Packing heat

It was a warm weekend and I did a long shift as a postal sorter for a random company. The other agency workers and I were greeted by a woman who had booked twice as many staff than were needed. She rambled at us unintelligibly for twenty seconds, all the time wearing earplugs so she couldn't hear herself or us, then assigned each of us to another staff member and walked off mumbling to herself. In hindsight, she could have been someone off the street, rather than anyone in charge.

I was put with a guy who was sorting letters in a specified order. It was quite a challenge to find and sort all the missing numbers between two hundred boxes of paper, but he had worked out a logical system that made sense and he taught it to me. It was a bit like reorganising a library, if libraries could be turned upside down a few times. Then I was left on my own to carry on the job, which I had only just learned how to do.

I wasn't aware of having met a manager yet, but, given no other information at all, I thought that copying the person who showed me how to do the job was a good plan. Things were going okay until someone came up to me and said I should put the letters in the boxes in any order so they could be counted. I said I was told to file them in order. He insisted I was wrong. Having just spent six hours sorting all the numbers carefully, I thought it was worth checking with the manager, but no one knew where the hell she was. I was inundated with various staff members telling me the job needed to be finished within the next two hours and that the numbers only had to be roughly within a thousand of the mark. Some said that the letters were to be shipped out in the morning, others didn't know, but all agreed that the job had to be done and dusted quickly.

I became aware at this point that the job itself was to put the letters in order again after someone else had muddled them up. Some of the envelopes had footprints on the them... A couple of other agency workers were assigned to the same job as me. They proceeded to randomly put letters in whichever box was closest. Papers were flung around and bent in the wrong places; a total contrast to the care I'd taken earlier with the first colleague dude. All those hours of cataloguing were instantly void, so I resigned myself to doing what I was repeatedly told by the hoards of 'people in charge'. Everything was stuffed in boxes and sealed. The sheets of paper detailing what was in each box were screwed up and thrown away, leaving no way to know where anything was.

That's when the manager, who I hadn't met until then, appeared out of the ether to check on the work. Of course, she wanted the letters in the right order because that was the only way to know what was in the boxes. Instead of trying to work out the best course of action, she had a go at us for mucking it up and went off in a huff. It's baffling to me for a manager to hide somewhere for several hours, leaving all her employees to work out blindly what they're meant to be doing and then leave it right to the end to check what's happening in her workplace. The agency workers seemed to get the blame whenever anything went wrong, and perhaps at times it was true, but the real fault seemed to be with the manager who couldn't find her own leg if her hands were tied to it.

I wonder how many hours are spent correcting mistakes resulting from mindless workers and incompetent managers. It seems mad to employ so many people for so many hours to do something that could have simply been done properly the first time. The sad is that not enough people care if they do a job right. Some people seem happy to muck up a job and do it all over again, as long as they're paid to do it and they have a bumbling boss to blame. Then again, for those hours, I was a cog in the malfunctioning machine, so perhaps I'm not entirely blameless.
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