The 15 Hour Work Week

The Rant

First off, I am not a YouTuber. I'm not going to sugar coat my observations or hand out hall passes to poor behavior to appease sponsorships or pass the checks of an algorithm. (Side Note: Have you noticed EVERY YouTube pulls back at the very end no matter how much evidence they present or how dramatic they were being in the middle of the video?)

There is pitiful lack of work ethic in the white collar working division of the United States. Particularly in regards to communications and paperwork processing. Support roles play a massive part in how our economy functions.

Sometimes you might just want to get things done on a Saturday or on Thanksgiving, and you'll be shit out of luck, but the problem I want to discuss is the weekends/holidays eating the workweek.

Inside of the 40 hour workweek, things have corroded. Mondays are groggy. Mornings have longer bootups. come ~3PM everyone is waiting to rush out the door or already leaving. Friday everyone is checked out or rushing to meet a deadline they procrastinated on. You're not gonna hear from anyone. The 40 hour work week has dissolved into a 15 hour one.

Cry Harder

If you've worked in an office job, in the public or private sector, then I'm sure this sounds familiar:

"Oh it's almost the weekend" "Oh it's a holiday" "Oh people are just getting back from holiday" "Oh it's summer everyone's on vacation" "Oh it's end of year wrap-up" "Oh it's start of year planning" "Oh it's lunch hour"

Yea this is the dicussion happening when they should be on their computer and actually helping people out ... like they're getting paid to do. The break is for when you're done. Not something to sit around yapping about.

Everything from hiring, retirement processing, receiving healthcare paperwork, getting business development traction, to introducing new ideas, implementing process efficiency, or just trying to get some information have been dramatically slowed down. The people behind the desk, assigned with these tasks, are not very useful, and the technology replacing them is arguably even worse.

Chatbots are completely useless for getting rich insights into something, developing a relationship with an organization, or trying to have specific questions answers. Chatbots can regurgitate basic shit in a rigid subset of answers - no different from an automated phone line.

LLM's have been offered as a potential solution to this, but given their tendency to hallucinate, need for full context to be useful, and most people's inability to properly prompt them, that's not going to be very helpful either.

If you are trying to get anything done when working with U.S. organizations, and do not have special privilges to access people with the ability to expedite, you are essentially left holding your dick in your hand and entirely on their terms. There's no guarantee you'll get anything of value even if you manage to get ahold of a human.

American Express

American Express is renowned for its customer service. You might think that simply being an alternative to Visa or Mastercard are what make it appealing, you might look at their fancier offerings and lucrative card benefits and think that's what keeps them afloat, but truly, it is the customer support and the consistent reliability they have offered in that respect.

When I call American Express with an issue or to dispute a charge, I know with near-certainty I am going to get to speak with a competent human that is willing to hear me out on the details of my issues, can see my information on their end, and actually work with me to get something done.

I have seldom encountered this level of competent cooperation from the customer service departments of other firms. They do exist, but it is usually a diamond-in-the-rough scenario rather than the norm. I have also not encountered this level of commitment to actually doing the thing they're getting paid to do from people interviewing me, or during project proposals.

Imagine a world where every interaction with an organization went as smoothly as it does with the Amex Customer Support division. When you see what quality looks like, you really start to see how little effort everyone else is putting in. Truth be told, I don't think American Express is forcing anyone to do anything special- they are literally just doing their job to the best of their ability for the full 40 hour work week. It really should not be a selling point, but it is.

Bogged Down

On the flip side, in the critical function of society (blue collar, first responders, necessary IT functions) you will tend to find skeleton crews that are extremely overworked and would have no free time to respond to you. I don't hear them bitching. I'm not upset that they can't get back to me. They're actually doing their job. They're not gooning all day about whatever Trump or Elon or Zendaya are doing. Wow!

People who are actually working on critical functions are not the intended target of this piece. If you're a software engineer, EMT, plumber, truck-driver, warehouse worker, it's not your job to get back to me! That is explicitly why we have people that are assigned to sit there and provide correspondence. They aren't doing shit.

Conclusion

I imagine most people who are designated with sitting behind a desk and providing correspondence or passing information along spend most of their time scrolling through Reddit, TikTok, YouTube. A decent amount might be actively participating in political activisim instead of doing their job.

It should not be this difficult to have humans that are actually quality at what they're supposed to be doing. If they're not doing their work, fuck it, replace them with the crappy technology. At least I'll know I'm talking to a useless bot and won't get my hopes up. This would cut cost too. If you're paying your staff to sit there, be shit at their job, and work less than 50% of what their contract specifies they should be doing, then you're really bad at running a business. Please step down from whatever leadership role you're currently in if that is you.

The point of these roles is to keep things flowing smoothly, manage the human capital or ideas of organizations, help regular people out with something important, or to just answer a damn question. It should complement the critical functions of organizations, not stifle them.

The people doing these jobs are lazy fucks. This is a waste of money for the businesses employing them. There is really nothing else to it. Replace them with reliably crappy technology, or fire them and hire people willing to do a better job. Simple.