It’s always somebody else’s job. That was a message reinforced for me the other day when I had the duty of ordering all day catered brunch for the office for a Saturday. First, the place I was ordering from could not take the order directly. That’s right: I called the place, and the manager told me he could not take the order directly. I had to go online to do it.
So I went to their official website. Take the business directly to the merchant, right? One thing Amazon has not taken over (at least not at the moment I’m posting this). I went through the whole process of selecting the food, the payment information, delivery time, special instructions (hold the gravy), and hit the order button. No delivery available at the time selected, the message said.
Being a support specialist and able to think outside the restrictions of online programming, I selected a half dozen other delivery times, only to be shot down every time. Nothing to do but call the place back. The manager asked if I had tried a certain independent delivery site, assuring me that when their own site doesn’t work, the other has always been reliable.
This would probably not happen if this were Japan. One would be a bit sheepish to admit that going someplace else would be a better way to achieve success. It does appear to be more the norm for Americans these days. The latest commercials from Chewy.com suggest that you should not have to haul around bags of pet food; let the website take care of your pet shopping for you. Of course, they don’t say that somebody else has to get the bags of pet food down from a warehouse shelf, then ship it to you (requiring hauling by the postal service), or that you still need to do the hauling at home (or have the kids do it). The idea is to divvy up components of life to have more hands fulfilling what used to be an internal team job. Human Resources departments are becoming externally resourced, which is a bit disturbing: imagine a resource that is so many miles away from you, it is too remote to be truly human.
However, the site for the catering did work, and when the time came for the indies to start working for the restaurant, they bugged me half a dozen times to let me know via text message that the order was okay, a delivery person had departed the place with the order, and they were at the door of the office to deliver the order.
The thing was, I wasn’t at the office on Saturday, so I didn’t even eat the food. I guess I let somebody enjoy it for me.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 