All,
This subject has been a passion of mine for several years as I started collecting tales of business and organizational stupidity. In some cases I was caught up in the center of the lunacy and others I witnessed it from a safe distance, although there were casualties....
Anyway, here is the inaugural post to Business Stupid -
Business Stupid - Saving Something!?!
There was the technician standing over the still broken icemaker. He had been working on the 2 year old unit for over five hours. He had yanked out every moving part and replaced everything he could find that might be slightly at fault for causing the unit to breakdown....again for the fourth time in 2 years.
Doing the math in my head, guessing an ice maker the size of a small cube college dorm-room sized fridgerator would cost somewhere about one to two hundred dollars...
How much was the cost of this five hour service call? No matter who ever was paying for it, it had to be close to the cost of the unit. Not to mention it was the fourth such call during the life of the overworked machine.
When I asked the tech why not just put in a new one, he just sighed, having seemingly pleaded that case and been handed his head for thinking of such a logical solution.
What is the service company and the customer who uses the machine saveing by keeping a unit long since beyond its time up (and all warrantees have expired) and running (as neither wanted to replace it)?
Turns out it cost more to go through all the paperwork than to requisition a new unit. That is, it would involve greater use of 'shop time' for filling out paperwork, filing or data entering, getting approvals, making disbursements, updating inventory, etc. That a five hour service call was cheaper than the bureacracy set up to stop a simple and effective solution.
So by the end of the day the ice maker is up and running again and the tech is on his way out. I will miss him, but not to worry, I will get to see him sometime again in about four to six months when the icemaker decides to die again.
That's Business Stupid.
Sanford Berenberg
sanford@berenberg.net
www.berenberg.net
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