I have always assumed that the people around me were honest and competent and been more concerned about making sure that I was efficient in my field than checking the performance of others. But recently I have come across such a large number of incompetent people that I am beginning to wonder if this is divine intervention to prove that the Peter Principle is indeed true (“In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence”) or if I have been very unlucky.
What bothers me the most is not that people make mistakes, we all make them, but it is their refusal to admit it and the lies to cover up, that get to me. From the computer store clerk who takes my brand new laptop to change a memory sick and returns five minutes later saying it has stopped working…just like that!…. Like a bad spirit has flown over their work bench and targeted MY machine…. Come ON! It has been a week….and they still have not fixed it!
Or the car dealership that diagnoses a small trouble and then suddenly discovers $2000.00 worth of repair….These are the same people who called to say my car was ready…and when I got there to pick it up, the car was up on a lift, with the hood open, inside a locked garage… nobody had they key….and they tried to blame me for getting their instructions wrong….Fortunately I still had the recorded phone message!!! Hooray for technology!
What about all the times I have been told: “the tickets have been sent”, when they have not…. Today was the winner: Because time was running out and I was fed up with the “tickets are in the mail” routine, I insisted they fax them to me….I got them at two minutes to five. By the time I had sifted through them and discovered the main page was missing…their offices had closed….When I finally got a hold of someone they had the nerve to argue with me that I must be blind to not see it…only to admit 20 minutes later that the aforementioned page was never sent in the first place because ” it is a new system…yada yadda yadda” . They did not even HAVE the page…after I had requested it specifically everyday for a week…
What about the store clerk who claimed that the lamp I like was not lit because all 6 bulbs had burnt out….and when asked if they could be replaced, answered that it could take a week or two…. This is so close to those jokes: How many *** does it take to change a light bulb? And after being assured they had six more such lamps in stock, I now find out that they only have the one on display…. but at least it IS now lit up and it only took two days!….
If you don’t know the answer just SAY SO! If you screwed up, fess up and fix it quickly.
To finish the week off, I checked my bank balance during my lunch break, and discovered an unexplained $1600.00 charge!!! More bull to sort… Fun and games!