Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Efficiency as a form of insubordination

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Mike Peterson Published: August 9, 2012 1 minute 3 comments

If you haven't been to "Retail" lately, you're probably out of the loop.

Here's the necessary update: Marla is not only back from maternity leave but has been promoted to store manager, which might be good except that her former boss, Stuart, is now district manager but has set up his office in the local store, so she's still right under his thumb, while, in her absence, he put Josh in her place and so she has now inherited an assistant she doesn't like and whom she wouldn't have hired.

Got it?

If you're like most people who have worked in the real world, you recognize it all, but for the gentler or more shell-shocked, it may be a little too close to your own experience. "Retail" is to "Blondie" as "Willie and Joe" is to "Beetle Bailey," and you may find a cartoon boss like JC Dithers easier to stomach than the more hyper-realistic soul-suckers in this strip.

Cooper, however, has established himself as a sort of "untouchable" character, and such people do exist in the business world: They do low-level-but-essential tasks that nobody else wants, and that most people do very badly, which forces management to treat them with kid gloves, knowing that it's better to put up with an efficient pain in the ass than to get rid of them and hire a more charming incompetent.

There are far more Joshes than Coopers in the world, which is what makes it fun to watch Cooper drive management crazy. He does what we've all wanted to do, only he does it without getting fired.

Meanwhile, today's strip brought up two anecdotes:

1. About 25 years ago, my then-brother-in-law got a job on a garbage truck. He didn't last long, but he lasted long enough to learn this valuable lesson: Each truck had an assigned route each day, which they were required to service in the requisite seven-and-a-half hours (aka, "eight hour day").

If you worked quickly and efficiently, you could do it in less than that, in which case you would be sent out to help a slower crew on their route, which meant a much larger amount of toting and hauling by five o'clock.

The trick was to establish a pace that would get you through your route without catching hell for going overtime but without finishing early enough to be sent out for more.

There are less stinky ways to learn this, and ways that involve a great deal less actual heavy lifting, but it is a universal and we must all come to it at some point in our professional lives. 

2. About a century ago, my grandfather was a soon-to-be-college-freshman working for the summer at the iron mines on the Upper Peninsula as a laborer.

The small carts of ore would emerge from the mine and dump their loads, then return for more. It was necessary to shovel the ore from this spot to the spot where it would await loading into the gondola cars, which was the task assigned to my grandfather and his partner.

"If we finish early, can we go home?" he asked, and the foreman looked at the massive pile and laughed.

"Yeah, if you finish early, you can go home," he agreed.

Now, granted that automation soon made a challenge unlikely, and that, later, the collapse of the industry made it impossible, but that day my grandfather and his buddy set a record that still stands in Ironwood for the most ore moved by a two-man shovel crew in a single shift.

Mind you, I suspect the "go home early" deal would not have received approval a second time.

Things haven't changed that much in the past 100 years.