[BITList] For All Who Work With Rude Customers

[HUGH]

John,

I daresay that one happened as described, and the following one did happen.  At the last shipyard I worked for, Kvaerner in Govan, Glasgow, there occurred an influx of dim-witted senior managers and directors, and their feats were legion.  However, few of their feats had anything to do with actual shipbuilding or marine engineering - they hadn't got as far as these subjects in their picture books. One of them had picked up the habit of "trying to catch people at it", and this he did by parading round with an eagle eye set to maximum.  So one morning he encountered a bunch lounging about on deck with no apparent plan in mind.  Parading past them didn't produce a flurry of work, so he confronted them with the time-honoured words, "Do you know who I am?"  They didn't, and they didn't care, since they were not employed by the yard, and in any case they were not due to start work for another half hour.  He got the same reaction as the passenger got, word for word, with added bits.  On another visit he ordered temporary safety railings to be removed from the fo'csle - he didn't like them.  The offices didn't escape him.  After one outburst he had to be taken aside and told the chap drinking tea and reading the paper didn't actually have to be there at all, since he didn't start work for another 30 minutes.  People staring at CAD screens annoyed him - not useful work, he reckoned.  Also, not using the keyboard at a fast enough rate. Bosses conveyed such sentiments to staff with as much of a straight face as they could manage.  He demanded keyboard key-tapping rates be monitored, so Jim, the IT chap, set up a system to that end and we all banged keys like hell and amassed astronomical rates of key-tapping while doing eff-all work.  What happened to him I've no idea.  I retired.

Hugh.
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