OFFHIRE
All seems well with Roy’s crosshire customer, until the paperwork arrives and torpor sets in. It all works out in the end, but is there any need for such superfluous bumf, he wonders…
PARALYSIS BY FORM FILLING J
ust when I thought I’d seen it all, this industry never fails to raise the bar for staggering imbecility that an Olympic pole vaulter would find impossible to come anywhere near.
Today I was contacted by one of these New Kids on the Block – no, not the American boy band, but a rental company who’ve appeared out of nowhere and suddenly have a fleet of machines so large and an infrastructure so great as to make Jeff Bezos’ Amazon look like a two-bit corner shop outfit.
We’d recently favoured them with a month-long hire of a machine and all went well, with no issues. So imagine our delight that they were contacting us to reciprocate the gesture. A somewhat excitable character called us wanting a machine but it had to tick certain criteria and must be on site first thing in the morning. We were able to oblige and confirmed that all could be comfortably accommodated. Armed with this welcome news they then proceeded to ruin my afternoon by presenting me with a six-page supplier approval document. This piece of work had obviously been hatched by some talentless Goon, with little interest in living in the real world. Amongst other things I was expected to highlight our management experience. Does being a Dinnertime Prefect at First School count, do you think?
The questions were endless, asking things such as environmental policy, health & safety policy, modern slavery… Well, I’d better not show that to one of our drivers or I’ll be up in front of a judge faster than it takes to pour a pint of Snaffle-waggon’s Old Peculiar.
To have completed said work of art with accompanying documentation would have taken me in excess of four hours, and the accompanying documentation would have run to over two hundred pages. I’d love to know if this would have been pored over by their legal department into the wee small hours to ensure we were worthy of their one-day hire for a self-propelled boom lift.
By now you’ll have guessed that being a gruff and hairy- arsed Yorkshireman, I speak as I find and don’t suffer fools gladly. Suffice it to say I deftly responded with the dexterity of Harry Potter waving his wand on a magic spell and told them their fortune. You see, we’ve been in business a considerable time longer than this other hire company. We may not be as big, nor have a vast array of equipment in a newly constructed facility, but we know how to run a quality hire business – especially as we’ve been trading four-times longer than these pencil pushers. Our debts are dramatically smaller and our cash holding is greater, so we’re happy where we are in that respect.
My response was short but succinctly to the point. We highlighted the above factors and advised that if we needed to complete such forms I would be obliged to charge them for my most valuable time collating and completing these documents and therefore the cost to do so would greatly outweigh the value of the hire. Subsequently, and as my time is incredibly valuable, I suggested that I would rather look at the machine in my yard and they could “Foxtrot-Oscar” into the sunset with their order.
Incredibly proud of my belligerent stance against unnecessary bureaucracy, I sat down preening myself in the knowledge that I was not to be bullied into inane form filling. Oh, but the sweet irony, as some fifteen minutes later the same man called back to say that he’d spoken with his managing director who’d said it was perfectly acceptable to waive these forms in our respect as we were a well-known and long established quality rental company, proving how farcical they were in the first place.
I can now retire a happy and contented man, but please avoid paralysis by form filling – I beg you!
Happy Hiring.
72 Executive Hire News - Jan/Feb 2022
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