Help
A week ago, or around then, P.B. messaged me that there was a person who needed light duty work, and he was going to utilize this person to help me catch up on claims. Technically, P.B. is not the person to do that; I report to K.K. But K.K. doesn’t care if someone else takes care of problems for him. I was on the phone, and probably doing at least one other thing, and I believe I answered P.B. “k.”
Then about a day later I got an e-mail from HR instructing me that this person was right-handed and could not use their right arm for an extended period of time. Well, what can you do if you are right-handed and you are supposed to keep your right arm at rest? The feeling I got from HR was that perhaps this person was not so seriously injured, but of course, nobody said so.
It turned out that someone else had already claimed this person’s time for their menial labor. Acme uses a constantly shifting byzantine array of paper to show visually to the ordinary plant worker the condition and direction of the factory. It is estimated that only 50% of degree-bearing Americans can understand the information conveyed by these systems after they have been trained, so the benefit to the average factory worker remains dubious; but it part of the current state religion so it cannot be questioned. So it took a few days for this chap to get the hang of what he was supposed to do in this lowest of low jobs.
One day he showed up, having something like an hour to spare before he had to go, to help with claims. Late afternoon tends to be the busiest time of day, as everyone in the country suddenly remembers those items they wanted us to ship and starts clamoring for it to happen today. But there was nothing for it; he would never be able to help without being trained. And if you ever turn away offered help, it means you do not need help. I do, so I had to take this help however it came to me.
On the first day we managed to pretty well get through the process of how to open up a claim. It did not help that I started showing him on one computer, then found it did not have adequate access, and had to switch computers and adjust the instructions. But he took notes, and seemed to retain his understanding of a concept once it was grasped (not true of everyone I have guided on computers).
It was several days before I saw him again, owing to his other assignment and various medical appointments. We were able to continue the learning from where we left off without too much refreshing, and I was able to introduce the concept of checking the count, checking the weight, and checking adjustments to the count. We even got so far as actually going out on the floor to check the count.
I’ll say one more time that this guy is not doing too bad at learning. He doesn’t get something the very first time and he is not a good intuitive guesser, but he does grasp concepts and retain them days later. I think I could train him to do the entire job of checking claims and he could do it well, given time. But if he is only going to be working odd hours when he is not needed elsewhere, until his light-duty prescription wears out, well, it will be tough to turn any kind of profit. Review the following quotes:
“I have good eyes, but they are slow.”
“I have trouble spelling words. I was real smart in high school, but I don’t read and write much any more.”
“I’m not used to switching back and forth between windows like this, it’s going to take me a while to get the hang of it.”
Yes, it does take him a bit to read through text, he makes frequent typos, and the job requires nothing if not switching back and forth between windows. But most disheartening are his exclamations of success. “Ah! I understand!” he says, of the convention for labeling the carousel locations. But there’s a completely different convention for the big stacker racks, several wild exceptions in the peripheries of the stockroom, a different convention for the assembly lines, and, because of sea-changes that are in progress, different rules for different lines, and even a whole new location naming convention with which I am not yet effectively familiar. To be able to find one part is much different than to being able to find any part. It took me months to learn what I know, and I am not an expert, and of course now things are changing.
Or explaining the form in Microsoft Access, again the evolutionary product of a year of occasional efforts; it’s a complex form, to accommodate the complexity a claim can have (shortages on multiple items, multiple items received marked as one item, unidentified wrong parts, checking by weight, by count, by paperwork, etc.) Yes, it is quite fair to call it a complex form, hard to understand and even confusing; I have never had time to really polish the user interface. But I had to make the darn thing. It’s doing so much more now than anything did when I started; it automatically refreshes the information from the shipping software, automatically fills in a number of fields necessary for recordkeeping, assists in the calculation of correct shipping weight, and generally gives some structure to the murky process of analyzing a claim for validity. In my perspective, seeing how much is now being offered, it is dismal to think that there is still a steep learning curve and no way to get occasional help.
This chap on light duty is not best suited to helping me with the claims on short terms, but even people more familiar with computers and shipping can’t drop in and go with the claims. To get the job done properly requires someone who can dedicate time to it on a regular basis.