by: Cameron MacKenzie
I try to be a good consumer. I do that by rewarding companies that I think are doing good work and penalizing those that aren’t. If a product line turns south, I switch to a competitor until things get better, or they don’t. You can’t afford to be sentimental if the system is going to work properly, I tell myself, because the market is expressly built to allocate the right amount of funds to the proper locations. One could say (I could say) that the market is simply the movement of funds to the most advantageous locations, and my job—to help the market do its job—is to determine what “advantageous” is, and send my ducats along. And that all sounds like a good, logical rule. But a recent issue with my kid’s bus stop brought up some difficult questions.
My kid just started kindergarten this year. He gets on the bus, big yellow 120, at 7:05 every morning. The bus goes by our house, around the block, and then finally down to the bus stop a block away. On the first day, I walked him down there, gave him a pat on the head, wiped away one silent, stubborn tear that I blamed on allergies, and headed back home. So it went for the last few weeks of August. But by the second month of school, the bus was coming later, and then later, and by the middle of September old 120 is rolling around the corner at 7:30, right when I have to leave for work. Suddenly this whole kindergarten thing is a pain in my butt because I’ve got to drive the kid to school, and I’m steaming about what I see as a broken contract on the part of the school district.
It seems that the district awarded our routes to the lowest bidder, which didn’t have enough drivers to fulfill the contract. After the first month, the company loaded up our driver with extra routes, making her later, and later, and later.
But one morning I’m walking out to the bus stop at 7:25 and here comes the bus right in front of my house. It stops, and the driver opens the door and hurriedly waves my kid on. Then it goes around the block and eventually back down to the bus stop, where all the other kids and their parents are waiting with daggers coming out of their eyes. Sorry folks, but man, I need those five extra minutes.
So here’s the question: do I just take my kid out to the front of the house at 7:25 and make the bus stop there, or do I continue to take him down to the bus stop with everyone else?
My “good consumer” voice tells me that if I want a product to improve, I’ve got to put pressure on it. If that burns a bridge then fine; it was a bridge that deserved to get burnt.
But there’s another voice too—what I’ll call “The Walter”—who says that there is ONE bus stop, not TWO, and you can’t just start making bus stops wherever you damn well please, or the entire system falls into chaos. People that don’t follow the rules upset Walter. There are rules for a reason.
Walter’s a little tricky. I like him—I WAS him when I was younger—but, I’ll be honest, he can get kind of aggressive. And besides, Walter’s a little rule-bound, a little inflexible, a little too ready to look for an authority and follow it. And I’m not like that anymore. Or less than I used to be.
So what do I do?
I cave! I listen to Walter. My kid and I waive off the bus in front of the house and go down to the proper bus stop like good citizens and we wait for 120 to go around the block and come back at 7:30. I feel like a sucker, standing there with the dads drinking coffee, a spineless goober who wants to get along.
Ugh.
But after a week or so, something funny starts to happen. The bus starts coming earlier and earlier until, after a few days, we’re right back on time. Why? Because, I found out, parents were giving the school principals an earful, and the school principals were giving the school board an earful, and the school board was giving the bus company an earful, until they finally got their act together.
I think the truth of the situation is that, instead of worrying about who to screw over at, I need to worry instead about how to best communicate. It’s a lesson I can preach, but man, do I find it difficult to execute. I hope I can remember it. I hope that next time I don’t like how something’s going, I can be a little less anxious to enact revenge, and a little more anxious to communicate my concerns to someone who can fix the problem. Turns out I might still have a touch more Walter in me than I'd like to admit.
As the Dude advises, Walter’s not wrong, he can just be a bit of a jerk.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.