of service calls for specialized residential repairs require a second visit when the technician lacks a single non-standard part. This number comes from a study of field operations and it tells a story of a quiet war between the front office and the driveway.
The percentage of specialized repairs that fail on the first attempt due to missing non-standard parts.
The front office wants a clean grid and they want to know where every nickel sits and they want the trucks to look like a showroom floor. The technician just wants to fix the house and he wants to go home. He knows that the house is a living thing and the house does not care about the inventory list.
The Era of the Junk Drawer
The man in the warehouse was very happy on Monday morning and he held a clipboard and he stood by the back of the white van. He told the technician that the era of the junk drawer was over and he said that the truck was now a lean machine.
He took out the plastic bin of old copper fittings and he took out the roll of odd-sized mesh and he took out the coffee can full of screws that did not have a name. He said these things were waste and they were a tax on the company and they made the truck heavy.
He put a new sticker on the shelf and the sticker said that only twelve items were allowed to live there. The technician looked at the pile of his old treasures on the concrete floor and he did not say anything because he knew that the man with the clipboard did not understand the way a raccoon breaks a soffit.
A Landscape of Entropy
When a technician drives through a neighborhood in Tampa he is driving through a landscape of entropy and heat and salt. The humidity in Florida eats the metal and the sandy soil shifts under the slabs and the bugs find the one gap that the builder did not see.
A standard inventory list assumes that every house is the same and it assumes that every problem has a code. But a veteran technician has a memory in his hands and he remembers the time he needed a specific kind of washer for an irrigation head in heat. He remembers the time a homeowner had a weird vent that required a bit of wire he found in a scrap heap five years ago.
The Brittle Comfort of the Spreadsheet
The front office calls this inventory shrinkage or they call it carrying cost and they think they are saving money. They see the $84 dollars of parts on the shelf and they think about the interest on that money and they think about the weight of the truck and the gas it burns.
They do not see the $160 dollars of labor and gas that it costs to drive back to that same house on Thursday because the technician did not have a two-cent piece of plastic. They have traded the wisdom of the field for the comfort of the spreadsheet and they have made the world a more brittle place.
1968
The British Rail Lesson
In the year the railway workers in Britain decided they wanted more money and they did not go on strike in the way people usually do. They did not walk out and they did not pick up signs and they did not stay home.
“They did a thing called a work-to-rule and they simply followed every single rule in the handbook to the letter. They checked every door and they tested every whistle and they stopped the train for every minor check that the book demanded.”
The entire rail system of the country came to a halt in less than two days because the rules were not meant to be followed perfectly. The rules were a guide but the system only worked because the men used their own judgment to ignore the parts that did not make sense.
This is what happens when you strip a truck of its stash and you tell the man that he is only as good as the list on his tablet. You are asking him to work-to-rule and you are taking away the distributed intelligence of the person who actually touches the problem.
The stash was not just a pile of junk and it was a collection of solutions for the 8% of the world that is not standard. When you throw away the scrap mesh and the weird screws you are throwing away the ability to be a hero on the first visit.
A Broken Promise
The homeowner does not care about the warehouse audit and she does not care about the lean inventory goals of the logistics manager. She cares about the wasp nest under the eave and she cares about the brown spot on the lawn and she wants it fixed before her kids come home from school.
When the technician says that he has to order a part or he has to go back to the shop he is breaking a promise that he did not even know he made. He is telling the homeowner that his system is more important than her time.
A company like Drake Lawn & Pest Control has to fight this urge to over-standardize because they are in the business of protection and protection is a messy job.
You cannot protect a home with a checklist alone and you need a man who has the right tool and the right part even if that part is not on the manifest for that day. The real value of a service company is not in the chemicals they use or the trucks they drive but in the capacity of the person at the door to solve the problem right now.
I think about my bookshelf and I think about the two missing bolts and I think about the technician who used to have a jar of those bolts in his side cabinet. He would have seen my frustration and he would have smiled and he would have reached into that jar and he would have saved my afternoon.
He would have been a neighbor and a pro and a savior of my Saturday. Now he is just a man who follows a process and the process says that I have to wait for a shipment from a warehouse in another state.
The empty shelf became the heavy weight of the second drive.
The cost of being right on paper is almost always paid by the person who is waiting at the window. We have decided that we want to measure everything and we have forgotten that some of the most important things cannot be counted.
It is the buffer against the unexpected and it is the margin for error that allows a job to be finished. If we keep cleaning the trucks until there is nothing left but the approved items we will find ourselves living in a world of half-finished bookshelves and second visits.
The Veteran’s Stash
We will have perfect books and very angry neighbors. I would rather have a technician with a cluttered truck and a memory for weird problems than a man with a clean van and an empty hand.
We need to trust the man in the driveway more than we trust the man with the clipboard and we need to let the veteran keep his stash. It is the only way the odd jobs ever get done.