One of the drivers was retiring. He had been unwell for some time and had therefore been unable to do much work. The other drivers tried their best to cover for him but it was quite a long time before Paul appointed a short term replacement to help with the workload. This new appointment however was a tremendous help and worked hard and within a very few months the drivers noticed that, with this extra capacity, the waiting times from customer inquiry to job completion had more than halved.
They were very pleased with this but acknowledged that even with this new bonus help they were still only just coping. They were delighted when one of Paul's assistant managers told them that they could convert this temporary post into a permanent one and so they spent some time considering what skills the new appointee should possess to best cope with current demands and to fit in with their strategy. The driver who was retiring had driven mostly Plymouths and the English Reliable Caravan Pulling vehicle for which there wasn't that much call these days; rather the drivers wanted help with the increasing demand for the Economy Mid Range car that was becoming very popular.
The other aspect of the departing driver's work had been time in the Research and Development workshop looking at ways to repair big ends and he had quite a reputation in this field. Many of the other drivers didn't quite see the point of this as once the big end was broken there wasn't much could be done to fix it and the car was generally consigned to the scrap heap.
Paul then had an idea.
"I know," he said to the assembled company. "We could use the money I had initially earmarked for your replacement to get a top class innovator in the field of big ends and recruit him to work here. We can then become a world-class big end centre. That would really put this branch of the National Hire Service on the map"
"But Paul," they lamented. " If you do that then the day to day service will crumble back to the shabby state it was in before we got our temporary replacement driver. You might end up with a world-class big end research centre but you'll also have a third class driving service. We'd struggle to be the best branch in this county, never mind the world."
"But the world-class big end man would help you," countered Paul.
"Nonsense Paul," they replied. "He'll be off taking big ends apart all day and then going to conferences to talk about it. We wouldn't get a shred of real work out of him - after all, that's not his job."
"But a part of my vision for this place is to make it world-class," sniffed Paul, clearly upset that yet again he might be thwarted.
"Walk before you can run, Paul," they soothed. "Walk before you can run."
No comments:
Post a Comment