A craft project, a kitchen injury, mass school closings: three incidents with a surprising common theme.
Incident the First.
Not long ago, I indulged my wife by accompanying her to a fabric store, part of a national chain, in a strip mall a few miles from our home. She wanted to get some things to make a crafty gift for the baby that my sister is expecting. We live in a major city, so most of the time we patronize local businesses and can easily avoid big-box shopping, but this was an exception to our usual rule.
She had gotten half a yard of batting cut at the fabric-cutting counter. The employees at the counter were paying considerably more attention to their conversation with each other than to the customers. One was saying she hadn't even wanted to come in that day because her shift was so short. The other was remarking on the bad performance review she'd recently gotten. I could well believe it, given that they were talking about these things in front of customers. So we weren't surprised when we got to the front register and the total was all wrong.
We were about ready to ditch our purchases and leave; we were definitely not ready to get back in the fabric-cutting line. But the assistant-manager-like guy who was ringing us out was determined to see justice done, so he took us back to the counter (from which the first of the two employees from before had gone on break) and started explaining how the problem should be fixed. But here's where it got interesting: He was wrong. Totally wrong. The more he talked, the more obvious it became that the fabric cutters knew how to cut fabric, and he didn't. The other employee came back from her break, and the two together told him what he needed to do, and they fixed it. They didn't know the first thing about customer service, and he did, but he didn't know the first thing about cutting fabric, and they did.
A significant part of the problem seemed to involve the hand-held electronic receipt printers they used. They clearly didn't work well, and while we'd been waiting in line the first time, we'd heard several calls go out for replacement batteries. The problem hadn't been in the cutting of the batting, which they'd done correctly; it had been in the printing of the receipt.
As we left the store, I contemplated: How could it be that assistant-manager-ish guy could have supervisory authority over other people yet have no idea how to do their job? And how was it that those customer service employees were working in their jobs having apparently had (or absorbed) no customer service training, even though they had the mechanics of the task down pat? In short, how could a store be so dysfunctional yet continue to operate?
I hypothesized that such a thing was possible only because the people in charge of the company, the people at the top who set policy, had had no contact, ever, with the people who at the bottom who actually dealt with customers. The gulf between the chief executives and the point of customer contact had grown too wide -- so wide as to be unbridgeable. It was possible because the people who could do something about the problems in that store had no idea that the problems existed. It was likely, in fact, that their own policies had caused some of those problems in the first place.
Incident the Second.
OK, so I'm an idiot. I know how to cut lettuce. I know that the right way to cut lettuce is not to press the blade of the chef's knife against the top of your left thumb and slice through thumb-tip and thumbnail alike. Yet that knowledge momentarily managed to escape me. There was, as you might expect, blood.
My wife came home about 10 minutes later, saw me grimacing sheepishly with a big wad of gauze wrapped tightly around my thumb, and together we set about trying to figure out where I was going to get treated. Because the last time this had happened (yes, I'd had a similar kitchen accident a year and a half before . . . I already confessed to being an idiot, what more do you want?), we hadn't been married yet, and I'd had no insurance, and so we'd gone to an urgent care clinic where, through the power of online coupon codes and sheer damn stubbornness, I'd gotten stitched up for $200 on the barrel (plus another $65 for a tetanus booster). This time, I was insured -- by Blue Cross Blue Shield, no less.
So while I pecked the keys of my laptop one-handed, trying to find decently rated, conveniently located urgent care clinics on Yelp, my wife called BCBS to try to figure out whether we'd actually be covered if we went to any of them. After sitting on hold for about eight minutes and then talking to someone on the other end, I heard her exclaim, "Are you a ROBOT?" and angrily hang up. Apparently the "customer service" rep had not only been utterly unhelpful but had been speaking in a halting monotone as if reading lines, badly, off cue cards. Somebody else's lines, from a different script.
From calling my primary care physician's office (the same PCP, embarrassingly, whom I'd just resolved to ditch because of screwed-up referrals that had nearly cost me more than $400), I learned that I would in fact have to go to the emergency room. This is exactly the sort of thing people tell us not to go to ERs for, because it's a waste of money, but the only option my insurance company has left me is to go to the ER. Thanks, insurance company.
It flabbergasts me that it should have been so difficult to answer the simple question, "I've sliced the hell out of my thumb; where should I go to get it treated?" It wasn't even that long outside business hours. And you'd think that, of all people, a telephone representative from my insurance company would be able to give the definitive answer about what my insurance would cover. But he couldn't even communicate like a human being, let alone give a useful answer. And in my experience, nobody in the real world is that bad a communicator. You have to be under orders to communicate that badly.
I remember, back in the late '90s, I once was told by my insurance company that some bloodwork I'd gotten done wasn't covered because my physician hadn't ordered it. I wrote back pointing out that their own records would show I'd gotten it just two days after a routine physical with the aforementioned physician and asking whether they thought I was in the habit of getting stuck with needles for the fun of it. I got back a form letter, signed with no name, with no contact phone number, telling me I'd be notified "when a decision had been made." Furious, I wrote a scathing letter to the president of the company, pointing out the obvious mistake and condemning the impersonal, condescending, authoritarian tone of the letter acknowledging my appeal. Shortly thereafter, I received a reply . . . from the president . . . apologizing for everything. It was my greatest-ever coup as a consumer crusader.
Would I ever get a letter like that from BCBS? Hell, if I ever wrote a letter to BCBS describing my experience, would I even get an acknowledgment? From anybody? Does any BCBS executive have any idea what his own telephone customer service agents sound like? That HMO president in the '90s, I'll bet he at least worked in the same building as his front-line employees, if not on the same floor. They probably walked past his car in the parking lot each day. The executives of BCBS and the customer service bot? No way do they work in the same building. For all I know, they may not even work in the same state.
Incident the Third.
This isn't one that's happened to me, but it's been in the news plenty. You may have heard about how Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's former chief of staff, former DCCC chairman and current mayor of Chicago, ordered the closing of 54 public schools, all of them in neighborhoods with African-American or Latino majorities (and in Chicago, that generally means 90 percent or greater). Here's a roundup of stories about the closings on the Huffington Post, and here's one on the Chicago Reader.
Emanuel made a big deal about being a man of the people, about riding the Brown Line to work. But the Reader has documented (part 1 | part 2) how Emanuel's calendar consists almost exclusively of meetings with the rich and influential, and how neighborhood groups and community leaders struggle to get any face time with him at all. Where does he get his ideas about what Chicagoans want and need from their city? Mostly from business roundtable types, one has to assume, because he's not listening to the people who turned out by the hundreds to protest his school closings, or his cuts to library hours, or his ham-handed forcing of a longer school day down the throat of the Chicago Teachers' Union, or -- most recently -- his offer to buy DePaul University a new stadium, which even the DePaul community has said it doesn't need.
I think what's going on here is the same thing that's going on with Big Box Fabrics, the same thing that's going on with Blue Cross Blue Shield, the same thing that's going on in corporations and communities all across America. The folks at the top are completely, 100 percent removed from the day-to-day issues, concerns, needs, problems and, yes, shortcomings of the folks at the coalface, the ones doing the real work, dealing with the customers and clients and patients and students and all those other difficult, complicated, annoying people with their difficult, complicated, annoying and sometimes ridiculous and sometimes absolutely legitimate and always pressing needs and desires. And this is the fundamental problem that's infected our elected officialdom, too, all the way to the top, to our president who once was a community organizer and who now rides to the defense of investment bankers.
The kings are ensconced in their courts, getting all their information from courtiers, who get all their information from other courtiers. They don't walk among their people anymore, if they ever did. They don't see the way their people live and work (or beg and die). They know only one world, their own. And you and I are but a moving row of visionary shapes that come and go; that is, if we're anything at all.
I mean, I don't know that that's really true. But it sure feels that way.