An Exercise in Avoiding Boredom

Today, at work, I went running over lunch. When I returned to the locker room, I couldn’t open the lock to my locker with my clothes in it. Not sure what had happened, maybe the lock I was using had gotten old. In any case, I needed help, and so I went to the reception desk and asked for someone with a bolt cutter.

“Oh, you need facilities,” she said, “let me call them.”

As it turned out, facilities was out, having lunch. Nobody could be reached. When I insisted, the receptionist got defensive: “I’ve been trained to call Junior,” she said, “and that’s what I did. I can’t help it. However, I can file a CSS ticket for you.” (A CSS ticket, at SAP, is a formal request for help in a computer system. It typically takes ages to get someone to respond, and frequently they are just forgotten.) So much for a quick solution.

Still wearing my running clothes, I decided to go eat myself. When I returned, facilities was still having lunch. After a bit of back and forth, I left to ask our usually well-informed secretary for help, who gave me the number of the facilities hot-line. When I called facilities myself, I got directed to… the receptionist, the one who had been trained to call Junior. So I went back to talk with the receptionist and convinced her to call facilities once more. Finally, one hour after we had first tried, she got someone on the phone. “Is it about a lock?” Junior must have said, “Then you’ve got to call security.”

So security we called. We got someone on the phone right away. It took them 15min to show up and cut the padlock, but at least they were available. “24 by 7,” they proudly said, and “Why did you try facilities in the first place? Everybody knows they are out having lunch most of the time.”

Ah, organizational hierarchy. So I learned something.

And as to our receptionist? She was friendly, professional, and barely useful. She reminded me of a cab driver who had lost her navigator.