Efficiency is good, right? Companies of all kinds tout their efficiency. Logistics companies get things delivered quickly. Appliance companies build units to efficiently use energy. Emergency rooms brag about their “short” wait times. Everyone wants efficiency and every claims they have it, but even if it appears that way on the outside, we know what’s going on inside these companies. Efficiency only rewards the inefficient while punishing the efficient, whose very efficiency is the cause of their inefficiency.
Now that we’ve re-read that efficient sentence seven or eight times, let’s explore some examples.
Phone and Video Calls
You have a call at 9 a.m. so you dial in at 8:58 to make sure you’re on time without having to endure too much conference-call small talk. You’re alone. Or waiting for the host to let you in. Or staring at one person you barely know, hoping that person doesn’t address you while you wait for the 94 other essential members of the call. Your timeliness is efficient and surely everyone else will have the same mindset: let’s start this thing at the scheduled time and end it as soon as all essential information is gleaned.
Instead, you’re still staring at the screen at 9:03 a.m. while the host says, “We’ll wait a couple minutes to let everyone else join.” Those couple minutes go by and people trickle in, each requiring additional time to insincerely apologize for being late. By the time the call starts (9:12 a.m.), your efficiency has cost you 14 minutes of your life.
CC Me on That
It’s not enough to do one’s job anymore. Now, you need to copy your boss (to prove you’re working), your underling (sham training exercise), your six colleagues to whom you might briefly mention this at some point in the distant future (doesn’t hurt to give background), your dentist (because you mentioned this project during dental-office small talk last week) and your personal email address just in case the work servers shut down and you need to access this crucial email at 11 p.m. on Saturday.
Inevitably, you forget to copy someone at first, then send another email with the very helpful “+ Sue” and then feel like you’ve completed your job for the day. That false feeling of accomplishment soon disappears as every person you copied chimes in with unsolicited inane feedback or, worse, “Thanks!”
What you’ve done is create an email vortex of people proving they’re working by replying to an email. Only one person doesn’t reply: the recipient, i.e. the only person you need to reply. Had you sent the email to the real recipient and no one else, thus avoiding the inbox clogged with nonsense, you likely would’ve received a quick reply and accomplished your task. Instead, nothing happens aside from your boss gaining respect for your uninvolved colleagues who said “Thanks!”
Planning to React
Naturally, when you have some kind of event coming up, whether a client presentation or full-scale extravaganza or even something as mundane as a simple meeting, your tendency toward efficiency has you spending time planning for the event.
For the sake of using an example, let’s call it a company picnic. You prepare everything you need. Inform everyone who needs to be informed. Everything is finalized weeks in advance and you’re ready. Then, the day before (or morning of) the event, your inbox is stuffed with hastily written reply-all messages trying to change every detail of the thing. And, because they’re hastily written everyone in the company is copied, misunderstandings occur and the “conversation” deviates into whatever the misunderstanding is. Because of the looming event, tensions get high between at least two of your colleagues who begin throwing personal insults at each other while still replying all.
After all that, with every suggested change canceling out every other suggested change, the event goes on exactly as you planned it aside from two things: (1) the whole thing is now your boss’s idea and (2) you had to buy more napkins because Dylan, the first-week intern who was copied on the email, was unsure if what you had would be enough (your boss’s boss liked the initiative and replied “gr8 idea thx,” which your boss interpreted as a top-priority directive and replied all while addressing you, “Hey! Can you go get another case of napkins ASAP! Per below! Thanks Dylan for the idea!!!”).
Instead of being efficient and spending all that time planning, you could’ve taken a vacation.
The Efficiency of Inefficiency
Every time you attempt to be efficient, you end up with another huge chunk of wasted time while the inefficient show up late, prove their worth by saying “thanks” to something that doesn’t pertain to them and taking credit for your company picnic. Plus, they get all these perks while doing whatever they want with their time. They take the vacations you don’t take, fake the illnesses you actually have, disrespect your time while you respect theirs and end up with raises.
What do you get? Self-respect. Maybe.
It appears the true key to efficiency is egregious inefficiency. If you’d like to discuss further, we can meet at the company picnic. It starts at noon so I’ll be there at 11:58. See you at 1:30.
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Recently, while moseying through the A concourse at the DTW airport, two teen boys hurried past me in the opposite direction. I’m estimating they were each 15 years old, based partially on a peripheral glance but mainly on the not-quite-high-but-definitely-not-low weird voice most 15-year-old boys and some unfortunate men have.
While they sped by, one teen said to the other, verbatim, “If I get a girlfriend, and if she has a Notre Dame t-shirt, I’m dumping her.”
What an astounding statement.
The boys were moving quickly, so that’s the only sentence I heard, which is probably for the best because now we can speculate.
If-Then Statements
The kid, whom we’re going to call Chase and who is possibly the normal age to be taking geometry, makes a pretty fantastic if-then statement, including two ifs.
IF I get a girlfriend and IF she has a Notre Dame t-shirt, THEN I’m dumping her.
Chase implies he wants a girlfriend. If he didn’t want one, he would’ve said, “If I had a girlfriend,” but he says, “If I get a girlfriend” as if he’s actively pursuing the situation. This also makes it less likely he’s lying to his friend about not having a girlfriend, which is already unlikely, as teens will lie about having girlfriends who go to different schools but will never lie about not having a girlfriend. Unless they have a second girlfriend, but that’s too advanced for our exercise.
Now, let’s invade Chase’s hypothetical future girlfriend’s closet. Does she have a Notre Dame t-shirt? Almost certainly, Chase is talking about the university and not the cathedral. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Notre-Dame de Paris t-shirt, nor can I envision a kid having such strict standards against French Gothic architecture. But if she does have an offensive Notre Dame t-shirt, she’s history, even though she presently only exists in the future.
Being that we were in the Detroit airport, it’s probable Chase is a fan of the sports teams for either Michigan State University or the University of Michigan, with a lower likelihood of being a fan of USC. In any of those cases, Notre Dame would be a rival. Granted, there is no guarantee the kid is from Michigan just because he was in a Michigan airport, but when factoring in how much he hates Notre Dame as well as Delta’s flight schedules, it’s probably a Michigan-related collegiate allegiance.
Why would a 15-year-old kid care so much about college athletics that he would pre-dump a girlfriend he doesn’t even have but desperately wants?
Jealousy
My official theory: Chase is jealous. These two kids have a third, unseen friend. The unseen friend has a girlfriend who has a Notre Dame t-shirt.
Based on Chase’s tone as he spoke his nonsense, he wasn’t jealous of the kid to whom he was talking. He was talking about someone else. Someone who does have a girlfriend. Probably a recently added girlfriend.
Chase is not able to spend as much time with the third friend anymore (which would be fine if Chase were the one with the new girlfriend), so Chase hates the girlfriend, whom we’ll call Our Lady of Paris. Our Lady of Paris was wearing a Notre Dame t-shirt recently and Chase decided that will be what he hates about her and thus his unseen friend.
Still, why not simply say he hates her? Why the asinine if-then statement that now bans him for life from having a girlfriend with a Notre Dame t-shirt? And no, he can’t be mature and be happy for his friend; he’s a filthy teen.
If he finds out a girl has a Notre Dame t-shirt in advance, does he ask her to be his girlfriend just so he can dump her? Or does the t-shirt discovery have to come after the doomed union of teen souls? Can he use it as an out, gifting his future girlfriend a Notre Dame t-shirt when he tires of her so he can then dump her based on his personal policy?
No. He’s never going to dump anyone. Regardless, Chase, as a fan of absurd contingencies and a pessimistic optimist for our youth, I wish you the best in your pursuit of a girlfriend who doesn’t own a Notre Dame t-shirt.
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A text message from a dentist:
“Hello. This is a reminder of your appointment Tuesday, October 29th at 11:00 AM. Please call or text to confirm. Please note we do not accept cancellations by text.”
No. I confirmed the appointment when I made the appointment.
Also, you’re bombarding me with violations of several of my biggest writing pet peeves, which persist despite my efforts not to care about such things (my biggest pet peeve remains to be the fact I have pet peeves). You should write “October 29” and say “October twenty-ninth.” And 11:00 AM is wrong for multiple reasons. And while “cancellations” is not technically wrong, “cancelations” is far superior. Further, I assume you don’t accept cancelations by text because so many people immediately canceled when you sent those awful confirm-the-confirmation texts.
What happened to the simple phone call, made the day prior to the appointment, reminding me of my appointment in case I’m incapable of making note of when I’m supposed to be places? Now I have to be pestered with a demand to reconfirm the confirmation I already confirmed?
These text messages have been coming, unwarranted and undesired, for a few years now, and I’ve never responded. Despite that, the fine dental professionals always let me in for my appointments. I’m being asked to reconfirm a confirmation despite the reconfirming having no bearing on the confirmation. On the plus side, it gives us fodder for small talk when I walk in loaded with complaints about this topic. Related: small talk is so vilely unavoidable that it exists even when one party has scraping devices and water guns shoved in his mouth.
A text message from a restaurant:
“Hello. We have you confirmed for a 7 p.m. reservation tonight. Please respond 1 to confirm or 2 to stop messages.”
No. I confirmed the reservation when I made the reservation. You confirmed that confirmation in your very own confirm-your-confirmation text when you said you had me confirmed just before asking me to confirm.
After doing no research, it’s safe to hypothesize restaurants deal with more no-call-no-shows than dental offices, so it makes more sense for a restaurant to ask for a confirmation confirmation than a dental office. Still, it is nauseatingly unnecessary.
What if I respond with 2? Am I also canceling my reservation? You don’t imply that but you don’t not imply that, either. I’m paranoid that demanding you stop bothering me will prevent me from bothering you at my appointed time. So I don’t respond at all. And then you keep texting me. And I keep showing up when I said I would because that’s the time I confirmed when I confirmed the reservation.
I made my reservation and I will be there. If I’m not, give away my table. Yes, this is tedious and annoying for you, but so is sending me a text message, even if it’s automated. You’re equally annoyed whether you ask me to confirm my confirmation or not, but I’m only annoyed if you ask me. By letting people take responsibility for their own plans, and knowing you’re going to be annoyed anyway, at least you remove some aggravation from society, making you worthy of high praise.
Don’t you want to be worthy of high praise? Comment 1 to confirm.
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