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Friday, September 23, 2005
Fire Tom Symkowski
There's that great moment in Office Space where Tom Symkowski explains that he takes the orders from the customers, only he doesn't actually take the orders, his secretary does. He's asked what, exactly, he actually does. His answer:
Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
That's ha-ha funny, because he doesn't really do anything, and what he does do, he's bad at. It stops being funny when you're supposed to do something important:
Pantuso [of the American Bus Association], whose members include some of the nation's largest motor coach companies, including Greyhound and Coach USA, eventually learned that the job of extracting tens of thousands of residents from flooded New Orleans wasn't being handled by FEMA at all.
Instead the agency had farmed the work out to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar Express America, which in turn hired a limousine company, which in turn engaged a travel management company.
...Landstar, the Jacksonville company that held a federal contract that at the time was worth up to $100 million annually for disaster transportation, did not ask its subcontractor, Carey Limousine, to order buses until the early hours of Aug. 30, roughly 18 hours after the storm hit, according to Sally Snead, a Carey senior vice president who headed the bus roundup.
This is pathetic. What would happen if the fire department worked this way? If your town hired a "fire response management company" which hired a "fire response coordinating group" which hired a "fire response call center" whose job it was to dial 911 and send the firefighters to the fire? You're always better off hiring the people who will do the work, rather than contracting people to contract people to do the work.
