Change

Yesterday, seeking to pick up some epsom salts for my summer bathing, I found the local pharmacy sold out.  This wouldn't be odd, except that the same shop was sold out of footpads, braces, muscle relaxants, muscle ointment and a lot more.  The shelf was empty; and as it happened, the painkiller shelf looked the same.  I asked if this had something to do with supply and the pharmacist explained that, no, they had been cleaned out of everything since that morning.

People are going back to work after a long hiatus, and they hurt.  At least one reader of mine is a pharmacist, I know, down in the 'states.  I'd like to know if he's experienced something similar.

On Monday the Washington Post published a story on employment: "Some 649,000 employees gave notice in April, the sector's largest one-month exodus in over 20 years, a reflection of pandemic-era strains and a strengthening job market."

The article explains that workers are ditching their $11-an-hour dead-end jobs for something worthwhile.  16 months of Covid, and time to think as the world skids down the chute, enables people to think.  With our head to the grindstone, we don't see much.  Lift our heads, and its a new world.  Things have changed.  Priorities shift.  The unlashed back has time to heal and there's less impetus to get back into harness and feel the lash again.  Though if my pharmacy is any indication, some people are doing exactly that.

This may seem a stretch: these are signs of how management has come to operate around us.  My son-in-law was recalled to his warehouse job, the temporary work he started doing because work as an electrician evaporated in early 2020.  He started five days ago.  In those five days he has worked four 10-hour-shifts, at a job where lifting and moving 80-pounds is unrelenting.  Working with four others, that's 50 hours of work a day, 200 in four days.  Why not six or seven employees working 8 hour days?  Because that's not how business worked then, and its not how business works now.  Welcome back to work, mules.  Now break yourselves, because it saves us $5 a day on business expenses.

I don't mean to sound like a socialist (though I am one).  My son-in-law is a mule, at least where work is concerned, and since he comes from a past of hauling cable over 14 hour days in Canada's arctic, he's already stretching into it.  The same can be said for his co-workers.  Young men are built like this.  Young men, however, become middle-aged men, many of whom I know well, whose ankles, backs, hips, and shoulders have degraded to where those fellows will be in serious pain for the rest of their lives, despite the surgeries, pins, brackets and so on they'll collect.  We don't say, when pitching the viability and importance of trade schools for educating the young, that they better climb in status or get out by their mid-40s ... remembering there aren't enough foreman jobs for everyone.  Anyone that's 30-something, in the trades, and hasn't already, should seek greater training, forthwith.

When a company offers that training, that's leadership.  Most small businesses don't.  Most large businesses do.  A pleasant reality of working in a non-service company, or the non-service branch of a service company — something I know first hand — is their acknowledgement that employees need more than a wage.  Employees need help ... though many don't think so or don't want it.  Naturally, an employee must reach out; when they do, there's something to reach for.  The smaller the company, the more service oriented it is, the less that's true.

There's a scene in 1999's The Cider House Rules where the boss presses a subordinate that's apathetically thrown his cigarette into a vat of apple cider:

"What business are you in, Jack?  Just tell me what business you're in."

Keeping with Friday's post about management and dungeon mastering, if you want to be a DM, you've got to ask yourself the same question.  Are you in the game business, or are you in the service business?  Which is it?  In the past, I've written posts that talked about how we've got to serve your players; I've also written posts that call for those players subjecting themselves to the rules, with us as gatekeepers.  This should help the reader understand that this isn't a simple question.  I believe that at times, a DM needs to provide things in setting and opportunities that definitely make D&D look like a service-driven operation.  I also believe than when a player character dies, that's how it has to go, no matter what I or the players might like about it.

When I was young and new to restaurants, I remember a kitchen manager that rode me and everyone else like we were cattle.  After a couple of months I found my dignity and confronted him about it, asking him to treat me with more respect than he had been.  His answer stuck; I can still see him, and the store room around him, as he chose to create a permanent memory in my retinas.  "You think I can't replace you just like that?" he asked.  "You think you're special?"

I told him to replace me, quitting on the spot.  He and his restaurant was as replaceable for me as I was for him; I had employment elsewhere within the week.  This story, however, means to address those DMs who treat their players just like that manager treated me (and everyone else).  There's a limit to how hard you can be.  A DM has to draw a line, yes.  Many players are even replaceable, as it happens.  But treating them like they're replaceable, guarantees you'll only find that kind.  Devoted, clever, enthusiastic players can't be replaced, and as it happens not all players of that calibre start out that way.  Many players need time to find themselves, to gain trust, to discover the game and so on, meaning that a DM's got to keep both eyes open and watch for ways to bring players like that out.  We devote ourselves, therefore, to enduring some of their more frustrating qualities, giving ground and sacrificing our time, until we know for sure, one way or the other.  Comes a time, after months, we become sure they're not going to get better.  We're tired of waiting.  Whereupon we cut them free.  But we give them every chance, first, to change.

This doesn't mean getting them to like our game system, our world or our campaign.  Like has nothing to do with it.  This is training, not pandering.  Whatever that kitchen manager's attitude, I'm sure now that he was trying to hammer me into the employee he wanted.  He thought smacking down my attitude, as he saw it, was the way to make me fall in line.  Working in a kitchen is literally described as "working on the line."  Everyone's got to toe that line, and work together, taking orders and churning out the food.  Sorry to call it "churning," but a single cook will cook and plate 60 lbs. of food an hour and that's what it feels like.  A single server will carry three times that, in food and plates.  Despite that, the food's got to be golden, every ounce of it.  When it's not, the server gets it, the management gets it and the cooks get it; and it's not golden consistently, there's no restaurant at all.  So shutting down a cook or a server matters; it's got to be done, because when that ticker starts clicking, punching out 18 dishes a minute, communication without attitude is critical.  Putting the tables together means multiple people working together to get pasta, meats, salads and sides on the plates at the same time to go out together.  There's no time for attitude.

That's what that kitchen manager thought he was getting from me: attitude.  What I wanted from him was respect.  His error wasn't telling me what to do, or even shouting at me to get it done.  When a kitchen crashes — when the orders come in so much faster than the food goes out that everyone, lead hand and expediter, gets pushed past their limit — then the kitchen is a warzone.  There's hot oil, there's fire, the floor's a skating rink, there are long sharp knives in everyone's hand and we're all moving very, very fast.  Screaming for the potatoes that are lagging on a "six-top" (a table with six clients) and keeping it from going out, is par.  Hard words in harsh tones happen.  "The heat" in the kitchen you get out of if you can't handle it isn't the food, the fire or the hot surfaces.

The kitchen manager's error came when the shit backed off, giving time for people to settle.  In a good kitchen, there are jokes; there are apologies; everyone pitches in and cleans the food that's been falling like rain.  In a good kitchen, the manager is there, cleaning up with the crew, making jokes, cooling everyone's temper.  Fred never did that.  When the pressure let off, he would leave.  Just leave.  Most likely, inside, he was shaking.  The comfort of his office, door closed; the comfort of having an office to escape into; hell, he might have had a bottle in a drawer.  Who knows?

I'm saying that DMs, when the pressure builds, can yell at their players.  They can make demands.  They can tell Jerry to "Shut the fuck up!"  Players can go at each other, too, and sometimes it's a good idea to let them.  What we can't do is pretend those moments didn't happen.  We're responsible for those things happening; and we're responsible for smoothing those moments out again.  DMing is running the game, and it's running the people ... and it's running the aftercare as well.  It's giving the players what they want, what they need ... and those things they don't think they want or need, too.

To do that, as a DM, we have to look past things like a kitchen manager saying a shitty thing.  We're got to pull those moments apart and see them empathically, through their eyes.  People do and say things that are the wrong things to say, but they also do them for reasons.  Managing people, leading them, requires a set of skills that will lets us, as leaders, see things from their point of view and not our own.  We have to want to do that.

It doesn't come naturally.  It takes wisdom.  It takes experience with the game and with players.  It takes admitting that when things went sideways, we were to blame also.  What Fred said to me that day, I was part of that.  I didn't see that at the time, but I was young and only saw things from my perspective.

Slowly, I changed.  I am changing.  Making the business I'm in, running as a DM, says I must.