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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

What bothered me about running TrueTech is that customers would sometimes demand repercussions against employees for making mistakes.

Enter Frans Plugge. Whenever a customer would get into that mode we'd fire Frans. This was easy, simply because he didn't exist in the first place (his name was pulled from a skit by two Dutch comedians, bonus points if you know who and which skit).

This usually then caused the customer to recant on how he/she never meant for anybody to get fired...

It was a funny solution and we got away with it for years, for one because it was pretty rare to get customers that mad to begin with and for another because Frans never wrote any blog posts about it ;)

But I was always waiting for that call from the labor board to ask why we fired someone for who there was no record of employment.

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It is unreasonable for me to think that company owners should have the spine to say, "We take the decision to fire someone very seriously. We'll take your comments under consideration, but we retain sole discretion over such decisions."

It irks me that businesses fire people because of pressure from clients or social media. But having never been the boss, I may be missing something.

One reason to like a facet of Japanese management culture: if a customer wants someone to rake over the coals you offer management, not employees.

Internal repercussions notwithstanding, externally the company is a united front. It cannot cause mistakes by luck, accident, or happenstance, because the world includes luck, accidents, and happenstance, so any user-visible error is ipso facto a failure of management.

apparently this is (or was) a job in japan. companies would hire what amounts to an actor to get screamed at by the angry customer, and pretend to get fired on the spot. rinse, repeat whenever such appeasement is required.

I know one person who does this for real estate developers. He gets involved in contentious projects early on, goes to community meetings, offers testimony before the city council, etc. When construction gets going and people inevitably get pissed about some aspect of the project, he gets publicly fired to deflect the blame while the project moves on. Have seen it happen on three different projects in two cities now and, somehow, nobody catches on.

I don't know how to describe this in a single word or phrase appropriately, but I think it is a "genius problem" to exist. Not a genius solution. I feel that the problem itself is impressive and rich in layers of human nature, local culture etc - but once you have such a problem any average person could come up with a similar solution, because it is obvious.

It's still mind blowing and very amusing that this is a thing in our world!

Do you have a citation for that? I am curious; it's something I've never heard of and goes against my intuitions/experience regarding what traditionally managed Japanese companies would do. (Entirely possible it has happened! Hence the cite request.)

Imagine if the customer saw the same actor getting fired in different companies! Is the customer going to catch on? More likely, they will think "Yeah, no wonder there was a problem. This same incompetent dude wormed his way into this company too" :-)

There's a movie sketch in here somewhere. A guy has the worst day of his life, every single thing goes wrong, and at every single company the same person is "responsible" for the issue.

Awesome! The first movie ever made based on an anonymous comment on HN. Wait. So I can't get a cut in the profits then?

Well, well, well...scribbles note into Trello: "Today I got fired, it was all my fault, our poor customers suffered" Blog posts as a service.

Inspired by the Daniel Pennac's novels? https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_Malauss%C3%A8ne

The BBC staff have a term for the way the corporation almost does this: "deputy heads will roll"

I always thought that was more a cynical take on the fact that the top guy was protected, rather than underlings.

Yes, exactly. Hence almost.

Historically some cultures practiced mock firing as a way to appease an angry customer. This was back in the day when most business transactions occured face to face so the owner should demand the employee to pack their belonging and leave the premises in full view of the customer. Of course this is all for show but this kind of public humiliation seems to satisfy even the most difficult customers.

Even when the customer knew it was show, I see it as a way of saying, "yes, we acknowledge that we screwed up and make a public, highly visible note of it that will be recorded in the annals of peoples' gossip in this area".

On the contrary, I think it's quite reasonable.

Did you ever insist that Frans must be fired and refuse to accept the "we didn't mean it?"

Cause that sounds pretty great.

Well, by then he was fired... :)

and mercilessly beaten?

Koot en Bie - Mannen Bellen

https://open.spotify.com/track/0tzlDFcFSNRUaaPnINWo8B

That's one deserved upvote :)

To what lengths did you keep that up? Did you just tell the client that informally, formally in a reunion or so, or did you actually put it in writing or even fake some "firing" paperwork?

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