Bruno

Discussion (2) ¬

1. 
   Peter Rogan

   November 6, 2018 at 1:14 pm | #

   …and now comes the hard part: Assessing blame and applying remedies.

   It isn’t better when you find yourself a culprit, forgetting to tell your people how urgent the job was. You quickly can get sucked into micromanagement here, taking on all the small decisions as well as the big ones. Something the Navy calls ‘driving the bridge.’ It’s no remedy at all. The carrier USS Enterprise had such a captain some years ago, telling everybody how to do their jobs. The helmsman saw the warning light on the shoal, and presumed the Captain did, too, and would tell him to turn when he was good and ready. But the Captain never did. Multi million-dollar hull repairs and for what? For a Captain who had lost trust in his people but not his own competency, when it should have been the other way around.

   But somebody else could have slipped up. Then comes the test of how to prevent a repeat without losing an employee or their respect. Another tightrope to walk. But you walk it or quit the circus. And few people want to leave even this low level of show biz voluntarily, even for cause.
2. 
   Jeffrey Nonken

   November 6, 2018 at 7:31 pm | #

   I sometimes get the opposite when I buy from eBay. The seller promises they’ll send it overnight sooper excess — which they do. After waiting two weeks before they ship it.

   Occasionally they’ll just lie outright and claim “expedited shipping”. Maybe I just don’t know what that means because I think it means “we’ll make it happen really soon” and apparently what they think it means is, well, what I said last paragraph — we’ll wait a week or so before we get around to shipping it Priority Mail.

   Back to the comic, though, it seems like I’ve seen this happen IRL — we break our backs getting a rush job done, run it down to shipping before the cutoff, just so it can get sent out by yak cart; the customer complains, we investigate, and then… well, this country frowns on death by torture, so I have to endure the idiot’s continued existence.

   Good thing we saved ten bucks on the shipping, right? Because we’re going to need it to pay off the late clause. Or the law suit.