You know these people, so do you have any insight as to why they did this?
Is it envy? “Screw this guy getting his fancy TV that I don’t have.” If not, what?
It seems needlessly cruel. I assume these are good people?
Is it envy? “Screw this guy getting his fancy TV that I don’t have.” If not, what?
It seems needlessly cruel. I assume these are good people?
The mood issue is real as well and it's less about personal feelings in general and more driven by how you're being treated at work. Any shift in the normal routine can set the mood of the entire warehouse and in return lead people into not caring. It could be announced mandatory overtime or even something as simple as removing something from the break room. Retaliatory action isn't seen as an inconvenience against the customer, it's a middle finger to corporate. You treat us like shit and we're going to make you feel it too, proxied through customer complaints about broken or missing items. Some individuals do go off the rails and it's usually related to some sort of perceived slight against them by the company. A lot of these could have been squashed if the manager didn't throw up their arms and say there was nothing they could do about it; take it up with HR. Most of the time if someone in corporate had just listened to the issue and let the employee get it off their chest, that would have been enough to calm the anger. What many white collar employees in the front office don't realize is how seriously some small and inconsequential issues can matter to blue collar laborers. This could go on and on about blue vs. white collar relations and management practices, but the point is that it's not about the customer so much as it is about internal politics and maintaining the status quo.
"Fragile" and other special instructions printed on the box are kind of insulting if you think about it. On the one hand, I'm a "professional" doing this for a living, so it's not like I need instruction from your I've-never-loaded-a-truck ass. And on the other hand, do I look like I have time to give your precious package special attention and follow your additional instructions for how it should be handled? It will be handled like all the rest. Maybe worse now that you pissed me off.
My pet peeve was the packing. If you've done a proper job of packing, i.e. fulfilling your responsibility to secure your stuff, you quickly find you don't need to proclaim "Fragile" on the outside. But if you don't pack well, and then write "Fragile" on it, you're kind of trying to transfer your responsibilities to me, and deserve a lesson.
This was judgmental young me talking, by the way. It's been a while since I did this. But speaking of judgment I also should mention the ultimate worthlessness of most of what people went to the trouble to ship. I handled a lot of B2B stuff, such as a region's worth of cigarette advertising for all the (insert name of convenience store chain here) in that region. Invariably marked "Fragile."
Just another example of how we all need to consider the lives, emotions, situations, feelings of others before jumping to conclusions. Life is never as simple as it may seem.
As a customer, if my box arrives smashed I am angry. If my box arrives smashed with a "Fragile" sign printed on it, I feel insulted. I guess in the second case the complaint is going to be worse and the reputation of the shipping company damaged even more ("They can't even deliver a 'fragile' parcel properly")
I especially agree with their point around properly packaging items.
Having said that, I can see how physical exhaustion and stress would lead to careless handling of goods.
That said, it's policy not to treat packages marked 'fragile' differently. Boxes get reused a lot, and a sticker like that has very little correlation with it actually being fragile. (60lb box of bolts? Fragile! 2' by 4' mirror that shatters from a 1 ft drop? Not fragile!)
For bicycles in particular, the issue IMO is that they're typically packed terribly, while being large and awkward enough to be handled with all the other large and heavy (70-150 lbs) stuff.
Damages will occur, it's just a matter of statistical frequency at a scale of 20 million packages per day handled by 100,000+ employees. Frequently, the damage won't even be discovered until delivery, and then there's no easy way to attribute the damage properly. That means aside from particularly egregious stuff where it's obvious you screwed up (say, laying a 55" TV flat and dropping a 30 lb box on it) you have to go way up the management chain to find anyone who cares. At a lower level, easily measured metrics like process rate are far more important.
If everyone in management you ever interacted with only measured your performance by LOC written, how much time would you spend refactoring?
The guy who said he purposely damages things was burnt out from working there for 5+ years. It brought out a side in him that I didn't know existed honestly. I was pretty shocked when he told me about it. Outside of work, he was extremely chill and fun to be around.
How about these people do something with their incredibly valuable short lives other than being miserable? Unless you're in chronic pain of some kind, being alive is a gift. It's a treasure. Every moment is precious.
That said if it’s a weekly habit that’s another story.
On top of that they would hate you for demonstrating that it could be done better, like being the guy who does not drive n over posted speed limit (n varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but is a positive number almost everywhere). And bosses probably expect speed and care, in that order, but that isn't the main mechanism.
But it does look like at least some are worth the extra effort to damage?
There is a monumental difference between throwing 20lb packages all day vs. picking them up and setting them down. Your body will tell you that it's just not sustainable in the long run if you want to live without persistent pain. You can very easily learn this by observing anyone who's done the job for more than a year or two - they might look like they're being lazy but they are really just trying not to hurt themselves. You might throw one or two in anger, but repeatedly throwing packages for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 48 weeks will make you regret it. There is nothing more painful and hopeless on the job than a mechanical injury you feel in every single box you move. You learn to do it without hurting yourself and this almost never involves being careless with the package. The consequences might not come from being reprimanded about broken items, but it will come in the form of injury and pain.
- terrible pay - long hours - silly computerised targets
It's difficult to care about your job if your job doesn't care about you.