At the time, it seemed perfectly logical
SteveLast night on the HR Happy Hour show, 'HR Horror Stories II', I shared a tale from one of my college summer jobs, as a landscaper in a large cemetery. The details of the story are kind of interesting if not all that important, suffice to say that we, (not me personally, mind you, I was kept at a safe distance from this sort of thing), had managed to 'place' a couple of recent arrivals to our facility in the wrong plots, and they needed to be 'swapped'.
flickr - casch52
In case you (and I hope this is most of you), have not had a close encounter with the process of digging, positioning, leveling, and backfilling burials, to effect this 'swap' would require several hours of work, varying in intensity from not too hard, (operating the backhoe), to pretty hard, (raising, transporting, and replacing the coffins). It was not a normal kind of activity for us, in the two summers I worked there this was the one and only occurrence of such a situation.
So in the morning we got the order that essentially read - 'Dig up Person A. Dig up Person B. Put Person A where Person B was, and vice versa'. And get this all done by 4:00PM, because no way we are paying overtime to any of you goofballs.'
Ok, I added the 'Goofballs' bit.
You would think that it would be the kind of hard, tedious, and unappealing task that the staff would try to avoid, as most of our days consisted of driving around on riding lawn mowers. When the supervisor asked the seasonal help for volunteers to assist the 'real' staff, I stepped up, figuring I had six more weeks of riding around on the mower before I went back to college, and a day of exhuming and re-interring bodies seemed sort of appealing by comparison.
I hopped in one of the pickup trucks accompanied by one of the long-time, permanent cemetery workers who immediately shared his excitement and enthusiasm that he was assigned this duty, and he continued on to congratulate me on volunteering for the job, as it would be 'the best deal I had all summer'. I sort of thought the guy was a little weird to begin with, so the comment did not phase me too much, and I figured that at the very least the whole exercise would make for a good story. I suppose I was right as here I am telling it again after more that 20 years.
When we arrived at the plot of 'Person A' rather than call up the heavy equipment, and proceed the (likely nasty) process of exhumation, I was instructed to hop out of the truck, and grab the little plastic sign that served as a temporary marker (the permanent gravestone had not yet been placed), and get back in. We then drove the short distance (none of the permanent staff walked anywhere when they could drive), where I snatched the temporary plastic marker from the site of 'Person B', and replaced it with the one for 'Person A'. We completed our version of the exhumation/re-internment by putting the marker for 'B' on the original site of 'A'.
Yep, instead of actually digging up and re-burying, we simply switched the temporary markers that had been placed on the sites. We saved ourselves several hours of hard work, were able to slack off for the rest of the day, (the staff were incredibly adept at hiding and doing nothing), and for the families/customers of 'A' and 'B', when they next came to the cemetery and saw the recently upturned soil and the temporary marker with the 'right' name, they were happy that the error had been 'corrected'. In a way we made it right, without actually doing the right thing.
As I look back, I am not especially proud of the story, I can rationalize it by saying I was just a 19 year old kid on a summer job and was trying to not make too many waves and get into trouble with the permanent crew. We should have moved Persons A and B like we were instructed. But thinking about it now, did it really matter that we didn't actually move them?
The only people that truly cared, the families, were convinced that we had actually executed the switch. The owners of the cemetery only cared that the customers were happy, which they were. The workers drove off to hide and sleep in their trucks for most of the day.
If Person A and Person B were unhappy, they sure weren't talking.
So if everyone ended up happy, why do I still feel a little guilty?
Reader Comments (4)
You still feel shitty because it was a shitty thing to do, and you wouldn't be you if you weren't ashamed of shoddy work. We all have an experience like this, a time when we didn't do our best/looked for the easy way out/didn't want to rock the boat and the list of excuses is longer than my career. But it's exactly this behavior -- looking the other way when the CEO drinks a little too much and hits on one of the interns at the sales meeting, your colleague in arms with whom you're traveling adds a few meals together to his/her expense report that never happened or were hot dogs and chips at the ballpark to cover those game tickets, or one of the sales people fobs off a reconditioned something or other on the customer because you're out of the new ones -- that is death to employee engagement, a culture of integrity, and a lot of other important aspects of organizational success. And the erosion of these important corporate values begins one "look the other way" at a time. Are we all a little guilty of this? Yes we are. But the good ones among us, like you, feel so shitty about an early experience of this type that they carry the dislike with them forever as a reminder that taking the easy way out isn't who they are.
Thanks so much Naomi for the insightful thoughts and comments. I agree that once you start taking the easy way out and cutting corners then it is a quick slide to scandal and loss of ethics and control.
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Wow, I thought I had oddball summer jobs...