I am not the sort of person who gets off on tooting his own horn... but on this occasion I’ll make an exception. The above “Conway’s Law” is one of the myriad variations on Murphy’s Law that have cropped up over the years. This one, like a lot of others, gave me a bit of a chuckle, even if I wasn’t quite sure I understood it.
I sure af understand it now.
I have supposedly been retired for a little over three months from the hotel I managed. “Supposedly” I say because I keep getting called for this or asked to do that, etc, etc. (In fact, as I write this it’s 3:15 in the morning and I’m doing the night audit for a clerk who couldn’t make it in.) At this place of business, I was the one who knew what was going on... the guy who could fix every problem, the one who knew how to deal with the customers and the operating system and the milk delivery people and... well, you name it. In fact, only two other people have any seniority at all (and one of them has pretty serious health issues).
I am getting hit in the face with this ugly truth: The last damn thing any business needs is one person who knows it all, who you can turn to in a pinch, that we can count on to pull it out when it all hits the fan. That’s as in ONE person: count ‘em all on the fingers of one hand and have four left over. Because if that person leaves, or dies, or (ahem) retires, it all really IS gonna hit the fan and no one is going to know what the hell to do. Not to mention the fact that, if that individual is the wrong sort of person, they might just parlay that “you’d be over a barrel without me” angle into a situation no one would care for.
Saying the person must be fired is a bit harsh, of course (and the “Law” is supposed to be humorous, after all). But I see how it’s better to identify the one person who’s holding the business together and at least reassign some of the things they were responsible for to someone else.
At the hotel, turnover among the Front Desk staff is pretty high. A lot of the desk clerks are college students who are not going to make hotel work their career path. Recent hires intended to be full time didn’t work out, and neither of the aforementioned long-tenured workers really wants to be in my position. I tried to prepare everyone for my retirement: I wrote enough memos to fill a book on the subject and tried to train new hires for what to do and how to do it. The GM has asked me to stay available to the start of November... and after that, I reckon I am just gonna have to tell them, “It’s in your hands now” and mosey on down the road into the sunset.
