Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Man Troubled By Discovery Of Own Incompetence

A man getting coffee with his coworker said he was very scared of losing his job with a package delivery company after his supervisor illustrated how incompetent the man was. He said that he'd been getting in trouble for failing to get boxes into the proper trucks, allowing boxes for truck A onto truck B. He said that he'd initially apologized when the errors first started turning up and explained that his child was suffering from chronic illness which tended to distract him from time to time. He'd promised to pay more attention, and in fact thought he'd been doing just that. But the errors continued, until at one point he improperly sorted six boxes in a row. His supervisor brought this to his attention and the man said that while he was capable of being distracted from time to time, he was sure he wouldn't miss six boxes in a row. The supervisor agreed that it did sound unlikely and left the man alone. Then, unbeknownst to the man the supervisor sent him four more boxes that were misrouted and the man failed to catch any of them. The supervisor then told the man that the problem did indeed appear to be his fault and if he could not correct it he would probably be let go.
The man told his friend he was worried. It was one thing to fail when he wasn't paying attention. It was another thing entirely to fail when you were trying your hardest.
Laziness he could change, the man said. Stupidity he was stuck with.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At least he realizes... If only I could make certain coworkers understand their incompetence, maybe I wouldn't so tempted to make them look bad all the time.