No Wonder Things Take Forever

I see policies in the workplace every day and it amazes me that ordinarily smart and logical people can come up with ideas that make no sense whatsoever. For example, today a new policy was created at my job. I work in a capacity where I am asked frequently by a call center staff to figure out what is causing the technical problem they are having. They bring me the issue, I figure it out, call the customer back, or give it back to them. This is in addition to my regular duties, so if anyone should be complaining about it, it would me, right? It works for us, takes usually less than five minutes, and everyone is happy. I don't mind the interruption and they get help.

However, it has now been decided that all of these problems should go through one central person. I'm not sure what this accomplishes other than make someone else feel important. It is not as if this person can fix the issues, or tracks them. This person becomes a proxy, or whatever. Anway, so I've been instructed to redirect my coworkers to someone else when they bring me an issue. I know already that this is going to get me in trouble because I flat out refuse to do this. If someone comes to me for help, I'm not going to tell them to go back to another person, who then brings the same issue to me. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen happen in our office.

One of myriad of reasons this is utterly ridiculous is that the people dealing with the customers understand the problem. The person who is to bring these issues to me, has no clue about anything technical and has proven time and time again that they simply do not understand it. Which means that I will then have to explain to this non-technical type the resolution to a technical issue. Probably multiple times in the same day. How much fun that will be, most likely leading to complaints about my attitude when I finally snap after having to repeat the same solution fifteen times. Oh, the fun we'll have.

When I was complaining to someone in another department, I was surprised to learn that they have a similar setup and were had been doing this forever. Most likely this is probably a fairly standard practice in call centers. Among other things, it showed me the reason it takes forever to get issues resolved when I call this department. I have to admit, I'm no expert on call center procedures, even though I have worked among them several times in my life. However, I'm sure there is some call center executive somewhere who has proven this to be the way to handle workflow. Anyway, eventually this person will become too busy to handle being a proxy. At that point, they'll have to hire additional people to do this. I see this at the company I work for all the time; if they would just fix some of the nutty procedures, they would be able to operate on about half staff in certain areas. You saw Office Space, right? "Why can't the customers just take the specs directly to the engineers?"

I am just always happy to be a part of corporate red tape. It makes my workday that much more pleasant and I am satisfied just knowing I am part of a monument of inefficiency which contributes to the overall frustration of people. Life is good.