Pointy Headedness Abounds
© Mark McWiggins 2024
This is a new updated introduction to my book 179 Ways Your Company Can Be in Business Thru Tomorrow.
Four examples, for two of which there are more charitable/ less charitable interpretations of events.
(1) A local car dealership where we used to live in NW Washington:
The manager there kept failing to return my calls for ten days or so, starting a couple of weeks before Christmas 2023 and then ending December 29 when I finally showed up. “Why haven’t you returned my calls?” “I didn’t call back because I didn’t know anything because Bob” (their one and only EV tech, at least at that time) “hasn’t been around for a couple of days.” “Uh, he doesn’t keep a log in your computer of the work he’s done??” “We don’t have computers.”
What I gather that he meant is that they don’t have the kind of computers that integrate into the backend system like every other car dealership in America at that time. (An exaggeration, I know; but the vast majority of them, surely.) The guy couldn’t have been such moron that he didn’t think of keeping track of customers with a bunch of filing cabinets and some legal pads. Was he?
I was trying to interview him to find out, where I would have gently suggested this to him. (My motto is never give anybody an excuse to get mad and punch or shoot me if I can help it, so I wasn’t going to call him a moron or any other name to his face.)
But I really don’t know anything about the guy. I suspect he was an exploited worker, possibly managed by a “my way or the highway” jerk and was just twiddling his thumbs until he could get another job. He left shortly thereafter and I tried to talk to the next guy and he refused to talk to me as well. Pointyheadeds everywhere …
(2) Elon Musk … This one has no charitable interpretation. Elon Musk is a billionaire from the tech industry, so certainly he’s aware of software and systems security … but instead he’s killed upwards of 40 people testing his EV software as if it were a high school robotics competition. No excuse whatsoever this pointy-head.
(3) A local hotel in Olympia Washington … from the deadly to the merely ridiculous … I was sitting on the toilet early a.m. earlier this year after my wife and I had wrestled up a huge cart of luggage up to our room without any help from the staff at all the night before.
Suddenly there was a CRASH! The light fixture over the sink fell down right next to me. I was barely scratched. Talk about dodging a bullet, or light fixture in this case.
The charitable interpretation of this one is that the local management was being short shifted by the national management, whoever they were, and weren’t giving the local management enough money to do the maintenace necessary.
The less charitable one, of course, is that the local management was skimming the maintenance budget for some other use.
Pointy heads!!
(4) Uber: This ride-sharing company headed up by Cowboy Travis Kalanick came to a quick end of their EV experiment shortly after a March 18, 2018 incident where an EV from Uber struck and killed a woman named Elaine Herzberg, who was pushing her bike across the road at dusk or slightly after dusk and didn’t see or hear the EV (coming about 40, mostly silently) until it hit her.
It turned out the woman who was supposed to be watching the road was turned the other way reading a magazine. Uber and its stable of Carnegie Mellon Phd’s exited the EV marketplace shortly thereafter.
I have details in my book on how this should have been managed.
Note: Probably copyrighted by Scott Adams and / or his publishers … please buy Dilbert books! I’m a fan!
