Micro microeconomics

You can tell how well an economy is performing by certain (trailing) indicators: how well low-level service jobs are performed. When the economy is doing well, these jobs are being filled by less skilled, less competent, less motivated workers. When the economy is doing poorly, these jobs are being staffed by people who are often seriously over-qualified for the work, but need the money. I've often jokingly referred to this as "Russon's Law of Economics", always in the context of suffering through terrible service at a store or restaurant.

On that basis, I'd have to say that the Ontario economy is performing far better than the official numbers indicate: service and entry level jobs are being performed as badly as I've ever seen. For example, in the office complex at work, there's a coffee shop offering the usual variety of hippy-dippy frappy latté options. It's becoming a joke between me and the manager that they can't get my own order right twice running (unless he or the assistant manager does it). I've had several unidentifiable beverages offered to me that then have to be thrown out and re-made properly. And, of course, the staff turn over at a fairly high rate (I've been going in there for three months, and over that time, only the manager and assistant manager are still there).

That's not too surprising . . . coffee shop jobs aren't the sort of thing that people aspire to as career moves. But it's not just coffee shop jobs that are showing this kind of downward drift in skill and attention. My employer has been trying to get a set of business cards printed — for months — and the printer seems to be staffed by illiterate and incompetent shaved baboons.

In this run, there are four managers who need new business cards. The information is sent to the printer electronically, and they set the cards and fax back proofs for us to examine and approve. We went through nine proofs before we could sign off on them.

Now think about this for a second . . . a business card has only a few key elements: the company name, the person's name, the title, the address, the email address, and the telephone numbers. Even if you got each of them wrong, it shouldn't take more than one more proof to fix things, right?

I can only assume, on the evidence presented in the successive proofs, that they were throwing away the draft each and every time and starting over from scratch . . . because each proof showed new and different errors!

I wasn't keeping track of the errors (because I never thought it would take so long to fix them), but the first time out, the company name was missing from three of the four cards. The next time, that error recurred, but now they'd used the same telephone number for all four cards. The time after that, still no company name on three of four, but now a different — wrong — number was used for the cell phone numbers on all the cards. And so on, and so on.

The actual printed cards finally showed up yesterday, and there's still a minor glitch on my own card, but it's close enough to correct that it's not worth the time and effort to try to get it fixed.

What's even scarier is that this is the fourth printer we've used, and (according to the person who deals with the printers) the other three were worse.

Oh, yes. The economy is doing just fine . . .