A time of waste
Valves, and why they’re important
The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote The Great Gatsby) disliked exclamation marks as “laughing at your own jokes.” I sometimes wonder how Mr Fitzgerald would have felt about the plethora of emojis with which we dot our communications these days but, perhaps thankfully, he was spared that confrontation with self-humour. Especially the dog dirt one.💩
The exclamation mark is a regular feature of some court submissions that I’ve translated in my time, as if adding one to a refutation adds power and force to the legal argument, or at least gets the judge to elbow his colleague and mutter, “Yeah, getta loada that one, huh!” It’s my firm belief that exclamation marks are most misplaced when inserted into legal communications, if only because they say isn’t it obvious? and law is all about things that aren’t that obvious, to one or the other party.
Settling legal disputes is remarkably simple, because there’s a rule book. Parents and teachers who need to settle playground tiffs have a far harder time of things, because they need to make up the rule book as they go along and cut intractable Gordian knots while trying desperately to recall how Mary Poppins had achieved harmony with such consummate ease. Something like this is classically how it happened in my own youth:
He hit me.
And what did you do to deserve that?
Nothing. I just said he had to give me half his Kit-Kat.
And you, why didn’t you give him half your Kit-Kat?
It’s mine.
Give him half your Kit-Kat.
It’s mine.
Do it.
Here.
Or some such. Now, did you ever see legal pleadings that short? But a parent here is able to cut the Gordian knot while riding roughshod over rights of property, duties of donation and rights of appeal and, in the end, everyone feels that justice is served. Because no one used an exclamation mark.
Note that second sentence: what did you do to deserve that? The one thing that parents and teachers know, acknowledge and recognise that courts of law don’t when a complaint is filed about someone else’s actions is that every action has reaction, and that nothing springs from nothing, or rarely. And yet, we get to read at customer service points the world over signs that announce (I paraphrase) “We have cameras on you and we’re watching you. We know you’re an aggressive son of a bounder, and we are KEEPING OUR EYES PEELED, so don’t you dare be aggressive or we’ll GET YOU.” A rather pale attempt to pre-empt aggression using … well, it’s not far short off aggression, now, is it? And being the first to be aggressive is always a sure way to ensure peace and harmony, innit?
What the customer service points that erect such signs know only too well is that their service sucks. Nothing we can do about that. Not our fault. Take it or leave it. Sorry – next. Because customer service in the conception of a customer is “solving problems”, to which the classic answer is saying it’s not our fault because, in the conception of a service provider, customer service is palming off.
So, an irate customer is an embarrassment, a noise, a nuisance, but anger doesn’t spring out of the ether. It springs from a sense of unfairness. A sense that one is being treated unjustly, and resolving that injustice will usually resolve the anger. Anger management is advocated by people who have plenty of space in which to lean back and say I’m not angry, I can deal with the frustrations of life and there’s not a care in the world that encumbers the tranquillity of my mind. Anger management is for people who cannot keep it in, so who are these people who cannot keep it in, and why do they let it out? I asked one of them:
It’s often said that losing your temper doesn’t solve anything. Is that right? It can be right, and it can be wrong. Take a steam engine, designed to run at 80 pounds of pressure per square inch (lbs/in2). If the pressure in the boiler rises above 80, the operator must use the regulator to slow the engine’s operation so that the pressure again drops below 80. If he fails to do that the boiler will explode.
Because a boiler explosion is not a pretty sight, boilermakers try to avoid them by incorporating a valve called a pop valve or a regulator called a governor, by which either the excess pressure is relieved by making an opening in the boiler side before it can explode entirely or it is relieved temporarily by opening a slider valve, which recloses once the pressure has fallen adequately.
Image: from C. H. Hewison Locomotive Boiler Explosions [North Pomfret, Vermont:1983, David & Charles]
The picture shows a locomotive whose boiler exploded in Alne, on the North Eastern Railway in England, in 1877, and you can see that the destruction is virtually complete. The firebox would have saved the driver from excessive harm, had he been in the cab; but he and the fireman were busy filling the tank at the time, along side. It was sheer luck that saved them, therefore, bits of the boiler casing measuring five feet square having been flung 200 yards distant. Valves save lives.
It was known practice in the age of steam for drivers of some locomotives that lacked performance owing to their design to jam closed the valves atop their boilers in order to augment the interior pressure and exact a greater speed from their machines. But foolish were they that did so without keeping a sharp eye on the pressure gauge, for the margin of safety that was allowed depended on the safe condition of the boiler rivets.
These are theories of mechanics. How do they apply to customer service? They apply to customer service because the provision of a service can be like the creation of pressure within a boiler. If a customer pays for a service and it is not delivered according to contract, then the pressure that builds up within the customer owing to the unfairness being imposed upon him or her is not created by the customer. It is created by those who fail to deliver on the contractual obligation.
The customer then gets het up, and the usual reaction to this by the customer service point, backed as they are by their overbearing sign “DON’T GET HET UP” is to say that the customer is in fault for getting excited about their lack of performance, and this is like telling a steam boiler not to increase its pressure.
A boiler’s pressure will not reduce by your telling it to reduce. You must do something in order to reduce the pressure, because telling it to reduce without doing anything will only cause it to increase, then blow its valve, and ultimately explode. In human relations, when the party at fault tells the other party not to react to that fault, it commits a second fault, and two faults do not result in no fault.
What then happens is that the double faulted customer explodes. Just like on the NER in 1877. The police are called and they certainly don’t care who started it. They are no teacher on a playground. They arrest the one who is shouting. They arrest the one who did nothing to start the argument. They arrest the customer. And the customer service point says to the customer as they’re led away: we told you not to lose your temper.
Isn’t that so? No: they did nothing to prevent them losing it, did they? Temper is a feature of human frustration. Like tapping your feet, or nails, or coughing or a flush of red in the skin, it is a means by which people can keep their violence in check. It is a valid violence-control mechanism. And yet it is treated as if it were violence itself. What those who label temper as violence do is in fact abrogate their own fault ab initio. And what allows them to do that is an array of things that have been put in place to placate the more obvious sources of anger among people:
- Pay indexation,
- Comfortable working surroundings,
- Paid holidays,
- Travel allowances,
- Child benefit,
- Free education,
- Eco-cheques,
- Lunch vouchers,
- Guaranteed work,
- Time off for weddings and funerals,
and so on.
We call these benefits. And what people who benefit from benefits frequently don’t appreciate is that they deal in their daily work with lots of people who don’t benefit from benefits. They have precarious existences, perhaps, and really that makes no difference, but the admonition not to get het up is really directed at those in a similar position to the customer service operative, or rather his or her bosses.
Because the sign not to get het up is the panacea that the operative’s bosses hang up as a protection measure for our staff. What they don’t do for their staff is actually provide them with the means to solve problems. So it’s not my fault is generally utterly true, but what is also not their fault is the fact that management have inserted them as a hermetic seal in the system, which means that customers have to like it or lump it, but cannot contact those who can do something about it. Management jams the valve closed.
Today I was at my local tip. I cannot tip my garden waste just anywhere, that’s called fly tipping. So to the tip I go. It closes at 4 pm and so I must be there before 3.45. I load up my two-seater truck to the top, pack it all in with ropes and drive to the tip – that all takes ¾ of an hour.
It’s 3.40 – bags of time. At the gate I’m told I cannot dump garden waste. The compressor is broken. I tell them that you don’t need a compressor to dump garden waste, I could perhaps dump it next to the container. No, that’s not allowed. I tell them I took a half hour to load my truck and can do nothing with the truck till it’s emptied. Sorry - it’s not our fault. I look over at the compressor. They have tried to see what the issue is. Beside the container is a pile of garden waste they have removed from it. Can I not put my waste on that pile? It’s 4 o’clock, no one else will come now. No, I cannot. I must take it away again, or drive 25 km to Haacht (there’s no time, of course, for that, and 25 km and back is 4 litres of fuel, and 4 litres of pollution).
I park. I unload two containers of waste. “You can’t unload that here!” I’m told. I reply, “I need to unload these to get to the bottles that I want to put in the bottle bank. Stop judging me.”
Because I had an issue with their policy upon the non-operation of their compressor, suddenly I’m suspect. Every last thing I do is wrong. Even though every last thing I do is prompted by their own mechanical failure. The boiler must not explode, even if the valve is jammed closed.
I go to leave. My card will not open the gate. So, I use the opportunity to simmer, and calm down. And this I achieve, because nobody is there telling me to do it. An operative comes over, turns my card over in the slot, the barrier lifts, and he returns the card to me. I leave.
I leave the tip, and I leave all the voluntary work I do for the council. Because I cannot with glad heart do voluntary work for an organisation that treats me like an evil-doer for telling them they’re not entirely in order. Sorry, but every action has a reaction.
There is clearly no SLA that gets an engineer to see to these compressor difficulties on a Saturday. That’s too bad. Driving across the country to dump waste is fatuous. And charging to dump organic waste is daft. If fly tipping is a problem, and it is, organic waste at least should be free. If it were all free, perhaps people would fly-tip less.
I blew my top because I pay for waste services through my rates. When they’re denied, I must look to my benefits as consolation. And, between you and me, there are none. In the end a deal’s a deal. And the council failed to deliver. So the council get’s the valve release, but no explosion at least.