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The phone lines at my house were down, and after a
considerable amount of argument with our
neighbourhood Ethiopian Telecommunications
Corporation (ETC) representative and the landlord,
both of whom could not explain themselves coherently
enough for the other to understand, which sadly left
me without a phone line for some time; the telecoms
folks finally decided that they would come and fix a
problem that should have been remedied some time
back on their behalf. With a sigh of relief, I heard
that the gentlemen that would be restoring my access
to the world were to arrive shortly and I waited
anxiously.
A
crew of four men with a huge ladder and a tiny
little blue pickup ETC showed up at the house and
proceeded to identify and solve the problem. It was
quite comical because the truck looked like the size
of the ladder would make it capsize. But the icing
on the cake was the guy sitting in the front seat
who had to be a good 250 pounds; I figured he
balanced the weight of the ladder so all was well
with that particular crew.
Being the cynic that I am, I assumed that the
problem would not be so easy to solve given that
“Sanford and Son” were our in-house engineers and
just as I had feared, it of course ended up being
more complicated than we had all originally hoped
for and lasted a gruelling two hours.
As the work progressed, I realised that most of the
men in the bunch knew what they were doing, it was
just that I happened to have a really odd first
impression, but there was one out of the lot that
was on the phone the entire time that he was there.
Granted a few of those phone calls were made in
order to do their jobs properly, but I overheard
more than one conversation not of an ETC nature
being discussed, and though the conversations could
have been classified as amusing, I would assume that
the Corporation does not condone personal calls on
its lines while out in the field.
It seemed that I was not the only one that was
annoyed at the fact that this young gentleman was on
the telephone; disregarding some of the questions
that I was pointing in his directions as well as the
ones that were coming from his colleagues, as the
young gentleman that was the antithesis of the sumo
wrestler I mentioned earlier, who was stuck with
doing all the grunt work, kept begging him to get
off the phone and make the call later.
He for one was not pleased with the situation, to
put it mildly, because it was he that had to climb
the ladder all over the neighbourhood, pull, cut,
connect, disconnect and reconnect during the group's
little stay. At one point, he was so annoyed that he
took the liberty to hang up the phone for his
co-worker, himself frustrated, but smiling and
pretending that he was doing it all in jest.
As I was sitting there throughout the entire time
that strange people were trampling all over my
house, I thought about how much faster the process
would be going if indeed the calls were made later
and everybody was as efficient as the small guy
stuck with the big work. The big boy was not the
ideal size to be running up and down ladders perched
on muddy streets; he, for the most part, was an
observer in the entire shindig.
The driver was in the same boat as the little guy
and was running around climbing and carrying ladders
to the best of his ability as well, although I doubt
that if we were to read the fine print in the
driver's contract we would find a 'fix phone lines'
clause anywhere.
I
am not entirely sure how efficient that this sort of
system is supposed to be. Using company resources
for personal use aside, how many homes in one zone
can really be covered a day when things are being
done in this manner. People wonder why things never
get done; take time to look at the folks that have
been assigned to do them and what their priorities
are for the day.
I
will be the first to admit that routine jobs can get
boring, especially when they involve physical labour,
but these guys are the only ones in town that are
providing phone and Internet services, I think it
would be nice if they tried to be as pleasant and as
efficient as possible. The sooner they get their
work done, the sooner that they can go home.
Does it make sense to send Bubba out on an errand
that involves a very small ladder? Is not there
someone that monitors what calls are made on these
phones that they are moving around with? I would
love to get a peek at one of these daily performance
reports (do they have those?) just to see what
fraction of the necessary work actually gets done.
After the two hours were up and the work was finally
said and done, and the nice men were on their way in
their tiny blue pickup with their huge ladder, all I
could feel was relief that at least they got my job
done today.
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