In some ways, especially after the last few months, I can understand the growing anger in the United States, especially at incompetence.
I don’t like mowing the lawn, and after years of doing it, I hired a lawn service. For years, everything was fine, but the past year has been a bit of a trial, both for me and for the owner of the firm, who’s had to fire people because of their carelessness and their sloppy performance, and in my case, for repeatedly ripping out sprinkler heads, which caused additional damage, and failing to mow parts of the lawn – despite the fact that they’re well paid.
For years, I’ve subscribed to a local/regional newspaper. It used to arrive in my driveway between 6:30 and 7:00 A.M. Now, and for the past few months, it arrives between 7:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. or so, and almost one day a week it doesn’t arrive at all but comes along with the next day’s paper a day after it was due – and the subscription price has tripled in the last two years.
Then, there’s the local tree surgeon/trimmer, who turns down work, if he doesn’t like people, or doesn’t feel like it, and the alternative is an outfit that costs more and whose work is problematic to say the least.
I’ve already mentioned the incompetence of the Tovala food service outfit, but I’ve also run into it in the professional area. As some readers may know, the protagonists of The Grand Illusion are not whitebread, but have skin tones in the range of dark honey, and the books take place in a very urban environment – yet one of the covers I got for an audio version showed two very white Caucasians in the middle of a forest (where they’ve never been in all three books) with the equivalent of laser knives (when Steffan and Avraal rely on old-fashioned throwing knives in a society that has no electricity). This was hardly an example of competence, especially when it took three tries to get the cover remotely close to the “reality” of the book.
For professional reasons, I won’t go into the more egregious examples in the publishing field, but I will mention, without more details, the senior editor of an extremely best-selling author who failed to edit the manuscripts and books of other assigned authors for over a year before he was let go. I will note that, in the publishing industry, the terminology is almost always that so-and-so left to pursue other interests. Fortunately, my editor is far more responsible and diligent.
It’s also not just me. My wife ordered a fog machine for one of her spring opera productions – and received an elaborate dog bed. She checked the order and the invoice to make sure it wasn’t her error. They both specified a fog machine and had the right number. The Music Department is now looking for a new secretary/administrative assistant. The previous one left because, among other reasons, she wanted to do a face-to-face job remotely and had the habit of being unavailable, even online.
Our son has had to fire sales associates because they’re unreliable and don’t want to do the grunt-work (like restocking the shelves and storage areas) of the high-end men’s stores he’s in charge of and where they worked.
I’ve never seen anything like the amount of these examples, all within the last few months, nor in these numbers, in more than fifty years, and yet, as we all know, prices have also increased. So who says that incompetence doesn’t pay?