When mathematics and common sense is not one of your strong suits you have to wonder wonder what is. The days of me being left speechless and flabbergasted by what staff do is long gone and one needs to expect the worst and multiply it. I am not exaggerating it is that bad and when you find a good staff member that can read and write and has common sense you feel blessed.
I was not going to write this story, but thought I would share what happens in my real world. You can laugh and you can cry, but this numbs the brain when you are seeing and experiencing this daily. This is not something you can train for either and it is like learning on the job thinking in code solving a mystery all wrapped up in one.
I had to take my daughter to the doctor today because the poor girl was suffering from pins and needles from her head down to her waist. It did not sound good and why I had her checked out as she has had a rough time of late. It turned out to be stress and low blood pressure or high as was not listening to that part after I heard stress. This is all work and staff related and why having staff is a killer especially in SA. Most cannot count further than their fingers unless they have a calculator on standby.
I dug deeper and found out what had sent her over the edge as I have never got to this point and everyone reacts differently. Two days ago one of our drivers delivered an order to a large client at their distribution center. No worries job done except yesterday that client phoned stating the order was missed. Everyone swears blind the order was sent and delivered because the staff had helped load the vehicle.
The delivery note was checked and it was not signed for so in theory was not delivered. This morning the driver and our foreman were tasked in hunting down the delivery in our clients massive warehouse. The receiving lady recognized the driver and admitted she had failed to sign the documents which our driver had never given her. You cannot make this stuff up and now there are two who are at fault.
Thankfully our foreman who as common sense and why he is a foreman insisted on finding the order nd not just having the delivery note signed. It took him over 3 hours, but the stock was located and verified and all ended with a Hollywood ending. This I think was the final straw after weeks of incompetence that sent her over the edge.
Unfortunately when you have incompetent staff you work twice as hard mainly as you have no other choice. Hands on from start to finish means you cannot take on over seeing every task as other wise you will kill yourself. This was a harsh lesson she had to learn and is unavoidable in our environment. When you give idiots more responsibilities you are making life harder for yourself. This is why my old foreman is there as he was a good 6 years of training working under myself. My daughter needs to work and train finding more mini-me type staff or you will not last in this line of work.
This is why I used to work such long hours and refused to delegate my work to staff. This is not great as you have no home life, but have comfort in knowing the work is done. She has at least learned to stop delegating so much work and to stop sticking her hand up taking on more work that others should be doing. I told her she has 12 staff members, but in reality she only has possibly 2 of those she can rely on.
