I Surprise Myself With My Answer and What I Put On My Bread.
Here's how it's supposed to work in America, and as far as I'm concerned, in good organizations all over the world. If an order to do something unambiguously senseless comes from on high, you tell your boss. The following things might happen:
1) Your boss understands and either countermands the order or takes over investigating the source of the command upwards in the chain of command.
2) Your boss explains that there are reasons previously unknown to you that necessitate the order. You do it.
3) Your boss is sympathetic but powerless. Escalate your complaint to the next level up and repeat.
One of these variants always happened to me in the States. Living here I have had to add two more:
4) Your boss understands, but for corrupt or political reasons tells you to do it anyway.
5) You can't find your boss.
What do you do in these situations? I've run across both. In the case of (4), I swallowed it and did what I was told. In the case of (5), I ignored the order, because if I can't find them, then I figure they can't find me to make sure I'm doing what I'm told.
But I surprised even myself with the way I responded to a problem in my school the other day. We have a beautiful brand new computer lab consisting of a projection monitor with pull-down screen, color printer and scanner, and six networked computers. (My and my counterpart's classroom got taken to host it.) To be honest, no one uses it. It's kept locked all the time and no one is sure who knows the password to the computers. The director, for a while, was putting tape across the door at night to see if people were going in and out, and I got in caused a real uproar, featuring real yelling and panic, because I went in there to use the copy machine, which hadn't been moved yet. (They have since taken my key.)
I went to ask a vice-principal for money to take my English-language debate team to Petropavlosk. (A summary of our conversation: "Anything you ask!" she said. "I need $60." "Oh, that's a lot," she said.) After we finished our business, she sighed. "Our school is in a lot of trouble," she said. What's the matter, I asked. "It's the computer lab in room 17," she said. "Do you want to see?" Of course I did. I imagined that something was broken or a kid had put a pirogi in a cd drive or something. But as we entered the classroom, everything looked normal. The vice-principal opened a book. "This is the plan we got," she said, and showed me a map of the room as it was, with the desks facing the projection screen. "And this is the Singaporean system," (this is actually what she said) and showed me a map with the desks facing the wall.
So evidently, they were supposed to have set up the classroom according to the "Singaporean system", even though the documents they were sent were different. The school will have to do this at its own expense, and since they cut every computer wire to the exact centimeter and secure it along its entire length for some reason (which is, by the way, the exact opposite of how they approach plumbing), moving things around will actually be quite a lot of work. "Why is it so important that you move it?" I asked. "Because this layout is dangerous for your health!" she said.
Perhaps they just need more cactuses. (A shout out to the Uralsk volunteers who first noticed the cactus-computer correlation.) But jokes aside, this order is patently ridiculous. In America I would have followed the above rubric, believing that somewhere along the line there must be a micommunication, that an educated, accomplished human being couldn't actually issue a statment like that. But my actual reaction surprised me. After making it clear that I thought whoever had issued this order wasn't worth listening to, I advised, "Look, just sit on it. Don't do anything. If you have to, make up some guy in some department that was supposed to give you some receipt and force them to try to track him down. Make them make a big deal out of it, and it'll all pass."
It wasn't until an hour after I said this that I realized what had happened to me. This kind of reaction to an incompetent bureaucracy doesn't help anything; it just perpetuates the fundamental problem. To recommend this course of action indicates a lack of faith in the fact that human reason can overcome poor organization. I recommended this sincerely. I have lost my faith. I have become a cynic. Or at least I have regarding the Kazakhstan education system.
In what I believe to be a fundamentally not completely unrelated development, I now love to eat bread spread with sour cream instead of butter. I crave it.
I am becoming part of Kazakhstan, and I leave in only four months.
1) Your boss understands and either countermands the order or takes over investigating the source of the command upwards in the chain of command.
2) Your boss explains that there are reasons previously unknown to you that necessitate the order. You do it.
3) Your boss is sympathetic but powerless. Escalate your complaint to the next level up and repeat.
One of these variants always happened to me in the States. Living here I have had to add two more:
4) Your boss understands, but for corrupt or political reasons tells you to do it anyway.
5) You can't find your boss.
What do you do in these situations? I've run across both. In the case of (4), I swallowed it and did what I was told. In the case of (5), I ignored the order, because if I can't find them, then I figure they can't find me to make sure I'm doing what I'm told.
But I surprised even myself with the way I responded to a problem in my school the other day. We have a beautiful brand new computer lab consisting of a projection monitor with pull-down screen, color printer and scanner, and six networked computers. (My and my counterpart's classroom got taken to host it.) To be honest, no one uses it. It's kept locked all the time and no one is sure who knows the password to the computers. The director, for a while, was putting tape across the door at night to see if people were going in and out, and I got in caused a real uproar, featuring real yelling and panic, because I went in there to use the copy machine, which hadn't been moved yet. (They have since taken my key.)
I went to ask a vice-principal for money to take my English-language debate team to Petropavlosk. (A summary of our conversation: "Anything you ask!" she said. "I need $60." "Oh, that's a lot," she said.) After we finished our business, she sighed. "Our school is in a lot of trouble," she said. What's the matter, I asked. "It's the computer lab in room 17," she said. "Do you want to see?" Of course I did. I imagined that something was broken or a kid had put a pirogi in a cd drive or something. But as we entered the classroom, everything looked normal. The vice-principal opened a book. "This is the plan we got," she said, and showed me a map of the room as it was, with the desks facing the projection screen. "And this is the Singaporean system," (this is actually what she said) and showed me a map with the desks facing the wall.
So evidently, they were supposed to have set up the classroom according to the "Singaporean system", even though the documents they were sent were different. The school will have to do this at its own expense, and since they cut every computer wire to the exact centimeter and secure it along its entire length for some reason (which is, by the way, the exact opposite of how they approach plumbing), moving things around will actually be quite a lot of work. "Why is it so important that you move it?" I asked. "Because this layout is dangerous for your health!" she said.
Perhaps they just need more cactuses. (A shout out to the Uralsk volunteers who first noticed the cactus-computer correlation.) But jokes aside, this order is patently ridiculous. In America I would have followed the above rubric, believing that somewhere along the line there must be a micommunication, that an educated, accomplished human being couldn't actually issue a statment like that. But my actual reaction surprised me. After making it clear that I thought whoever had issued this order wasn't worth listening to, I advised, "Look, just sit on it. Don't do anything. If you have to, make up some guy in some department that was supposed to give you some receipt and force them to try to track him down. Make them make a big deal out of it, and it'll all pass."
It wasn't until an hour after I said this that I realized what had happened to me. This kind of reaction to an incompetent bureaucracy doesn't help anything; it just perpetuates the fundamental problem. To recommend this course of action indicates a lack of faith in the fact that human reason can overcome poor organization. I recommended this sincerely. I have lost my faith. I have become a cynic. Or at least I have regarding the Kazakhstan education system.
In what I believe to be a fundamentally not completely unrelated development, I now love to eat bread spread with sour cream instead of butter. I crave it.
I am becoming part of Kazakhstan, and I leave in only four months.
6 Comments:
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, "My little boy is growing up."
The next thing you're going to tell me, Sandy, is that we all have to keep growing up,... for the rest of our lives. What a crock!
You all remember the line from that Bob Dylan song, "Ah, but I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now." There's a case to be made for growing back down before we grow up.
I guess that means the key is not to die at a low point, or something.
I don't think you've gotten cynical, Ryan, I think you were naive before. Your American possibilities missed out on: 4) Your boss is the one who issued the senseless order, because he happens to be incompetent.
Actually, this has usually happened to me as a subset of 3 - someone at the top of the chain of command issued the order.
At my last place of employment, when hit with a senseless request, I reacted exactly as you did. Just don't do it - they'll never remember. If they do, give them some plausible beaurecratic reason (completely made up, of course) as to why you're on it, but it hasn't happened yet. Then do your own thing, secure in the knowledge it is the correct thing to do.
If you end up in the corporate world, your Kazak training will serve you well.
Aha. This is additional evidence of a theory of mine about the age 27. (Ryan , by my count, you should be about 27 on your next birthday). At age 27 I quit flying airplanes upside down for a living, bought a house, and had a kid. But I also noticed that I had found the ability to recognize when there was something that I couldn't change - or that really wasn't worth the effort to try to change, based on the problems it was causing. When I encountered a dysfunctional system that I couldn't make work - I'd just figure out how to make it not be too inconvienient for me. I think maybe 27 is the age when a person actually becomes what we call an "adult." That is when you learn that you don't have the time or energy to change EVERYTHING (since, frankly, nearly everything needs changing), and you start to select your fights more carefully.
Maybe it's because I'm only 24 and not quite privvy to the depth of the "adult" portion of this string (or because my only job experience is in corporate R&D, where such demands are perhaps so commonplace I don't even regard them as extraordinary), but I must say that the sour cream on bread disturbs me far more than the computer situation. Unfathomable! Yet I can't resist going down to the fridge to try it...
Post a Comment
<< Home