Fit to be Tied

Have you noticed how many people there are working along side of you who are either stupid, ignorant or just wilfully lazy?

I am afraid that I am one of those people who cannot stand stupidity, incompetence or laziness.

I have no problem accepting that any given point in time someone may not know what to do or how to do it. I am happy to assist that person with training, mentoring, coaching and learning on the job.

I do however have a problem with people who fail to learn and keep making the same mistakes time after time. If the person is in some way intellectually challenged then I will adjust my expectations. However if they are university trained graduates who make claims to being relatively intelligent and continually demonstrate that their lecturers were at fault for ever giving them a passing grade then they make my blood boil.

I am particularly unhappy with people who are lazy.

People who expect to wander into the work place and spend most of their day chatting to other staff, surfing the web, reading and responding to their emails and otherwise enjoying the social activities of the work place. The notion that they have been hired to actually achieve some work outcomes seems only to emerge in discussions about their performance and when they seek promotion.

God help the supervisor who dares to suggest to a staff member that his/her work is unsatisfactory. The staff member immediately goes on stress leave and when sufficiently recovered, heads to the nearest union representative to accuse the manager of being a work place bully.

The world has gone mad. Accountability for one's work used to be a non sequiter. Managing to keep records, adhering to official policies and guidelines, ensuring that risk management protocols were followed, that products were tested before being issued into production, that quality guidelines were being followed were not things that anyone would ever question. The directions of management level staff were obeyed with only two questions being permitted, to ask whether the instruction was ethical or legal. If they were then it used to be "Yes boss" and a sincere attempt to get the work done.

I blame the changes in the education system. With the removal of corporal punishment and accusations being levelled against teachers who forcibly insist on maintaining order in their classrooms the rot set in. Never having been punished by their parents or their teachers, young people seem to have learnt that there are no consequences for doing exactly what they want to do when they want to do it. So when they come into the work place they do not expect it to be different.

By doing what they want when and how they want it they are merely expressing their individuality, their intellectual freedom and their creative side. People like this are a waste of space and my time.

I am fit to be tied.