oh brother...reminds me of Jan's shoe story.You are on a small island for pete's sake,how could one possibly get lost or confused? What a ding bat. How was my day? I'm still dealing with all the candidates for Congress,...need I say more?

Groaning ....it made me groan. It's as if somebody had the lleh scared out of them about making even the smallest decisions slightly out of line with protocol. Those are common sense decisions, but they feel so unempowered to act on common sense.

I went to a Mom and Pop cafe decades ago back in my hometown in Missouri and ordered a BLT. I asks if they'd please put a fried egg on that as well. The waitress assured me they couldn't do that. I was on my lunch hour from work and wasn't in the mood to monkey around so I asked her to please go ahead and get that BLT for me, but I'd also like to order an egg, over hard. I had to go through the usual litany of questions. No, I didn't want sausage or potatoes, no toast thanks anyway. She didn't have a problem with that. When both orders came, I took the top off my sandwich and slid the egg onto it. Duh.

At least once every summer I have to explain how you make iced coffee to some waitress. If it's not on the menu, they're flummoxed. josh

Suzy, that reminds me of a time that I went in to a little diner and told the waitress that I wanted just a hamburger patty, and a couple slices of tomato on some lettuce with a blob of mayo. She couldn't get her mind around that. So I ordered a hamburger without the bun. That was OK.

5 Easy Pieces.

So I called my gas company today and told them the pilot on my furnace was out ( happens every summer) and I got some guy about 600 miles away trying to "make sure I would be home between noon and 5 PM"...not really knowing that in this small town, the service man might travel at most 4 miles and will spend, at most 8 minutes lighting my pilot light and is likely sitting around waiting for a call....and when he arrives will greet me by name and know the problem already..
And it's all because people seem to have to follow a "recipe" rather than just doing what's sensible!
Coffee is hot...a hamburger is in a bun, an egg comes with bacon, and even an address ON a main highway must have directions from the main road!

Last week when I was cooking for that huge funeral lunch. Making egg salad for sandwiches and one of the eggs in the carton was broken. There was a bit of discussion on what to do with a broken egg. I said put it into the disposer! Another said...Oh no! We aren't supposed to put eggs into the disposer!
What had been said is "Don't put a bunch of egg shells down the disposer when making church breakfasts"...and 3 dozen egg shells got mixed into the protocole with one poor lone egg!
I dumped it into the disposer, turned it on, ran cold water and someone said.."OK! Let it be on your head then!"..LOL!
Have we all turned into people who can only follow written directions and have no brain?
Linda C

Yes. It's just like Night of the Living Dead with the pod people. I work with them all day. When I'm feeling charitable I call those nice folks Concrete Linears. ;-) Nearly every interaction starts with "I wasn't trained to do it that way." Pretty soon they'll all start screaming and pointing at the few of us who still have brain cells and can think outside the box. LOL!

I often must give directions to people who need to come to my office. My favorite caller was the lady who wanted her directions "with lefts and rights. I can't read street signs while I'm driving." Okay. So I ask where she will be coming from, since some starting point really is needed [my county is 64 square miles with thousands of roads in hundreds of communities]. Lady says, "from home." I ask what is her home's address. She answers, "I don't know; I can't read the street sign."

I am always a little ticked off at myself when I complain about people like this. I don't know the IQ of the person and I have no way of knowing whether or not they are capable of independent thought. However, in the case of the Power company representative, you would expect a certain degree of intelligence.

So I want to brag a little about people doing the best with what they have. We have a very active Retarded Citizens Assoc. here. They work quite hard to place the clients in positions where they can perform enough to earn some money for themselves.

We have a supermarket that hires many of them as stock and bag boys. Some of them have been there for years. One is a women that must be at least 4'6" tall. She is the most cheerful and happy person that you might ever meet. She greets everyone with a big smile and you know that she understands what it means to be happy and content. She is so short that she can't very well be used as a stock clerk as she couldn't reach the top shelves.

So, she gathers up the carts in the parking lot. Rain or shine, she's out there with a big smile doing her happy thing!! It's a treat to watch her enjoy herself. Maybe a big IQ isn't all that great after all!

I don't think this has to do with IQ as much as the omnipotent oberlord syndrome. Before the word "empowered" entered our workworld, one's very job might hinge on how minutia was performed. The bottom feeders of corporate and even not-so-corporate America daren't stray one millimeter from written or oral protocol, and making a personal decision deviating from the protocol could even spell termination. I lived next door to a lady who was terminated from a soft-serve custard franchise because she couldn't get the hang of making a proper curly-Que on the top of the cone.

The other factor is of course, there isn't hometown anything anymore. Our paper goes to an out of county publishing company, our power crews are also out of county anymore and go from a central location to all points of this section of the state to put out the emergencies. Cost saving, of course. Then there is the phone system where there is no option to speak to a human, ever.

It must differ from state to state,county to county. Here,when something is delivered or whatever,the person always asks for the nearest crossroads and that's it. The drivers have maps and cell phones and that's all they need.Once in a great while we'll get a call saying " we are sitting in the parking lot of the Gulf station..where are you from here?" We are in a rural area but 20 minutes from here you are in the Philly suburbs,so it isn't as if they didn't have to deal with all kinds of areas. I think a lot of the people on the phone are simply doing their jobs and know that they will get Hell if they don't..so either they get it from the customer or their boss.

And just think of all the people who are hired to write and develope those rules for how to operate! What are they called? Systems analysts? Does anyone think Bill Gates developed Microsoft by never deviating from the written rules?
For example, when Wally world gets those huge deliverys of plants that they put on their parking lot...that die there. I said something to someone with a hose one day, there were plants on the lot with the leaves hanging down....and he was watering the stuff in the hoop houses. He said, but they were just delivered yesterday. Apparantly the "rules" said that plants only needed to be watered every 2 days. So those in the hot sun were frying while those in the shade were being flooded.
Too many "rules" not enough thinking!
Linda C

That is exactly correct, Linda. Can you imagine how demeaning it is to those people who have to blindly follow them, knowing full well how rigid they are and the inevitable consequences? It speaks volumes.

I have quit more than one job because I wasn't supposed to think. Ever work for the government?? Hoo, boy!
Linda C

Hey, I work for government and I have to think a lot!

I used to love the travel abroad, people were so polite I didn't regret the little money I spent over in your Greece and Italy. Then Hey! listen a minute I thought there is a gold mine here, "'ave a good day" is a money spinner. I had a winner, Imagine that, surly underpaid sort of Americans pretending to be polite, "have a nice day" made me a fortune. the smiley face alone bought me a condo someplace. Surprisingly to me being non American It seemed to have even more power because it was phoney, hey what do I know, this is the American way. Oh, the correct answer is in the question "How much does it cost".

Lindac, please don't stereotype all us government employees. Please keep in mind that many of us are doctors and nurses who save lives on the battlefield every single day, aircraft pilots who fly combat mission, Infantry men who hunt out "bad guys" and sometimes die defending the values we American's hold dear. Values such as the First Amendment which gives us the right to speak freely.

In every organization one will find someone whose common sense is on the lean side. A larger organization, such as the government, will yield a higher percentage of those who are challenged.

I apologize for being overly sensitive to your comment, I know you are a wonderful person with a warm heart, but I've been losing close to a soldier a week for the past few months. This week, I lost 3 soldiers, and I'm having a hard time not feeling some guilt about it. After all, I'm the government employee who equips and trains them to go to war. I can only pray that their death wasn't caused by my lack of intelligence or common sense.

Maryanne, proud to be a civil servant for the past 25 years

((Maryanne))

After my own flip answer above, today I got to be one of the "mindless concrete linears" that I spoke of. (For the record, I truly did not mean specifically government workers.)

I am currently a city employee, and though I like to think that I'm on the ball at all times, today, well, not so much. I was helping (yet another) customer at the front counter "the way we got told to always do it" when I realized halfway through how utterly stupid it was. I stopped, looked up at the customer, and said, "You know, I was online chatting just last night about customer service people doing things the stupid way, and here I am." He started laughing, and admitted that he had been wondering about my IQ, and would I like to know how his usual account rep did it (not 'by the rules'). Yup. I sure would.

For a more balanced perspective, I'll post some recent interactions with people who've called in. It isn't always the customer service person who is clueless.

Having worked for both government and private companies now, there's good and bad workers everywhere. As customers, we all just remember the bizarre and stupid interactions the most. Besides, except for stalkers and weirdos, who says to themselves, "I sure do like calling the tax customer service line about my past due bills! That nice lady always helps me out." As customer service people, sometimes we are doomed before the phone even rings.

these are funny

I have a couple too, years ago I was being driven home from a fellowship weekend by a girl who lived in the next town to me. As we neared the exit from the motorway closest to my house I told her to take it, was told that she only knew how to get to my house from her house and doing it any other way would confuse her and she'd then wouldn't know how to get back to her house from mine. So I had to endure an extra 30 minutes while she drove to her house and then say 'look there's my house now I can drive you home.' I have only experienced claustophobia a few times in my life and that was one of them, mind you I don't think I've ever suffered such panic as experiencing her driving that weekend.

At my work there is a book of the procedures we are supposed to use, I work in a retail store. When serving a customer the procedure is supposed to go like this - on a piece of paper write up the prices of the items being purchased, add up manually then check adding with a calculator and then ring up the items on the register. I once described this method to a customer who couldn't believe it, until the customer waiting behind her told us that the procedure was actually in use at another of our stores and that is why she drives the half hour to our store because she is back home in less time than it takes to get served at the other store.

Sorry Maryanne...I forget that soldiers and sailors work for the government.
I was referring specifically to those who authorize millions to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity when a pencil will do. And to those who can be so rigid in following the book they forget to think.
Not to those who have to think on their feet every day.
Linda C