Sometimes life takes over. Back to the UK and every bit of gadgetry that you have become reliant on, phones, fridges, cars and even doorbells decide to break simultaneously. In Greece customer care is an alien concept, so you get back to the UK and find out it is worse (if not quite as creatively haphazard). Ah well, most is fixed now, so, as therapy, I am returning to the keyboard.
A very strange and special weekend looms, but first, I had to get a new phone. The most interesting part was talking to the shop assistant, who was very helpful. It started when he told me about the quality assurance questions I would be texted. Cue big speech about managerialism, using customer satisfaction as a way to control staff, lack of autonomy in the workplace and the importance of unions to help individuals meet the collective power of the corporation on more equal terms. He was interested so we drifted on to political economy and then I left before I got him the sack. Yet there was one thing that made me sad. In the past, I would given him my contact details and enrolled him onto an adult education course. He would have done well, he was curious and eager. His life would have changed. But there are hardly any left. It was a glimpse of what we have lost, or rather, what has been taken from us.
A very strange and special weekend looms, but first, I had to get a new phone. The most interesting part was talking to the shop assistant, who was very helpful. It started when he told me about the quality assurance questions I would be texted. Cue big speech about managerialism, using customer satisfaction as a way to control staff, lack of autonomy in the workplace and the importance of unions to help individuals meet the collective power of the corporation on more equal terms. He was interested so we drifted on to political economy and then I left before I got him the sack. Yet there was one thing that made me sad. In the past, I would given him my contact details and enrolled him onto an adult education course. He would have done well, he was curious and eager. His life would have changed. But there are hardly any left. It was a glimpse of what we have lost, or rather, what has been taken from us.
2 comments:
The last thing business needs is employees who think for themselves.
From time to time I see a concourse near here crowded with graduates awaiting conferment, draped in garish academic robes and surrounded by relatives dolled up as for a wedding, posing for photographs, all MBAs, and all, I suspect, well schooled in how to put one's foot in the faces of those like your shop assistant and keep it there.
No surprise then that today I read a headline on how Tesco, for long held up as the company that had cracked the business model for tomorrow, was governed by a climate of intimidation. Quite separate from the company's lapses of basic arithmetic, obviously. Or is it just the old cynic in me that sees the connection?
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