Mary Smith lived in East London and she carried a long pole made of bamboo. She walked the cobblestone streets at and she tapped on the windows of the laborers. The laborers paid her a few pence every week and she was their alarm clock.
She was a human system and she knew who needed to wake up at and she knew who needed to sleep until . The laborers went to work and the city moved. Then the mechanical alarm clock became cheap and the factory owners thought Mary was a relic. They told the men to buy clocks and they stopped paying Mary.
The clocks were loud and the clocks were heartless. A man would have a fever and the clock would still scream and the man would try to work and he would break a machine.
Mary would have seen his face through the glass and she would have let him sleep and the machine would be safe. She was the first buffer. She was the person who absorbed the friction between a hard system and a soft human life. We do not have knocker-ups anymore but we have their descendants in every office and every shop floor. They are the people who do not have a crisp job description and they are the people the efficiency consultants hate.
The Redundancy Paradox
The consultants come in with their spreadsheets and they look at the data. They see a man named Arthur. Arthur has been at the company for and he does not have a high output of units. He moves between the front desk and the back of the shop and he talks to the vendors.
He drinks coffee with the insurance adjusters and he sweeps the floor when it is dirty. The spreadsheet says Arthur is a redundant expense. The spreadsheet says Arthur is an idle asset. They cut Arthur and they save sixty thousand dollars a year.
The immediate fiscal gain that masks the systemic erosion of the business’s informal network.
I am a medical equipment courier and I see this happen in every hospital dock from Port Chester to the city. I was driving a load of heart monitors and I accidentally hung up on my boss. My thumb slipped on the screen because the road was rough and the connection died.
It felt like a small disaster but it was just a silent phone. That is what happens when you cut the buffer. The connection dies and you do not even hear the click. You just realize an hour later that no one is listening.
When the Shop Breaks
The first week without Arthur is quiet. The second week is chaos. The insurance adjusters arrive and they are angry because no one greeted them with a joke. The painters are frustrated because they have to move their own cars. The parts are sitting on the loading dock because no one checked the manifest against the delivery. The shop is lean but the shop is breaking.
In the world of collision repair, the pressure to be lean is heavy. The insurance companies want the car fixed fast and they want it fixed cheap. They look at a shop like an assembly line and they forget that an assembly line is made of people. At a high-quality
auto body shop Westchester County,
the work is not just about pulling metal. It is about advocacy.
It is about the person who stands between the customer and the insurance company and says that the repair must be done according to the manufacturer’s standards. When you remove the person who absorbs the chaos, the chaos does not go away. It just distributes itself across everyone else.
The lead technician is now spending on the phone. The office manager is trying to figure out why the ADAS calibration equipment was not delivered. The productivity of the entire shop drops by twenty percent but the spreadsheet still says you saved sixty thousand dollars.
“The spreadsheet shows the miles and the fuel but it does not show the three hours I spent waiting for the nurse who lost the key.”
– Camille C., medical supply depot
If there is no one at the depot to anticipate the delay, the whole chain snaps. We live in a time of optimization and we are optimizing ourselves into a corner. We think that if we can measure it, it has value. If we cannot measure it, it is waste.
Measuring the Invisible
But you cannot measure the disaster that did not happen. You cannot put a dollar value on the angry customer who was calmed down before he reached the manager. You cannot track the minutes saved by a veteran who saw a mistake on a work order before the paint was mixed.
Formal Structure
Written on the wall, brittle, and requires perfection. Cannot handle computer crashes or sick employees.
Informal Network
Built on trust and small favors. Knows which insurance adjuster likes specific donuts.
The buffer is the person who understands the informal network. Every business has two structures. There is the formal structure that is written on the wall and there is the informal network that actually makes the work happen.
The informal network is built on trust and it is built on small favors. It is built on the guy who knows which insurance adjuster likes a specific type of donut and which one needs to be left alone until .
When you cut the “idle” person, you destroy the informal network. You are left with the formal structure and the formal structure is brittle. It cannot handle a late delivery or a sick employee or a computer crash. The formal structure requires everything to be perfect and the world is never perfect.
I see this in the cars that come into the shop. A car is a complex machine and it has many sensors. If one sensor is off by a millimeter, the whole safety system fails. The sensor is a small thing and it looks insignificant compared to the engine but the engine is useless if the car thinks it is hitting a wall.
The people who absorb the chaos are the sensors of the business. They feel the vibration before the part breaks. We serve people in Greenwich and Stamford and White Plains and they all want the same thing. They want their lives to go back to normal.
The Soul of the Operation
They have been in an accident and their car is a mess and their insurance company is sending them automated emails. They are stressed and they are tired. They need a human buffer. They need a shop that values the person who handles the paperwork and the person who explains the deductible assistance program.
If you go to a shop that has been “optimized” by a private equity firm, you will feel the difference.
The people are rushed and the floor is dirty and the communication is poor. They have removed all the “waste” and they have removed the soul of the operation. They have removed the person who makes sure the paint matches perfectly even if it takes an extra hour.
They have removed the person who double-checks the frame alignment because it is the right thing to do. I think about Mary Smith and her bamboo pole. She was not efficient. A whistle would have been louder and a clock would have been cheaper.
But Mary Smith cared if the men got to work. She cared if they were healthy. She was a part of the neighborhood and she was the glue that held the morning together.
When we look at our businesses, we need to look for the Mary Smiths. We need to look for the people who are “wasting” time talking to their coworkers. We need to look for the veterans who seem to have a lot of free time.
That free time is the margin. That free time is the capacity to handle the unexpected. If everyone is working at one hundred percent capacity, there is no room for error. And in auto repair, error is dangerous.
The insurance companies will tell you that the repair should take . They have a chart and the chart says . But the chart does not know that the bolts are rusted. The chart does not know that the parts are backordered.
The human buffer knows these things and they manage the expectations. They are the shock absorbers of the economy. The insurance is a promise but the buffer is the one who makes the promise keep its word.
Beyond the Columns
We must stop valuing only what can be put in a column. We must start valuing the silence of a smooth operation. If the shop is running well and the customers are happy and the technicians are calm, someone is absorbing the chaos.
Find that person and give them a raise. Do not let the man with the spreadsheet tell you they are redundant. I am going to call my boss back now. I am going to apologize for hanging up and I am going to tell him that the road was rough.
I hope he is a buffer. I hope he understands that the connection is more important than the mistake. If he doesn’t, maybe I will go work for a shop that knows the value of a veteran who knows how to hold the world together with nothing but a little bit of time and a lot of care.
The cars keep coming in from the New York metropolitan area and the metal is always bent. The sheet metal can be straightened by a machine but the experience of the repair is handled by the people.
We must keep the people. We must keep the buffers. Without them, we are just machines hitting other machines and there is no one left to wake us up in the morning.