that new question of how to get employees to do the work you want

[DeaconBlues (imported)]

They should have FIRED the BITCH...

Y'know, why is it that businesses today only pay attention to cash flow? Is it because that is the only thing for which they are held responsible? Y'know, working conditions are never considered until cash flow is affected, then they are demoted OR fired because of the cash flow problem.

Then, they bring another in to take over, and once cash flow is established the same thing happens all over again.

Isn't it remarkable that in the end the problem is laid upon employees if no manager can keep cash flow adequate, the problem becomes the workers and the business if it does not fail is re-located to a place where they can find a new bunch of suckers... er.. employees who have not had their attitudes or work ethics DESTROYED by bad management practices.

Then, the whole mess starts all over again.

If you do not want to relocate every 5 -7 years or so, NEVER get into management. If you only desire to be an employee, prepare to work 7 to 12 jobs during your working career.

This reminds me so much of something I heard just a month of two ago while listening to a "webcast" talk show (The Tom Leykis Show), the host was talking about the recent collapse of "Hostess" bakeries. The public news release blamed it all on the bakery employees union insisting on higher and higher wage and benefits.... The Hostess "Twinkie" was the number one snack food cake in the country, it was not exactly healthy but it was a tasty treat and it was the NUMBER ONE SNAKE CAKE IN THE COUNTRY, yet the Hostess corporation could not stay alive and make profits with several products that clearly dominated their market... Sounds like LOUSY MANAGEMENT, not lousy employees.

I really don't understand too much about business and all that, but as the talk show host explained the Hostess corporation collapse (and many other corporation collapses), it was caused by insanely ambitious "buy outs" of all the competition, merger and merger and merger, so that they could have a monopoly of the market, with the only surviving competitors being relatively "small fry" businesses (like the "Little Debbie" snack cake company). That way, their lousy management and marketing can go on and survive for a while because they have little real completion (they bought up all the real competition), only now they have incurred such a huge debt because they barrowed so much to buy out their competition, that all money they make has to go for "debt servicing" all those loans. The final phase is when all the executives grab the biggest "golden parachutes" they can, the BLAME THE WORKFORCE for the huge failure that in fact they clearly caused themselves...

Is anyone else sick and tired of hearing about how everything is just so wrong with the greedy, lazy, undereducated and incompetent American worker? I know I am sick and tired of hearing it. Seems to me that EVERY business leader is making up every sort of excuse they can to "outsource" and re-locate to anywhere else. Ultimately, the American middle class is fucked to the point that there is no more middle class able to buy products, even if they are produced in China. And of course, it is always and completely the fault of the lazy and greedy American workers, the nerve of those selfish pigs! (I am being sarcastic here for those to stupid to recognize it.) The next thing you know they will be expecting affordable health care! Shameless thieves and ruffians!

[StefanIsMe (imported)]

I get all those except sometimes #4 can slip through the cracks.

My company used to be AMAZING, but lately, it's become pretty crappy.

They buy new equipment with cash from profits constantly, which is excellent, but then they scrimp in the STUPIDEST ways.

GET THIS....

They bought our department a new colater/folder/stitcher machine for about $200,000.00 bucks. Sweet machine, I love it. We've had it for two years. They do all scheduled maintenance, buy all proper parts.

BUT:

They gave me some old, ratty pair of scissors from the Supervisor's desk that had been kicking around for years.

It cut fine guage cotton thread for shit. I'd borrow the big Aster sewing machine operator's scissors, but they are 200 feet away; can't do that constantly, my "little" machine has just as many threads as theirs.

I begged for a YEAR for a good pair. My supervisor would agree, and do nothing.

My one shithead supervisor (you know, the clueless idiot employed by every company), after a year, rolled his eyes in frustration when I mentioned it again and fumbled in his drawer, handed me an even worst beat-up piece of garbage, and actually thought I'd be grateful.

Unbelievable.

So, I took a page from our Fearless Leader's Book of Attitude to fix the problem.

I waited until I had a job our head manager was all anxious about; he was hovering around, waiting for the sewn books.

I stopped the machine and started fumbling around, cursing with my head in the machine. I was just cutting the sewing head threads, for the fuck of it, and making sure he could see me.

He comes and asks what's up, and I show him the scissors the company gave me originally (floppy, loose joint, beat up) and the one that Shitty Supervisor had just given me.

I told him I have never been able to cut thread properly for the year we've owned the machine, and yes, I have submitted requisitions (I simply opened my email SENT folder and searched "scissors" and showed him the EIGHT email requests I've sent).

Strangely enough, the next day I had a catalogue of industrial supplies with two freakin' pages of scissors, handed to me by the other supervisor, who asked me if I could please select what I thought we needed for my machine. My three selections arrived soon after.

[Riverwind (imported)]

I once bought a memory stick for my PC at work because it was so damn slow, it embarrassed the management so bad they reimbursed me that day.

Yes, I know what you mean.

River

[Arab Nights (imported)]

Deacon Blues and StefanIsMe's posts are only further evidence that we have reached the limit of human competence.

The are business leaders whom you almost cannot pay too much: the eternally mentioned Steve Jobs, Alan Mulally at Ford, Louis Gerstner at IBM, etc. Having said that, I can easily name that many and more who are a joke and give executive pay and privilege a bad name. As Stefan points out, incompetence extends up and down the command chain. That obseration might include him and me if we had any power.

The way politics, business and society in general is organized, there are way more positions than there are competent people.

[JesusA (imported)]

The latest issue of Mental Floss has a Q&A on jobs that seems to fit here:

Your job may not be perfect, but at least your boss never sends you into sewers.

Q , I hate my boss. I hate my cubicle. I hate my coworkers. I hate the forced bonding at the company retreats. Help, please! --AMY IN GALVESTON

A: That does sounds unpleasant. It might be time for a career switch, and I have some suggestions, though a few require time travel.

Perhaps you should apply to be a tosher, a Victorian-era occupation that involved wandering through sewers to look for trinkets. It would certainly get you out of that cubicle. Or you could apprentice with the night soil man, who schlepped excrement from privies to the edge of town.

Or, if you're feeling ambitious, there's the Groom of the Stool, the lucky fellow who made a career of cleaning King Henry VIII's royal rear!

What I'm saying is: Many jobs today are terrible and soul-crushing. But relatively speaking, they are much less soul-crushing (and smelly) than the jobs of yesteryear.

I've got plenty more to make you feel better. Moving from the scatological to the grisly, there are the bone pickers of the Choctaw tribe: Men and women with long fingernails who were tasked with plucking corpses clean of flesh. According to the delightfully bleak book The Worst Jobs in History by Tony Robinson, the dullest job ever could have belonged to treadmill walkers, the folks who trudged all day without access to iTunes or Gatorade back when treadmills were used to mill grain.

The saddest? Definitely the pleureuses of 18th-century French theater, who were paid to weep during dramas.

And I'm not even counting all the hundreds of modern jobs that are probably worse than yours. Just try being a player for the Washington Generals, the athletes who are paid to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters (and who I hope get free Paxil prescriptions). My professional advice? Unless your gig involves packs of fans booing and laughing at you while you work, keep your day job.

mentalfloss.com March/April 2013, p. 22

[Arab Nights (imported)]

Thank you, Jesus, for putting our thoroughly misable modern existence in historical context. And may we all bring it to an end by dying like a poet (fall into a privy and drown).

[JesusA (imported)]

I've met Paolo's boss and seen his work environment. Paolo might actually be happier as a tosher than he is in his current situation....

[A-1 (imported)]

The damned part of the country Paolo and I live in... well, if they gave America an enema, they'd HAVE to stick the tip right here...

[Paolo]

Amen!

Never mind the fact that my boss is a hoarder. There's junk piled up all over this place. My office/lab may look like a disaster area, but I know what all the stuff is, where it all is, and what it all does.

[Dave (imported)]

There was a time when I would keep a "disaster area" office without order and memorize the place of everything. Suddenly one day, I discovered order and neatness and a clean desk and now, I won't go back to the messiness and the disorder...