Gaming the System

I write a lot about enti­tle­ment issues here. The way that I see it, one of the pri­mary dri­ving forces behind much of the ills of our soci­ety is the over­whelm­ing sense of enti­tle­ment that most peo­ple seem to have. We want things done our way, and we want them deliv­ered now gods damn it! We seem to have for­got­ten the old axiom, “Cheap, Perfect or Fast; pick two.” Which leads me to an odd lit­tle piece that I picked up via The Consumerist (I’ll link to them after I’ve for­given them for being part of the Gawker Family of Suck). The blog post in ques­tion is titled Hey Burger King, you’re get­ting timed for a rea­son! from the Selfish Mom blog. Yes, dear read­ers, I’m tak­ing on the mommy – blog­gers again. I only pray to Lord Satan that I emerge with my tes­ti­cles intact.

The gist of this lit­tle mis­sive, charm­ingly filed under the cat­e­gory of “How To Piss Me Off,” is the real­iza­tion by the author, Amy, that Burger King employ­ees have been gam­ing the timer sys­tem by hav­ing drive – though cus­tomers back up and pull for­ward to reset the timer. The shock, the hor­ror! To think that some min­i­mum – wage dead – cow jock­eys are gam­ing Corporate’s pre­cious tim­ing sys­tem! A mil­lion douchebag effi­ciency experts are cry­ing out in pain.

Amy writes:

I went back this morn­ing, in the inter­est of inves­ti­ga­tion – not because I was dying for a Croissan’wich. Once again, when I got to the win­dow, I was asked to pull for­ward and back up. I said “Why? Are you try­ing to stop the timer?” She said yes. I said some­thing to the effect of “But that’s cheat­ing. How will the process get any faster if they think you’re already really fast?” I know enough about fast food restau­rants to know that they really study this stuff. There are sys­tems that fig­ure out when you should drop fries based on how many cars are in the Drive-Through lines. There are McDonald’s that have out­sourced their Drive-Through order-taking jobs to call cen­ters. Corporate sure as hell wants to know for how long peo­ple are sit­ting in the Drive-Through.

Honestly, Amy, this was of such burn­ing impor­tance to you that you felt the com­pul­sion to “inves­ti­gate?” And do you hon­estly think that the Burger King cor­po­ra­tion devel­ops these met­rics based on any fac­tor other than max­i­miz­ing their profits?

Let me explain a fact that I learned dur­ing my long tenure in the world of call cen­ter oper­a­tions. The cor­po­rate douchebags respon­si­ble for set­ting these sort of cus­tomer – ser­vice met­rics haven’t the fog­gi­est clue what they are doing. I guaran – fuck­ing – tee that the pur­pose of tim­ing the poor fucks on the drive – though win­dow isn’t, as Amy seems to believe, to make them faster so that you get your slab of dead cow a few sec­onds quicker. They’re being timed so that Burger King can squeeze the max­i­mum amount of profit out of these schmucks’ shifts.

Again, from expe­ri­ence, I can tell you that there are three responses to this sort of pres­sure. First, you can muster up your dig­nity and quit. Of course, if you are work­ing at a BK drive – through (or a call cen­ter for that mat­ter) your employ­ment options are prob­a­bly some­what lim­ited, so let’s dis­re­gard that option for now.

That leaves two choices. First, you can take what­ever short­cuts needed to bang out the prod­uct in the time alloted. Fries aren’t quite done / are way too fuck­ing done? Who cares, time’s almost up, dump that shit in the bag. Want to take the time to cre­ate a pre­sentable and edi­ble sand­wich? Who the fuck do you think you are, Bobby Flay? Pop that fucker in the rether­me­lyzer and move on. We have fatasses to feed!

Of course, we all know what’s likely to hap­pen if you deliver a shit prod­uct too may times, even­tu­ally some enti­tle­tard with an inter­net con­nec­tion is going to post about it on The Consumerist, then cor­po­rate will decide that they “take this seri­ously,” which is basi­cally code for “fire the fucker who got caught then pro­ceed as usual.”

So that leaves our sec­ond choice, game the sys­tem. The stu­pid timer can be reset by some­one back­ing up, well back that ass up baby! During my tenure in the call cen­ters, as man­age­ment con­stantly tight­ened the met­rics in an attempt to squeeze profit from a dying con­cern, the phone – mon­keys played a con­stant game of cat – and – mouse to avoid the bullshit.

So, who’s to blame? We are, well, not me I’m not an enti­tle­tard. The peo­ple to blame are the ones who insist that every­thing has to be fast, cheap and per­fect. In their quest to get a 99¢ burger, “the way I fuck­ing want it, and right now you fuck­ing ass­hole I’m a very busy per­son,” they have cre­ated a world where the poor fuck sling­ing beef at Burger King has to resort to gam­ing the fuck­ing drive – though to keep their job. Good going fuck­ers, I hope that Whopper tastes good, you earned it.