Murphy’s Law
MURPHY’S LAW – September 11, 2024 – Broomfield, Colorado, USA
Like all the other full-time Recreation Center employees, Britney Murphy was nervous. Uneasy rumors about the new General Manager, Sean Elzinga, put everyone in defensive mode. During his first few days, Britney only saw Sean in passing, but the whispers around the front desk and coffee maker warned that Sean was looking to shake things up.
“He’s a position climber,” one voice said. “This is only a temporary stop for him. He’ll claim on his resume he made a bunch of improvements and then move on.”
The biggest gossip in the place claimed that Sean was a micromanager. “He’s like a snake. He’s got a big mouth but no ears.”
Most Recreation Center employees, including Britney, thought the place operated pretty smoothly before Sean’s arrival. The building and equipment were clean, they ran on budget, and customer ratings were high. Employees did not see many reasons for change. But Sean very quickly set up meetings with everyone to perform what he called an “audit” of their job responsibilities. Britney set aside an entire Wednesday morning for her evaluation.
Sean arrived at his office late. Britney tried not to take it personally. When he showed up, he was wearing expensive Nike exercise apparel and sipping a tall cup of coffee. He looked ready to burn off some nervous energy by running a few miles or joining a pickup basketball game.
“Let’s walk and talk,” Sean said to Britney. “Show me around your spaces and tell me what you do.”
Britney was happy her “audit” would be show-and-tell rather than sitting around Sean’s office. She led the way down the facility’s main corridor while Sean sipped coffee with one hand and held out his phone with the other. As if he was a security guard monitoring suspicious activity, he constantly switched his glance from the phone to anyone passing nearby.
Britney was not sure Sean was listening, but she described her job as they walked toward a room hosting a spin class. “I’ve been doing this about five years. I’m in charge of hiring and training all our fitness instructors. We offer a huge number of classes. From intense cardio like HIIT and kickboxing, to more relaxed stuff like yoga and Pilates. We’ve got dancing classes like Zumba, and of course, lots of spinning.” They had reached a room full of stationary bikes and Britney waved to an instructor encouraging her exhausted students.
Sean nodded as he looked through the room’s glass wall. When he did not say anything, Britney continued their tour.
“We offer at least 30 classes every day and use 10 different instruction rooms. I work with almost 200 instructors, all of them part time. Many of them are very part-time and only substitute for regular instructors once or twice a month. I love our people. Customers have a great experience and keep returning.”
Sean continued a disinterested nod as they turned a corner toward another section of the building. Britney led him into an empty instruction room that held up to 30 people for cardio workouts.
“I worry a lot about condition of the rooms and equipment,” Britney continued. “Some teachers need dumbbells, others need mats. Things like that tend to wander off. I regularly check the spin bikes to make sure they’re working. I want everything to be consistent and simple to use. We have so many part-time people, if there’s a way to mess something up, they’ll find it. I call that Murphy’s Law.”
“Uh, huh,” Sean responded without appreciation.
“Here’s a perfect example,” Britney said, leading Sean to the sound system equipment in one corner of the room. “Most teachers use music and they all want a wireless microphone so they don’t have to shout.” Britney held up one of the compact microphones that wrapped around a user’s head. “Each one is matched to the system in the room. I check them every day. That means testing and replacing the battery.”
Britney opened a plastic enclosure on the microphone and pulled out an Energizer AAA battery. “We go through a lot of these.”
Sean suddenly looked interested. “You replace those every day?”
“Almost, for rooms that get used a lot.”
“That’s expensive.”
“I buy batteries in bulk.”
“Throwing away alkaline batteries isn’t very environmentally friendly. I want this place to be green and sustainable.”
“I agree. I’d like to replace these old headsets with new ones that have built-in rechargeable batteries. They come with a charging plate. You set the headset anywhere on the plate and they charge automatically. They’re perfect for us but they cost $250 each. I’ve put in the request, but no one will approve it.”
Sean smirked. “We need to do things that are environmentally and budget friendly. Why don’t you get some rechargeable AAA batteries and a charging station for each room?”
“Well, I thought of that, but . . .”
Sean cut Britney off. “And you shouldn’t be the one messing around with all the batteries. Make the instructors do it.”
“I love our instructors, but they aren’t good with the equipment,” Britney said with a grimace. “They’re focused on their class. They don’t think about who will use the room next. And those rechargeable batteries don’t have as much juice as the Energizers. They’ll need to be changed more often.”
“Have more faith in your people,” Sean replied dismissively. “They’ll rise to whatever expectations you set. And these teachers look like they’re young and tech savvy. Changing a battery can’t possibly be a problem for them.”
“I don’t know. What we’re doing now works pretty well.”
“I insist on the change. We’re going green. I’m making a note of it.” Sean made a show of tapping on his phone. “This will be one of our big initiatives. Get the rechargeable batteries.”
“If you say so,” Britney answered reluctantly.
“I do. And this will give you time to think about more important things than batteries. For example, are you sure the classes you’re offering are what people want?”
“That’s what they say in their feedback.”
Sean raised his eyebrows skeptically. “I’ll let you think about it more. For now, I’ve gotta run.”
Sean made a quick exit, leaving Britney with a head full of misgivings. After spending less than 30 minutes with her, he wanted to upend crucial parts of her job. But Britney was no defiant agitator. She ordered the rechargeable batteries and charging units for ten instructor rooms. Before she distributed them, she tried to make her teachers understand the major change they faced.
Communicating with teachers had always been a challenge. They got plenty of electronic messages each day and it was hard to grab their attention. Britney used email and texts sparingly and realized that when she did, she was bound to only reach a fraction of recipients. She sent messages about the rechargeable batteries, anyway, clearly describing how they were supposed to work. For those who inevitably did not read the messages, she attached a diagram and list of instructions on the walls above the sound systems.
“All I can do now is hope for the best,” Britney said to herself on the first morning with the rechargeable batteries.
It did not take long for disaster to strike. Just after noon, Britney received a text that read, “My microphone’s not working.” She hurried to the problem classroom to find dead rechargeable batteries and an instructor who was clueless about the new expectations. That afternoon, at least half the classes were taught without working microphones. When Britney surveyed the building, she found numerous rechargeable batteries thrown in trash cans.
Britney sent out another email and text message explaining that each classroom had four rechargeable batteries and a charging unit. “I recommend putting a freshly charged battery into your microphone before you start class. And I beg you to put the battery back into the charger after class.”
Over the next few days, Britney struggled to stay calm as she watched instructors ignore everything about batteries. Those who did attempt to swap for a freshly charged battery mixed up the polarities half the time. There was a fifty-fifty chance the positive side of the battery was connected to the negative terminal in the microphone or the battery charger.
Two weeks after his initial walking tour, Sean scheduled another one so he could follow up with Britney. “I hope our new green initiative’s going well,” Sean said as they stood outside a Pilates class.
“To be honest, it’s been kind of rough,” Britney admitted. “I spend twice as much time dealing with the rechargeables than I used to spend on the Energizers. We have lots of interruptions when the microphones stop working.”
“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” Sean replied with a scowl.
“The instructors haven’t caught on to the new system.”
Sean sighed like he was reprimanding a child for running next to the swimming pool. “You need to hold your teachers accountable. It’s all a matter of communication and training. And if you’re always there to fix their problems, they’ll never learn.”
Britney wanted to defend herself, but she could not come up with the right words.
“I’ll help you out,” Sean continued. “Call an all-hands meeting with your teachers and I’ll do the training. What time would work best?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never tried to get them together before. Maybe in the evening.”
“Okay, let’s say this Friday at 6pm. You get everyone here and I’ll worry about the agenda.”
Britney did not question Sean’s plan. She sent out more messages requesting all her instructors attend a mandatory Friday night meeting. Almost immediately, she got 50 responses asking if they really had to be there and if they were being paid for the time. She was surprised on Friday when almost 70 people showed up. There was no room big enough to hold them, so they sat on the floor of one of the Recreation Center’s basketball courts.
Sean began the meeting by attempting some half-court shots with a basketball. He introduced himself and talked about teamwork and goal setting for the first thirty minutes. He chanted about having the best facility in the state of Colorado, the United States, and the world. The instructors sat cross-legged or reclined wearing outfits ranging from business suits to skimpy shorts and crop tops. Some people stretched out in yoga poses. By the time Sean got to his chanting, most of his audience was scrolling phones.
“Now let’s talk about batteries!” Sean shouted. “This is part of your job. Your responsibility. You need to replace your own batteries and put them in a charger.” He fumbled through a demonstration with one of the headset microphones and a charging unit. “Easy as that. Any questions?”
“What if the microphones don’t work?” asked a young woman wearing a Colorado Buffalos sweatshirt.
“These are your responsibility. Work out the problem amongst yourselves. No more calling Britney every time something goes wrong. Britney is forbidden to help with anything involving the microphones. Understand Britney?”
Britney was standing ten feet away from Sean and she nodded her head.
“But what if we really can’t figure it out?” the instructor in the sweatshirt asked.
“I know you can do it. You’ll rise to the occasion. But if you feel totally helpless and are willing to embarrass yourself, if you feel there’s a major, major problem, you can come to me.”
The meeting broke up with Sean inviting a few people to join him for either a basketball or volleyball game. For the next week, Britney obeyed her orders and did not touch a battery or headset microphone. She switched entirely to a mode of distressed observer as she toured the classrooms to find more rechargeable batteries in trash cans. Then she began to see Energizers show up in the charging station intended for the rechargeable batteries. Eventually, dead Energizers were the only batteries around, most of them shoved into the charger with mixed-up polarities. By the end of the week, all batteries and charging units were in the garbage.
Britney was also a passive observer when Sean started the top of every hour by yelling at instructors over how to change batteries. When he mentioned at the close of all the all-hands meeting that people could come to him in case of emergencies, his words were interpreted to mean he was available for any problem. That message spread among the 200 fitness instructors. Sean received never-ending questions and complaints. The instructors also passed his number to customers attending their classes.
Sean stopped looking at his text messages, which all said essentially the same thing: “The microphone didn’t work in our class.” If the message came from a customer, it often included a threat to take their business elsewhere.
Britney was copied on some fraction of the messages. As much as she cared about the Recreation Center and the quality of the fitness classes, she could not help smirking.
And then one Saturday morning she got an abrupt message from Sean. “I solved the problem. We won’t hear any more customer complaints.”
Britney was skeptical, but Sean turned out to be correct. Over the weekend, the complaints completely stopped. Britney hurried in on Monday morning to find out what had changed and if Sean had truly worked a training miracle. In the first classroom she reached, Britney found a new headset microphone sitting on an inductive charging plate. It was the exact setup Britney recommended during Sean’s first walk-around audit. He had removed all the batteries and replaced them with expensive, automatically charging microphones. The system was now so foolproof, none of the instructors could mess it up.
Britney was not a big “I told you so” person. She took a few minutes to enjoy the new microphones now working in all ten classrooms, but she was not going to dwell on what could be called a moral victory. She was already thinking about the Recreation Center’s towel problem. They were always out of fresh towels by the afternoon. Britney knew the answer was regulating how many a customer could use in the morning. She simply needed to find a way for Sean to take credit for that solution too.
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