Real Customer Service Story

Let's say you have just parked your rental car. It's nothing fancy, just a Chevy Malibu, with an emergency brake on the floor. On the floor? How quaint. Let's just put the gear shift back on the steering column, shall we, and I'll buzz for the car-hop.

As you crush it to the floor, you notice there is no lever to pull it back up.

Let's just say that happened.

And after you look for the manual in the glove compartment, and try every button in obvious reach of the driver's seat (popping the hood, the trunk, and the gas door in the process), and after you call the rental desk ... The rental agent says, "There should be a release lever right above it." The only answer to that, even in the South is, "Yes, there really should be, shouldn't there?"

You, Dear Reader, might have other resources to draw from. You might call your partner in life -- the person you don't mind feeling completely ignorant in front of and can say anything.

The well-heeled spinster knows she must be willing to look ignorant in front of anyone. This is why the salesmen at Berglund Chevrolet will get a nice thank-you note, and Alamo rental will not.

Right foot on the main brake; step on the parking brake again.

Youth and Management

"...we may have to start planning careers that move downward instead of upward through time...Perhaps [one] should reach his peak of responsibility very early in his career and then expect to be moved downward or outward into simpler, more relaxing, kinds of jobs."

Harold J Leavitt, quoted in Alvin Toffler's Futureshock, 1970

The greatest supervisory responsibility I had was for a class of 52 college freshmen in my care 3 days a week for an hour -- during which time I was to teach them the basic reading comprehension and writing skills they would need to thrive in the Texas state university system. It was my first professional job. I was 22 years old and paid $600/month.

Four years later came managerial responsibility for about 20 paid staff and as many volunteers (some of whom overlapped), a $100,000 budget, capital improvement goals, campus committee requirements and jump-and-run responsibility whenever the President needed more folding chairs. And I had never been happier.

As I stand in staff meetings today (no one runs for chairs anymore is what I'm saying) and watch the young managers pound their laptops and posture for the Boss's attention, I think of this quote often. I don't know how young they are, but I know for sure our executive's top tier is younger than I am, and that one of them is in fact 28. The people I suspect (and know for certain) have been working longer than I have all have lower ranking or consulting positions, with the exception of the Boss himself.

In a knowledge-based economy, experience is the commodity. It has to be built the hard way, while young, when one has everything to gain and very little to lose; when the idea of reading trade magazines on the treadmill and a fat business book on vacation sound like excellent career-edge-building opportunities; and you haven't yet discovered that the Company will not keep you warm at night. Once today's knowledge worker does realize that (or makes her millions), there is an gentle dial-down to a consultative role. Mentor the next generation who are quite sure they are presenting ideas that have never been tried.

In higher ed, there was no model for this. The faculty had their adjunct/visiting/emeritis system, where a person ran a cycle of TA, team/junior faculty, professorial ranking and chairmanships, then as one aged, scaled back down to part-time work, research, then finally just being trotted out occasionally at awards banquets like Johnny Pesky. In administration, one worked one's way to a deanship, provost, perhaps a Presidency -- none of which had tenure, but all of which you hoped you could retire from if the stress didn't kill you.

In 1970, when Alvin Toffler predicted this shift in management skill would flip, he used the training of engineers as an example, only marginally anticipating that technology and information would be the driving force of the US economy in "the future." Industry and agriculture were economies rooted in history, which one excelled in over decades of practice. In the future, he pointed out, the most recently educated and trained will be the most desirable, because knowledge will become obsolete. The young must lead because their skills are current, and the mature must advise them based on their experience, because their training is no longer applicable.

Toffler also wrote,

Thus we find the emergence of a new kind of organization man -- a man who,despite his many affiliations, remains basically uncommitted to any rganization. He is willing to employ his skills and creative energies to solve problems with equipment provided by the organization, and within teporary groups established by it. But he does so only so long as the problems interest him. He is committed to his own career, his own fulfillment.

[gender bias forgiven; ladies didn't have their own credit cards yet]

Something to Tide You Over

Life happens. Until I can get a block of stuff posted... here's what my frontal lobe is working on.

Songs played by "classic hits" stations disproportionately to their place in the rock canon
1 - Sister Golden Hair
2 - Rhiannon
3 - Small Town
4 - Little Pink Houses
5 - I Can Feel it Comin' in the Air [heard twice today already]
6 - Rocket Man
7 - Take it to the Limit
8 - Tiny Dancer
9 - Takin it to the Streets
10 - Wonderful Tonight [seriously, playing right now as I type this]

Songs we could stand a little more of on these same stations, but which never get any play
1 - Fire Down Below
2 - Raspberry Beret
3 - Captain Fantastic
4 - Everyday People
5 - Magical Mystery Tour
6 - Senses Working Overtime
7 - Life During wartime
8 - Love is the Seventh Wave
9 - China Grove
10 - (your call)

On a Stack O' Bibles

The dump in this little town is not so much a dump as a transfer station, and by frugal Yankee standards not much of a station at that. In some towns, the books are stacked and sorted, clothing and toys are displayed in freestanding buildings and the food container bins are covered to minimze infesttaion. Here by the dam, the recycling center is clean and attended, but limited in its pickin's of free stuff. You can take one bucket of sand, and as much as you want from the book and magazine bin.

Some visits yield more than others. I watch out for interesting finds for friends, old textbooks, the occasional first edition. I once scored a 15 vol. set of Dickens. I began rescuing the Bibles because it made me sad to see them there. I didn't really have a plan; I just couldn't walk away and leave them to the pulper. (Let me add at this point that I would also rescue a Koran if I came across one. Let me also add that you wouldn't likely find a Koran in a dump.)

So the situation now is that I have about a dozen Bibles of all ages, translations, and sizes in a box in my garage. I still have no plan.

A chaplain friend, involved in prison ministry, advises that it is more difficult to donate books to prisons than you might think. You see, I could have soaked the pages with some illicit substance, designed to either intoxicate or poison the inmates and staff. I am reluctant to give them to a shelter (unless it is run by the Salvation Army, who declare their motives right there in their name) because it is hard enough to get into a shelter without having to literally sell a little piece of your soul to do so. I also want to be sure that the recipient is going to use them, and not send them back to the trash.

I thought about taking them to hotels and leaving them in the drawers, which made me wonder how the Gideons manage to get away with that behavior, and why hasn't anyone written a book about that? (one site calculates over 100 Bibles placed every minute, but my experience is, that just like NASCAR fans, an actual Gideon is never found in one's personal circle.)

If you don't click that Gideon link, you will miss the sentence, "The manager of the Central Hotel ...asked traveling salesmen ...to share a room in a crowded hotel, which was hosting a lumbermen’s convention."

Say what you want about Christians (and none of you ever hold back, either way -- I should really get you all together), they have embraced the Internet in all stripes, and it only took a few clicks to find bf.org, The Bible Foundation. (searching bf.org will also turn up a lot of Bigfoot stories, which is such a delicious juxtaposition it ought to be its own post.) The Bible Foundation will gladly take your stack o' Bibles. They do not guarantee they are NOT soaking them in peyote, but I will have to trust they are not. I have asked them for some info. I'll let you kow how that turns out.

Let's Play the Pyramid

today's category: Crazy Things the Focus Group Said

Skittles should come in ice cream flavors

I'm so lazy I need my PB&J to be pre-made and frozen

We have no interest in standardizing car doors

What if everything was dispensed as a strip? No, a wipe! or a strip. Ok, a strip.

Oo, yeh, make it really expensive. But it only brews one cup at a time

Well, in my house, it's just the kids and all the toilet paper they use. What can you do about that?

I wish the TV Guide were bigger

I wish my cookies were smaller

We will buy anything served by a woman with big boobs. Or just boobs.

Put chicken nuggets on corn, on potatoes, and cover the whole thing in gravy and cheese. We would totally eat that.