All Signs Point To Your Employee Being Right

After months of searching, I finally found a job in one of the new testing stations for a certain disease. The owners and managers are not exactly experienced in running a business like this (or in some cases at all) and it shows — sometimes in small, silly ways.

We have to use a one-way system inside the place so people can maintain the proper distance. There are arrows and signs all over the floor to show the correct way, but of course, people don’t always look at the floor, so we often have to tell them where to go anyway. The area around the entrance is rather narrow, so you’d think that people would not try to constantly squeeze through there, but nope. People don’t look at the floor, don’t see the signs, and don’t think, even though pretty much every shop in the country has been one-way for more than a year now. It’s annoying for everyone working there because we constantly have to yell after people.

Management’s solution? Change the signs on the floor. Yellow arrows, red signs, bigger arrows, bigger signs, differently designed signs, etc. I think they’ve changed these signs at least four times. Of course, it doesn’t improve anything. They are still on the floor where the customers don’t see them.

In the beginning, I made a joke about how we could probably put up a huge sign on the wall the customers have to face when trying to leave, and they’d still not read it. After the second sign change, I suggested it more seriously. It’s obvious that the floor signs alone don’t work, and it might help to put them on eye-level and on a huge, otherwise empty, white wall.

I was ignored. I was ignored after the third sign change, too. So, I gave up. Management kept complaining about the customers not reading the signs. They kept complaining about “having to change the signs all the time.” They expressed hope about “this design finally being the one.”

Finally, after more than two months of this, they put up a large sign on the wall. Almost immediately, people stopped going the wrong way. Some still do, but it’s only a couple and not a third or half of all customers, so that’s still a win.

Management patted themselves on the back for finally solving this insurmountable problem.