PASSPORT ERRORS—IT’S PROBABLY THE SYSTEM (COMMENT). My niece, Molly Lazar, asks whether the passport office errors are due to hiring marginal workers to meet the overwhelming backlog. It is tempting to say that the schools are not preparing students to check their work (as they did in the early 1900’s through the fifties when students were prepared for jobs as clerks). It is also tempting to blame technology—spell check makes us all careless even though computers are harsh on keystroke errors. But I am still influenced by the “quality†movement of the fifteen years ago when American business was trying to imitate the Japanese. W. Deming Edwards, the guru for the quality movement, preached that errors were the result of the system rather than the workers. It is hard to imagine managers not making proof reading a part of passport office procedure.
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Do you remember our grade school teachers’ trying to teach us the parts of speech? They didn’t do it well, but they did it over and over–faced with the blank wall of their students’ unspeakable boredom and indifference? I imagine training people to be proofreaders is similar. Close enough has to be good enough. Otherwise, they’d never be able to keep enough bodies in the chairs. Now, if doing the job well got bonuses, or just plain old high salaries, we’d all have perfect passports we could actually use, wouldn’t we?
I live with an economist.
So if it’s not the system, it has to be the workers, I guess?
It’s an egregious error because of the effect it has on the consumer (Nick), but it’s a pretty easy error to make, isn’t it? Especially if the workers are expected to get through a certain number of passports per hour, and especially if there are more passports than usual to do.
I’m not really making good points here but you and Mom and Molly did.