The Efficiency Craze Gives Productivity a Drubbing

I keep pondering this matter of productivity in our economy. Huff huff, the United States is supposedly a leader in productivity. We’re warned that we’d better get more productive still if we’re going to keep our edge.

I wonder how such things are measured.

In my everyday experience, our breathless determination to be efficient has now come around to bite us on the ankles. We think we’re getting somewhere, but are we really?

According to the federal government, productivity is a simple measure. The nation’s economic output, excluding farms, is divided by the number of hours worked to produce it. The percentage change in this number measures our efficiency back to 1947, when someone first dreamed up the idea.

Thus, we have become 2.2% more efficient each year, on average, for 53 years. No wonder life is so great, huh?

I see productivity differently.

I’ve been wrangling with the telephone company again. Six weeks ago, I paid $213 to have a second telephone line installed in the house. Ever since, it’s been like living with a newborn. Sometimes when the phone rings I hear a voice. Other times I receive only an ear-piercing screech.

Seventeen repair calls and complaints to four supervisors later, I have learned a lesson in efficiency. Each time I contact the company, a “ticket” is opened on my case. The overriding goal of the repair department is to close this ticket. If the line can be made to work, good. Otherwise, well, closing tickets, not making repairs, is how the phone company measures productivity.

When the ticket is closed, I get a prerecorded phone call that tells me the problem with my line has been located and repaired as of 3:58 p.m., or 6:02 p.m. I call back and say, but it’s not fixed. Sorry, but when the ticket is closed, the automated system must dispense its rewards.

Company experts blamed my telephone, not their line. So I bought another phone. They closed the ticket. When the line screeched anew, I was advised that my new telephone could be, coincidently, faulty too, and in exactly the same way. I refused to buy another phone. They closed another ticket.

As I figure it, the telephone company has been fiddling for six weeks to no certain outcome. By its accounting, all repair calls resulted in the rapid closing of tickets. The productivity tyrants are pleased.

Meaningless productivity like this permeates everyday life. During intervals when my telephone functions, I am assaulted by threatening calls. It seems I was assigned a phone number that recently belonged to a deadbeat. This woman defaulted on her government-guaranteed student loan. So I am drawn into another round of efficiency madness: debt collection via waves of recorded messages that I can’t stop. I don’t have the necessary Social Security number to penetrate the lender’s automated call-back apparatus, and there is no live person to talk to.

The shuck is self-evident. The lender doesn’t really care about collecting this loan. But the government requires proof of attempts to collect. These recorded calls are the cheapest way to do it. Maybe this will show up on next year’s report as an increase in productivity.

Yes, we could go on all day about the irritating, self-defeating efficiencies we impose on ourselves. Ever more businesses are hiring evermore empty-headed, untrained employees in the belief that reducing payroll is productive for the bottom line.

At the grocery, I call attention to a rack of cheese sprouting green mold. The clerk looks and pronounces the cheese fine. She points to the “sell by” date and explains, “See, it’s good until May 2010.” At my local home improvement emporium, they sell closet rods and mounting sockets in sizes that do not fit each other. “I dunno,” says the manager when I ask why.

Computer companies, presumably those with the most to gain from e-commerce, reduce their customer services to keep ahead of declining profits. My FedEx deliverywoman says she has noticed a corresponding uptick in the return of computers purchased online. She picks up and sends back about half of those computers she delivers now because the customers cannot get them to function. I presume this will soon necessitate another cutback in service hotlines to keep productivity in line with profits.

But enough complaining. I need to turn to productive matters myself. I’ve got to switch long-distance carriers and earn myself 5,000 bonus frequent-flyer airline miles. If only I can get the telephone to work. Our breathless determination to be efficient has now come around to bite us on the ankles.