Incompetencies and Snobs

by Eko Prasetyo @ 5:47 AM I work for a multinational company that is proud of their excellencies in work ethics and punctualities; a bastion of qualities, if you will. I have been working for this particular companies for a year and four months after having my tenure for other company of the same field but lesser remunerations (and qualities).   This week, from wednesday to thursday, I attented training on MERAK PEEP, a software that help petroleum engineers and business planners to asses the value of a project. It was a good training, both refreshing and eye opening. There are more to this software beyond what I have been doing with it. It's a good training all and all, although the room where the training was done could benefit more from less air conditioning. Felt like I was in the mountain but without the fresh air. The weather was not altogether sunny. Gloom with heavy rain poured several times during days and nights. Not that I have trouble with the weather. Transports are available on call if I want to go somewhere in the complex where the training was held. They are usually reliable. But there is no such things as 100% reliable. The last day in the compound, where I was supposed to be picked up at 6.30 a.m, turned out to be a day where incompetencies accumulated. The story goes like the following: My friend and me have a flight at 9.10 a.m. We need to be at the airport at 8.10 at least to have proper check-in. This being Indonesia and all, you can not at 100% sure that the schedule would go as planned. Sometimes they are late, but surprise surprise, sometimes they are much earlier. So we Indonesian need to go to airport TWO HOURS earlier than flight schedule just to be sure. So yeah, we wanted to be picked up at 6.30 a.m jut to make sure. So then it was 6.45 a.m. Several pick up cars went by and none of them were scheduled to pick us up. We were curious, so we call the transport dispatcher. He said the car is rolling. 7 a.m. No cars were coming. My friend go furious and called the dispatcher again and this time they said that the car has just been rolled out. Stupid, my friend said, we clearly ordered 6.30! 7.15. No cars were coming. We got furious. My friend called the dispatcher and unload his anger to him. The dispatcher apologized and said the car was in another location, picking up some guys who are still eating. At this point our anger welled up.  7.30 the car came, bring with him two other passangers. Young, inexperienced, but looked like spoilt brait and downright snobbish. So we got in the car, and the driver gave no apologizes whatsoever. I kept my silence, but my friend blew up in anger and got furious with the driver. The driver pointed at his early passangers. Then my friend got furious with the early passangers who looked like a bunch of new recruits with no field experiences and ego as inflated as the wall street before the toxic credits meltdown. My friend lashed out time and time again during the drive from the compound to the airport. He blamed the other passangers for not attentive to the times and for making us suffer because we were forced to skip breakfast and wait for an hour while they enjoy their morning with breakfast. He then looked at the supposed scheduling of the driver and pointed out that the other two passengers supposed to be picked up at 6.30 too but they showed their incompetencies, non-punctualities, irresponsibilites and their insensitivities by ordering breakfast at 6.30 and kept us waiting while they eat.  Finally, after my friend lashed out for half an hour or so, one of the young ones, the snobbiest looking of them, explained that they ordered the car to be arrive at 7 a.m.  So my friend then lashed out at the driver and said why didn't he picked us up first if their schedule was 7 a.m? The driver said it was the dispatcher who told us to pick them first. Then he grunted and got furious with the dispatcher. At this point, we are not sure whose to blame. The fact is that we were discarded, misinformed, and kept hungry due to the non-punctuality of the transportation.  It was ten minutes after checked in that we are told to board the plane. What if the driver picked us up 50 minutes past 7?We would be discarded even more! And to our surprise, the snobs were nowhere to be found, so we assumed they are flying with company plane that the passengers supposed to be get picked up by BUS AND NOT BY CAR!  The incompetencies baffled me. It was good that the driver and those two snobs utter their apologizes, otherwise we would curse them forever. | My Alter Ego | Blogroll Me! | |