The Incompetent Worker

I no doubt refer to myself with this title.

Here I am, sat in the cold confines of a working hotel castle (the room that used to be a gym I'm reliably informed by an alcoholic alumini guest a few weeks ago) not knowing exactly what to do.  Instead I thought I'd use my time to write about how frustrating it is being on the other side of the counter.

My mother yesterday was irrate when she contacted a company regarding our boiler breaking down.  She was affronted that the person who was coming out to do the annual check was unable to do it because there was a fault with the machine rather than the routine check he expected.  Instead he told her that an engineer will be with us shortly who will know more about what to do with the problem.  My mother couldn't comprehend why the guy that does the routine checks and is meant to pick out suspected faults, couldn't manage a little leak.  And this got me thinking.  We expect such a high level of competency from businesses and we're annoyed when they can't do the job they're being paid to do.  Then this got me worried, because no matter what job I do, no matter how long I've been at it, there's always something that I don't know, something that I need someone else to help with. 

For instance, innocently covering a lunch time shift the other day, I was asked a question that I'd spent the last month trying to work out an answer to - what do I do if a customer asks for a print.  All I got from everyone I asked was 'play it by ear'.  And that day, 10 minutes before the end of my shift someone wanted a print.  Nightmare.  This caused 10 minutes of humming and harring and 'would it be possible to come back in 10 minutes time?'.  The queue was mounting up and the woman behind this customer looked much put out by the wait.  This simply is not fair.  I wasn't given the information to deal with the customer no matter what length I went to even before the situation arose.  And plus I'm only casual staff popping in every so often so it's quite hard to keep a grasp of things.  In another scenario, I thought my life had been made easier by a till update on items instead of spending 2 minutes endlessly searching criteria just so someone can have a 50p postcard only to find out the option on the til wanted me to charge £2.50!! "Dear me, all this for one postcard!" exclaimed an old man, but all I could do was plaster a sympathetic smile on my face and wait for the till to get a move on.  This is what technology has brought us, reliant on machines to the point that when it goes wrong we're actually helpless.  Forget about robots it's already controlling us.  Working in a customer environment all we seem to get is complaints and 'why can't you just answer my question' - it's simply because I don't know or we don't know, or we're not even paid to do that.

Therefore, to end my rant, I have utter sympathy with the man that my mother spent the rest of the evening blasting about that he can't do his job.  We are, afterall, only human.  Next time a retailer has problems ringing up your product or they don't have the answer to your question, relax, you were in that position once.