The Forgotten Art of Quality
In the last four years or so, my husband and I have had to deal with numerous contractors, service providers, and retailers and while we’ve managed to eek out completion on most of our projects, the experience has been excruciating, or at least vexing, when it comes to our expectations of quality. On all levels, we have been let down over and over again, at every turn. The only time something has been done on time and without a defect, has been when we’ve done it ourselves.
Let me explain, my husband and I were engineers, and both trained in the idea of Five Nines quality. Early in our careers we were taught that anything less than 99.999% quality was, well, crap. This could mean the systems we were making had to be up and running a 99.999% of the time. Or the software we wrote had to be 99.999% defect free. It was applied to customer service calls, performance reviews, basically everything the company did both internally and externally was required to meet this goal. Did we always have such quality? No. Still, it was the mantra of the company and drilled into our minds.
This desire for quality never left us. Some would call it perfectionism, but here’s the thing, in the 90s, Five Nines or “six sigma” quality was a goal in most corners of business. The factories of that time were required to meet this, and every meeting, training module, and performance review would place quality goals as the key metric for evaluation. Back then, your mission statement was to do your best 99.999% of the time.
My friends, those days are long over.
I could give you pages of failure stories as examples that would make Red Green cringe. In the past four years I’ve dealt with everything from the regular truck breaking down (code for the surf is good and I’m not coming up to fix, repair, or do my job) to the electrician who canceled the week my first tiny home was to be delivered because he decided that morning to go to Egypt to windows that didn’t have the latches on them to a pair of two left boots delivered.
I swear this wasn’t always the way things were. I swear people used to show up for the job, kits would arrive complete, windows could be opened, and shoes came in right and left.
As we attempted to complete our latest project, building a garage, I have finally come to accept that the days of Five Nines are long, long gone. Like humor, partisan compromise, dating your co-workers, and other things the 1990s were known for, quality is no longer en vogue. The goal now is, um, I’m not sure. Good enough? 80%? One Eight instead of Five Nines? That might even be too gracious.
My husband decided to order a metal garage building and have it installed. It’s like an erector set. All the parts are loaded onto a flatbed truck and then the company contracts laborers to come to your house and build it. Of course, we ran into all sorts of issues with the planning department (that nonsensical group of people who have NEVER heard the words quality or customer satisfaction) and we had to wait four months for the guys to come and pour the foundation (that happens when 900+ homes burn in a weekend). Finally, the garage guy calls and he’s on his way.
A day later, he calls and says his trailer broke (it’s always the truck I tell ya), and he needs to get it fixed, but only two days later, he arrived with his crew, and they got to work. That’s pretty good for California contractors. Usually when the truck breaks, I don’t hear from them again for weeks, so I took this for a good omen.
The crew was great, they totally knew what they were doing, but soon they discovered the windows they brought were the wrong size for our building. So my husband had to run to Home Depot and buy windows to fit. He hauls all four up the mountain and of course, when the men open the boxes, one of the windows is cracked. So back down to Home Depot he goes to replace the broken window with one that isn’t. On the last day, as the sun is setting and the men are installing the last garage door, they discover that they have two left brackets rather than one right and one left, and they can’t install the door. On the last day! They’re due to get to another job. They cleaned up the job site, left us with the uninstalled door, and now my husband has to work with the company to 1) get reimbursed for the windows he bought and 2) get another crew out here to install the final garage door.
The thing is, given what I’ve witnessed in the past four years, this is an okay outcome. Only a two day delay due to the truck breaking down, a few wrong parts (four windows and the door brackets) and then ¼ of the windows from Home Depot were broken. I’ve experienced much worse. 80% quality from the garage manufacturer, 75% for Home Depot.
I guess this is as good as it gets. If anything, I think quality is going to get worse. Why? I’m so glad you asked, because here’s where I’m about to get controversial. Quality in America will continue to fall for three reasons:
1) Equity rather than quality is the focus now. All money, training, evaluations, and plans are centered around making sure everything is equitable at all costs, including quality. Even in the 90s, evaluations were already moving into those “softer” categories rather than the raw data that quality measurements bring. But now companies are evaluated on a different benchmark and making sure their products and services are of the highest quality isn’t even in the top five.
2) Our education system is crap. “No Child Left Behind” started the downfall of our public-school systems and the Chromebook classroom sealed the deal. Math and reading scores have plummeted since 2012 across all genders, socio-economic classes, and race. The kids aren’t learning the basics when it comes to cognitive function, and thus the higher order skills needed to follow quality standards, see through a job to the end, and handle details will soon be a thing of the past. Many employers now say that they need 3 Zoomer employees for every 2 openings to make up for this lack of quality and focus.
3) Legalization of weed. Okay, I bet you didn’t see this coming but hear me out. I used to be the biggest proponent of legalizing it. Hell, I used to think all drugs should be legal. I tend to be Libertarian on most issues. However, after watching the effects first in California and now in Illinois as the states have made cannabis legal, I think it has effected workforce participation, meaning less people are actually going to work, as well as performance because people are high all day. You’d be surprised how many people start their day with a little tincture in their coffee. It’s something that I started noticing as a teacher. Vaping, for example, is smokeless and easy to do in the bathroom, and it’s not just nicotine those kids are using. Their parents aren’t much better. Edibles make popping a gummy so easy. Smoking a bong or drinking a beer are obvious actions. Hard to hide those at work. The smell of vodka on your breath would get you fired in the 90s. Gummies, tinctures, and all the other fun stuff that looks like snacks and candies are so much easier to hide. I know women who carry their gummies in their purses because you never know when you’ll need one. Many people in Silicon Valley are all about micro-dosing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking my dog through an intersection, the smell of weed filling the air as the twenty-something DRIVER takes a hit. At 8:00 am. If he’s up and driving at that time, he’s probably on his way to work.
It's unfortunate, I know, but given that most states will have recreational marijuana soon, which brings with it the cool dispensaries filled with easy-to-use products, I don’t think we’ll ever see quality as good as today even, much less what was expected of us in the 90s.
The Buddha said that all of suffering is a result of expectations. This means that to navigate the decline of quality and all that entails, I must change my mindset. No longer can I be a Five Nines sort of girl. One Eight might still be too high an expectation. Besides, that sounds so sad. One lonely, little eight. Perhaps, my new quality baseline needs to be, “good enough.” What trendy name can I give this? AGAIG? (As Good As It Gets). Regardless, I have to come to a place where I’m okay with crap service and quality because it's honestly the best we can do now.
I suggested this to my husband today as he was collecting all of his receipts and preparing to call the garage manufacturer to work out his refund for the windows and scheduling the installation of the garage door. He tugged on his boot and grinned.
“Nah, I’ll just keep doing it myself.”
Five Nines for the Andersons. I’m a lucky woman.