A long time ago I worked briefly (2 days, or maybe 3 or 4 days if you count the orientation--I've managed to forget how interminably long that orientation seemed to last) for a "big box store." I was going to be a night stocker (not stalker)/cashier, which sounded like a good fit for me at the time, for a variety of reasons I may or may not enumerate here. The job paid minimum wage or thereabouts, so you would think the expectations of its performers would be, um, minimal.
"Minimal" has been redefined over the years, obviously.
Minimum-wage me was expected to average somewhere north of 100 "swipes" across the scanner per minute, for instance--again, don't remember exact numbers, but more than one swipe per second. Probably that is possible if someone trundles up a cart full of, say, canned mushrooms; if instead the trundled cart is full of kids' clothing, well, it gets a bit more complicated. Or impossible. Plus, as a night stocker/cashier, you were expected to be at restocking the department at the far northwest corner of the store while at the same time keeping an eye on the cash register at the southeast corner--and woe be unto you should you make the customer wait more than 22 seconds for you to arrive.
There ARE people who can do this. I wasn't one of them.
Sometime before that I worked as an office coordinator (glorified secretary) in the general pediatrics section at a children's hospital. I happened upon that job at a time when that particular section was being "studied" by some sort of "efficiency expert." The efficiency expert basically wandered around, probably with some sort of design or purpose although it was impossible to see from the "outside," taking notes and making checkmarks on a clipboard. After a few weeks I asked him how I was doing, checkmark-wise. "You actually come out pretty well," he said. Too-long conversations with physicians I worked with/for were marked as "work discussion," whether they were or weren't, for instance. A lot of what I considered "time wasters" were, in the statistician's view, necessary and valuable and, whatever. And I suppose there was a case to be made for that, from a purely human standpoint--I would have been able to "produce" more without the human interaction, but the human interaction, the time I spent talking to, or, more often, listening to the human beings with whom I worked probably made for a better workplace environment for all of us--and that in itself probably increased our "productivity."
It has been close to 20 years since that experience, and I no longer remember what, if any, recommendations the efficiency expert made. He was a consultant--a pigeon who flies in from more than 20 miles away, craps on stuff, then flies back on out, or something like that.
In my current job--medical transcription--we get these reports every week or two telling us how many "gross" lines per hour (and a lot of the operative notes really are gross) we've produced, compared to "net" lines per hour--that is, the lines we produced while actually typing/editing, not counting time we spent researching stuff or going to the bathroom or letting cats/dogs in/out the door, etc. The reports are essentially meaningless to us, because they never provide benchmarks to which we can compare ourselves (and if the company for which I work DID provide such benchmarks, I would automatically doubt them, would assume that their numbers were just pulled out of the air or the head of a corporate suit).
We've all become so "quantified." Any humanity to which we once clung has been "bean-counted" out of the workplace.
I understand the "need" or craving or whatever it is we seem to have for statistics, for numbers--but if we rely only on numbers, how can we quantify or qualify the human element, the "Human Touch" (my subject line is a line from the Bruce Springsteen song of that name, by the way)? The talking/listening I did with/for my co-workers/bosses at that children's hospital may not have shown up in the "bottom line" for the hospital or even for our particular clinic, but I think it mattered. That I can produce 250 lines an hour or whatever in my current job may also matter to someone's bottom line--but maybe I could do 300 if I didn't spend so much time researching/googling terms, or trying to catch an ESL ("English as a second language," you know, foreign) dictator's accent and trying to figure out what he MEANT to say, as opposed to what he actually DID say. Maybe the time I spent chatting about the day's heavy snow and the horrendous heating prices, mostly to fill time (not KILL time), with the elderly lady who was fishing with trembling hands and painstaking slowness for the few items in her cart killed my productivity stats for the two days I worked at that box store (in fact I know it did), but how much of "me" would it have killed NOT to spend the time with her?
At some point, doesn't humanity have to count for more than numbers?
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