My wife is perennially getting cheesed of when her apparently simple instructions to the house help or gardener are not carried out to her satisfaction. What is so difficult with cleaning windows, sweeping under the bed, folding clothes, arranging the pantry she constantly wonders? What is so difficult with measuring out the salt that you put in the food, in using the condiments that she spends a fortune on in cooking, in using the fabric softener when doing the laundry, in correctly ironing the clothes after they are dry or even in knowing when to change the bed sheets she fumes?
Imagine for a moment that there was a shortage of trained lab technicians. Being a senior scientist, you naturally do not want to get your hands dirty on mundane things so that you may focus on the strategic technical and scientific developments that you are highly trained to do. So what do you do since you want someone to do the spade work for you carrying and arranging the pipettes, Bunsen burners, droppers, evaporating dishes, petri dishes, microscopes, beakers, flat bottomed and round bottomed flasks and whatnots and mixing chemicals and gases in exact proportions and at specific temperatures as well as taking due care and ensuring that all the safety issues associated with a laboratory that will make it remain a safe environment to work in are taken care of. You obviously look for someone to do what you expect them to do and with a modicum of intelligence that means that you will instruct them once and given their own skills and technical knowledge including the relativity table they should be able to carry out that task effortlessly and leave you to the difficult job of scientific development.
But I had mentioned that there was a shortage of these trained lab techs so what next? Naturally being a busy man you spread the word that you are looking for someone with certain skills and expertise to assist you in your work and voila someone who knows someone’s cousin is looking for a job tells you that they can get someone for you. After a few harried and testy questions (remember you are a busy man) you hire yourself a lab technician. Being the busy man that you are, the business of vetting and obtaining references and recommendations takes a back seat and you get to work.
Despite being busy, for the first few days you are patient with your new found lab tech and he seems to be catching up always eager to ask questions and understand your methodologies and is mixing chemicals in the right proportions and concentrations and arranging for you the required equipment with few if any mistakes. However you will never know that when left alone and unsupervised that lab tech you hired is a klutz of the worst kind, unschooled and unaware of the most basic of safety rules while in a laboratory and worse still prone to periods of myopia when he is nursing a hangover and therefore a danger not only to himself but to other around him.........until something dramatic, fatal or injurious to property or life happens!!
That my friends and senior scientists is how we hire those that we entrust with our children and our most prized possessions in our homes to cook for us and wash for us and wash up after us. We are patient with them the first few days as they get to learn the ropes but leave them to their own designs thereafter and complain when they get it wrong or do not live up to the mark. We forget that we are dealing with an ill-trained human being desperate to get a job and willing to try anything to get a salary at the end of the month even if it means lying to us. We forget that we need to vet these people and take references and do our homework to ensure that what they profess to be proficient in is actually backed up with a reference somewhere. We end up hiring drunks, rapists, thieves and assorted dregs of society simply because we are too busy to take time and do what is necessary to ensure that safety issues are well demonstrated and a semblance of common sense is apparent in those that we hire. Many of the expensive gadgets that we have in our homes are also alien to them and unless they are trained in how to use them they will just remain just that, expensive gadgets instead of the time saving conveniences the manufacturer intended!
So when in a moment of inattention you give your gardener clear instructions to bring you the three newspapers or when you tell him to wash up an oil spill in your garage until it is as clean as the rest of the garage floor, don’t be surprised when he brings you three Daily Nations (as happened to a friend recently and with all due respect to him) or he gets some acid from god knows where and then proceeds to almost burn a hole in the garage floor in his efforts to ensure that he fulfills your instructions don’t get upset.
Instead empathize with them!
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