss’s mouth were, “Man, I wish I could fire every one of my third-shift techs and get some more.” I asked him why. He responded, “Because I want four phones per hour out of them and every last one of them is doing one-and-a-half.”

I never feel the urge to hit anyone, but I suddenly wanted to take this guy out in the alley and give him an NYPD Blue-style tuneup. With a tensed jaw I asked him, “Sir, if a teacher gives a test and every student in class fails, do you blame the students or the teacher?” He allowed as how in this case it was the students, because he’d tried giving them soldering classes, brought in experts, and even sent some of them to a manufacturer for training. I knew one thing he hadn’t tried, though, because the HR lady had tipped me off about it when she handed me the application forms five hours earlier. I queried, “Have you tried letting each tech specialize in a single model or brand, or do you expect them to fix anything that lands on their benches?” Just as she told me, they hadn’t tried it.

I asked him how many models they worked on. He told me: 29. Each tech was expected to be able to efficiently repair any of 29 models from five or six different manufacturers at any time? He confirmed it. I made polite talk to close the interview and told him I would think about it, getting out of there at 4 PM with just enough time to race home, grab my guitar, and slog through the traffic to my band’s standing Friday night engagement. Over three hours of playing onstage that night, I broke four strings.

OK. I told you I was going to talk about thankfulness, and I am thankful—thankful that my economic situation at that moment was not so desperate that I had to go back and kiss up to that fellow to convince him to hire me for a position at which I knew I couldn’t survive more than a month. (I’m always good, but seldom fast.) Right after that, the day job I’ve been at for the past two years came open, and now I’m doing better. The other day I was reflecting on how this decade hasn’t been very kind to me financially, and the heckler who lives inside my brain kicked me, saying, “How can you say that, Bobby? You’ve got several friends who lost their houses.” For once, the heckler was right. Even though I’m earning less than half what I was at the start of the century, my wife works in healthcare, so I haven’t had to visit the pawnshops (yet), and one can tell by looking that I haven’t missed any meals.

I know saying one can always find something to be thankful for is horribly trite, and suggesting that the exercise of finding that something will make one feel better is even more hackneyed, but clichés often become clichés because they’re true. Things are tough all over, but I really think taking a few moments to consider how much worse it could be will help. Give it a try.