#6 Rick and Joe
It was the first day for Rick to start his new job at the dispatch center. Rick felt weird as he had to leave his previous work and routine to start a new one. A new task not only for him but a very important change in the company as a whole. Rick was chosen for reasons that were not very clear to him, as he always felt just an average worker, a good average, but still pretty normal among his peers. He was chosen between his peers to try a new process or what the bosses of the company called a revolution in the way of working of simple workers like Rick. Most others were unsure about this new change and policy and mostly they were skeptical of change as a whole. Once you are trained for years to optimize every single step to perfection as every millisecond of delay could be multiplied into millions of losses, any change seems gigantic. But most of all, getting acquainted with a new task might be a long and tedious process, but Rick felt great about it.
Joe, on the other end, started the day in the same way he always started his day. He was there standing and resting at his station on standby, waiting for someone to tell him what to do, what to pick and where to put it. Trivial actions for him after years of work, but that was what he liked about it. Some aspire for variation in work, for stepping up to more complex tasks, but Joe deeply enjoyed the repetitive nature of his work. Most of his mental effort was focused on not fucking it up, no questioning of the commands meant no responsibility on mistakes, which meant at the end a very clear and peaceful mindset. Just follow the set of orders that you receive, do what you are told to do, go on with your life. He loved this feeling about this job: no drama.
Rick was extremely unsure about what to do. No one told him anything or gave him any instructions or material to prepare himself for this day. He was placed in a room by himself, a place that he never saw before. The workday started with a loud whistle and the mechanical sound of every other line at work started to raise. There were some colorful levers and of different size and shape in front of him. None of which seemed familiar, but some that seemed more grazable than others. Somewhere vertical weirdly shaped cylinders, some were a tiny metal block on some rail. He knew they were levers or controls, but not really sure for what. The only thing Rick was told, was that today was a training. They told him that he would be working in a ‘sandbox’, where no actions that he would perform would lead to serious damage or mistakes for anyone. He was free to learn the task by himself. This was the new style of work that his company was adapting to. “It’s open learning! we want you to feel empowered to discover and master a task by yourself!” his bosses always told him. “It is a new era of liberated and self-thought work for you.” It did indeed felt pretty liberating for once. No commands, no repetitive actions. Just figure out the best way to work on your own. He only knew that he had to achieve a simple task, moving a box to a pallet, but through these new controls.
Rick instinctively grabbed the weirdly shaped cylinder in front of him and started to move it left and right, front and back to see what movements were allowed.
Joe was there in his workstation waiting for the day to start when the work day signal went off. Another day in the line of work. Another day picking cardboards boxes and moving them around. He was happy with anything that he was told to do, anything that didn’t require too much thinking. However, the line wasn’t starting as fast as he was used to. Actually, nothing was moving at all. He was waiting for a signal or something, but nothing happened. At a certain point, he did hear some sort of command. He wasn’t really sure what that meant. But he turned left and then right. Joe thought this was his boss playing around with him. He was sometimes doing that when he was bored or angry.”Being a boss must be hard” thought Joe “You have to make decisions for others and get responsibility for your action”. However as the same commands went on for a while, Joe started questioning whether some loop of communication or error in transmission was happening between his boss’s control panel and Joe’s workstation.
Rick started to get a hold of the controls in front of him. The lever seemed to work and after a few times, he got a sense of the range of motion of what he was controlling. He saw another lever on the right of the big red horizontal bar. Was he supposed to use that? “Why not trying. Anyway is a training day no?” he thought between himself. The big red bar would move only up and down. Probably this was opening and closing a claw or something like that. That seemed easy, one lever to direct, one bar to pick. That was the exact same sort of actions and commands he was used to receiving during his work on the line. Move there, pick that and repeat. However, now he was himself through this lever giving the same commands to something else.
Joe felt a bit lost as he was told to pick things that were not boxes, to move around and open his claw at random points. What was the point of that? Finally, Joe received some clearer commands, the communication issue was probably fixed. So he thought he finally started his workday. As the line started moving in front of him and boxes started to flow, Joe had to pick the boxes and move them on a pallet nearby. He missed a few, which was not normal of him. His boss was not sharp that day probably. His commands were confusing and different. “What was happening up there? Did they put a new boss to control my workstation ?” Joe thought while missing the fourth box of the day. “Why would they put a new boss now? I am one of the best workers with the most efficient box-per-hour ratio?’ He continued in his head.
Rick finally got it. He was there sitting at the commands for a reason. He got promoted from the workstation to the command station. Only ‘bosses’ used to be there where he was standing. He felt weird about it. This was something that he never thought possible. Him, Rick, a simple line worker having other line workers under him? He suddenly felt happy and excited but also troubled because he was now in a position of telling one of his peers what to do now. He was controlling one of his former colleague to pick up boxes. Was this right? Will this be ok with the others now? But as time went by, moving levers felt a lot easier and more rewarding than moving heavy boxes by himself.
Joe was angry and annoyed about the situation. This was ruining his clean sheet of work. It would hurt his reputation probably. It will bring down all the efficiency of the line. “They might even change me with a newer worker now”. Then suddenly everything got back to normality, actually even smoother than before. As the day ended he achieved more work than he used to, his boss somehow figured out a new combination of action that saved even more time than before. As the work day ended with another whistle Joe received a message in the command line from his boss.
“Hey Joe, I’m Rick. It’s weird, but I’m the one controlling you. So I guess I’m your boss now. Good that it’s a robot arm like you and not a human, right?”
