Paul's view on education

For much of the year the drivers had Learners attached to them from the nearby Driving School - the company annually received a hefty sum for carrying out this teaching work. Depending on the type of vehicle and nature of the jobs, one or two Learners were supposed to shadow the drivers and pick up tips both from observing them 'in real life' and from dedicated talks that the drivers gave. Because there were so many different types of vehicle the Learners spent only four weeks at a time with each sort.

One Friday morning one of the drivers was doing his usual round of preparing the vehicles for the coming week. A Learner accompanied him. The first car was a Ferrari that needed refuelling. The driver took it to the fuel pumps and explained to the learner about the type of fuel, the amount the vehicle consumed and the dangers of allowing the level to fall too low. As they left, moving on to the next job the Learner enquired:

"So, do you put the petrol into the boot or directly into the cylinders?"

The driver was astounded and horrified in about equal measure. He could barely begin to imagine the thought processes that led to the asking of this question, displaying as it did the lack of both theoretical and practical knowledge of the Learner. Moreover, the chap clearly hadn't done any background reading to ask such a daft question. He tried to explain.

The next vehicle was a Jeep. The tyre pressures were rather low and needed correcting before the next arduous off-road journey. The driver tried to give the Learner another chance.

"So what do you think could make tyre pressures go down?" he asked.

First silence. Then: "Is it air?"

The driver shuddered inwardly. Even the man in the street knew a few reasons why tyre pressures were low. He tried to give broad hints to the Learner to tease out some correct answers. Finally:

"Is it spontaneous combustion of the tyre rubber?"

The driver sighed and moved on.

The third car they came to had broken down the day before. The driver approached it with a spring in his step. The basic principles of Assessing Brokendown Cars. Surely the Learner would get something right here?

"So if the engine won't start what should be the first thing you look for?" he queried.

The Learner looked blank. "Do you have to take the engine out and take it to pieces?" he ventured. The driver inwardly wept.

"No," he persevered. "Can you think of something simpler first?"

Silence.

"Look, you've done your workshop attachment. Apply what you learnt there." He was becoming exasperated.

Again silence.

"Have you heard of the fuel gauge?"

The Learner shook his head.

And so it went on through the long morning until they had finished. The Learner held out a piece of paper to the driver.

"Can you give me a grade for my four weeks with you, please" he asked.

The driver, annoyed and angered beyond belief by now, let fly.

"Frankly no. For a start, this - the last day of your attachment - is the first time in the four weeks that I've even seen you. Secondly, every question I asked you this morning you got wrong. Not just a bit wrong but spectacularly so - so much so that I would have got more sense asking the boy who cleans the windscreens. To give you a grade I would struggle finding a letter low enough, as frankly a 'Z minus' would be too high."

The Learner left, sulking, to find another driver whom he might cajole into giving him a 'C'.

*

Later, walking down the corridor deep in thought, the driver ran into Paul. He thought he would ask him about the state of the Learner's woeful lack of knowledge. He explained the details of his morning's trauma. "Don't you think at this stage - eight ninths of the way through their third year of training - they should be rather better?" he asked.

Paul smiled and shook his head.

"Oh, I don't know," he said in a conciliatory tone. "I can understand how that could happen. They are told that they needn't concentrate too much on the practicalities for the first four years - rather learn about more abstract principles that might stand them in good stead later."

"But the practicalities are what underpin everything that they are going to do when they qualify, not to mention the best way of learning facts," protested the driver.

"Well," said Paul. "They are very good at colouring in pictures of cars."

Paul tackles dirt

Paul sat cradling his third cup of tea and pondered his predicament. The problem was the mud. And the gravel. And all manner of dust from the road.

It got into all the vehicles and sometimes the standard vacuum cleaners that they had down at the Cleaning Section weren't sufficiently powerful. Or, in the case of the wet mud, they didn't make any impact at all and different cleaning materials were needed. And the other problem was that in the various car parks the vehicles would have different sorts of dirt in them - not all the same kind. This was because those scruffy, inconsiderate drivers would drive many different vehicles in a day and go to different destinations and walk over different terrains. Their cross-contamination of the vehicles was a significant problem and Paul had already introduced a scheme whereby the drivers had to change their shoes or boots between each journey - the Clean Below The Ankle policy - but strangely, this had not made much of an impact on the dirt problem. Paul assumed that this was simply because they weren't doing it diligently enough.

This morning for instance, one of the cleaners had had to hoover out a limousine that had been used to go to a hotel with a gravel drive, then clean a fork-lift truck that had been used to lift crates of vegetable matter and lastly try and scrape wet sand from an off-road four-wheel drive car. He had needed different tools for each job. How wasteful, thought Paul. It would have been so much easier if all vehicles encountering sand were parked in one place, mud in another, and so on.

He stood up and tried to think this through. It was however clear to him that such a scheme could not work as it it was impossible to predict what sort of dirt any given vehicle would encounter on its journey and moreover, there were other considerations when parking it in a nominated area - namely what sort of engineering maintenance it might need by the teams of mechanics that fixed, serviced and generally prolonged the life of all the vehicles after their journeys. Even Paul conceded that their task was paramount. But the cleaning issue still irked him.

He did what he normally would in these circumstances and convened a focus group to make an 'options solutions' list. The group's message was clear. As the vehicles had to stay in the areas where they currently were, so the drivers should stay in fixed areas too - as opposed to the criss-crossing of the compound that happened now.

Paul put a poster on the canteen notice board to this effect. He was pleased. Job done.

*

He supposed he should have expected it though. Never did he come out with a brilliant idea without the tiresome drivers challenging it at the first opportunity. This one was no exception.

"For heaven's sake, Paul!" they moaned. "We can't just switch round and drive all the vehicles in one particular area. There are all sorts of different ones needing all sorts of different skills to control. We aren't all trained in all of them, you know."

Paul sighed.

"If you just stayed in one area then it would only be one type of dirt that affected those vehicles." He spoke as if to little children. "Then we would only need one type of cleaning equipment per car park."

"But Paul," they chorused, "Take Tom here. He currently has two vehicles in Car Park D - a Ferrari and Jeep (he's still waiting for the European Universal Saloon)." Paul ignored the dig. "There's also a JCB in that area. Were he to drive that he probably crash it and cause all manner of harm. Last time he drove one of those was at the Drivers Training School over twenty years ago. Things have changed a bit since then."

"Are you telling me that you can't all drive all the vehicles here?" Paul was incredulous.

It was the drivers' turn to sigh. "That specialisation for you, Paul," they said.

Paul turned, looked out of the window and then closed his eyes just wanting the dirt to go away.

Paul checks on job completion

Each time the drivers had finished a tasking, however small or lengthy, they recorded this information on a standardized form and this record was then kept centrally. For some years however, this had all been computerized using the Electronic Drivers' Operation Centre Software so that anyone on any terminal in the company could check who had done which job and when.

The drivers filled out these forms, entering the basic information about the trip - time taken, miles covered, amount of petrol used, number of passengers carried and so on - but also such additional data as any existing faults on the vehicle, repairs that had been necessary, unusually heavy loads moved and the like. Thus it was that it was possible to build up an inventory of who had been doing what work and driving the most efficiently.

At least that was the theory.

And as with most theories, it folded upon contact with reality.

For the computer system worked on the premise that whichever driver had been allocated a job was the one who carried it out. In practice of course the drivers ensured that, as far as possible, the driver with the correct skills for that job took it on - regardless of what the computer had directed. Moreoever, the drivers swapped shifts, went on holiday and even occasionally had time off sick - all the things that a good computer-model driver would not do - and as such the data that was held on the company's mainframe was at best patchy, at worst wholly inaccurate.

Paul naturally was unaware of any possible discrepancies between the sterile environment of the hard drive and the messy, vibrant, colourful existence of his employees. He had spent much time promoting the system and he was not about to let real life intrude on his model. He regularly sent reports up to head office based on these figures and in return received instructions for future strategy based on them. He never questioned why these strategies rarely survived their first contact with the shop floor.

Each branch of the National Hire Service was required to submit this sort of data annually to assess which were the best performing, safest ones and which needed reform. These data, gleaned from the Electronic Drivers' Operation Centre Software were fed into a complicated formula to arrive at an absolute number - the Safety Measure Ratio - and this number in turn presumed to sum up all the work that had been performed in the branch over the last year. Branches with the best figures received more work and staff and kudos from head office. Their managers won bonuses.

It was that time of year again. Paul sent out instructions for all the drivers to review large numbers of their already completed forms to ensure that the data were accurate. Unfortunately the information, drawn from the fallible central system, failed to connect the correct driver with the correct job most of the time and thus the drivers had to spend valuable time checking the details behind the forms and then forwarding them on to whichever colleague had done the job.

Just as they had trawled through this arduous task, Paul sent another email:

"Regretfully, there has been a glitch in the way the software has matched drivers to taskings. A new list of forms to be completed is attached. Please ensure every one is completed within two weeks. Drivers failing to comply will need to attend my office to explain their failings."

And so the trawling, searching, reallocating process started all over again and the mood of the drivers soured further.

"Why on earth are we doing this anyway, Paul?" they asked. "We've filled out the forms once and we do them thoroughly."

"It is imperative that we submit accurate information," retorted Paul, one eye on his end-of-year bonus. "The extra information is vital to securing a good safety rating."

"Well, why don't you just add a few fields to the existing form so that we fill them in then and there rather than having to go back, months later when we've forgotten all about the particular job and vehicle?"

Paul hadn't thought of that. He was however not brooking any dissent on this one and resorted to his usual tactic of shouting.

The drivers shook their collective heads, and as usual just got on with it. Good or bad, they wouldn't be seeing any bonuses.

Paul's creative counting

The Single Colour Parking scheme had been in operation for many months now and the drivers, as with so many of Paul's initiatives, had incorporated it into their daily routine to minimise the fuss. However, one new feature of the scheme was beginning to increasingly irk them. Often they would come into work the next morning and find that their vehicle - correctly parked in an appropriately coloured bay the night before - had been moved somewhere completely different without their having been asked. Worse than this was the fact that often no one seemed to know exactly where the vehicle had been moved to.

Paul's so-called Parking Managers operated without reference to any of the drivers and seemingly without being held to account to anyone as the blame for finding moved vehicles too late in the day would always find it's way back to the drivers and never rest on the shoulders of those who had effected the move, even if problems had occurred as a result.

Much investment had been funnelled the way of these Parking Managers. They had high salaries and a smart uniform and a vast office where they would periodically hold 'crisis meetings', even when there was apparently no crisis to be seen. When asked about vehicle moves or locations they would usually deny all knowledge, blaming it on the previous shift - which was of course impossible to track down for many days, if ever.

Moreover, they were uncontactable by the usual channels. Whilst just about everyone else on the site could be reached by telephone or pager this elite crew sported weird, Star Trek-like communication devices worn around the neck on a cord that instantly sprang into metallic voice the moment they spoke to each other across the compound but were mysteriously inaccessible to the drivers and just about all the other staff.

As usual, and without much hope, the drivers went to find Paul to see what could be done about these unregulated, unwitnessed, uncatalogued overnight vehicle moves. They started on what they thought might be a promising line of attack.

"Paul," they said. "A few months ago you introduced a scheme to limit the number of moves a vehicle underwent between entering and leaving the site in order to minimize risk and increase quality of service. Did you know that some vehicles are still being moved up to six times between journeys and that therefore sometimes we can't find them in the morning leading to delays in services?"

Paul thought awhile.

"Well," he countered, "if they are taking up a valuable 'rapid-exit' slot they might need to be moved so that a rapid-response vehicle can use the space."

"Granted," the drivers replied. "But that accounts for about one in twenty moves. What about the other nineteen?"

Paul thought awhile.

"We try and put similar vehicles into adjacent slots," he tried.

"Not very successfully. This morning I had to visit five car parks before I found my vehicle," one of the assembled drivers shot back. "Even the superintendent of the area where I had left my vehicle yesterday had no idea where it had gone to."

Paul thought awhile.

"But the figures don't indicate a problem," he retorted obstinately. "In the last six months no vehicle has been moved more than the target of twice between any two taskings."

"What!" The drivers were aghast at this blatant twisting of the facts. "You can't have been counting properly!"

"Depends at what point you start counting," thought Paul and smiled.